“I suppose I’ve fallen a little bit in love with all of my partners through the years,” she muses. “I don’t necessarily think love is something finite, to be held by one person and one person only. I think it grows and shifts and changes depending on where you are in life, who you’re with, and what you need in that moment.”
I lean closer, hanging on her words.
Lex continues. “I think society’s definition of love is more about ownership rather than really understanding or caring for someone else. Real love, I think, is truly accepting someone for who they are—all their imperfections and flaws and weirdness and awkwardness.” Lex glances at me as her cheeks turn pink.
Warmth floods my chest as I try to imagine an all-encompassing love like that. What would it be like to be truly accepted, coveted, held within someone’s mind with such reverence? I never thought the type of love Lex described was possible. But now it’s all I want.
I place my hand on Lex’s knee, trying to find words even remotely as insightful as what she just professed. “That’s really beautiful,” I manage, my throat tight.
Lex’s eyes search mine, seeing far past the surface, boring somewhere deep down to a hidden, locked-away place where even I don’t like to venture. I try to swallow, but my mouth is dry. I lick my lips, and Lex’s eyes follow...
The doorbell rings.
Winston explodes into a flurry of grey fur and erratic barking, leaping from his place on my lap to the floor and knocking the bottle of wine off the coffee table as he races to the door.
Lex and I spring into action to grab the wine and mitigate the spill as a large mulberry stain spreads across the beige surface of my carpet. After wrangling the dog, going upstairs to grab the pizza, and ultimately accepting my carpet will be stained forever, we finally resettle back on the couch.
“Well, that was intense. Cheers,” I say, a little out of breath while hoisting a floppy slice of pepperoni and mushroom toward Lex. Lex gives her head a shake, but cheers me with her own slice nonetheless. Winston whines at the edge of the couch. “No pizza for you,” I say to him firmly. “Your poor little guts would never recover.”
Lex sucks in air through her teeth. “I may have already fed him a bit of cheese.”
My mouth drops open in faux distress. I don a posh British accent and press a hand to my chest. “Feeding a lady’s dog, without her express permission?”
Lex smiles while trying to hide her dimples. “Sorry, ma’am. Won’t happen again.”
“You will be forgiven if you admit that I’m cursed.”
Lex fits me with a look. “I wouldn’t stoop to that level.”
I laugh. “Ouch.”
“But!” she says, before pausing to take a bite of pizza, chew, and swallow. “I do think I have enough background information, and we can move on to phase two.”
“Ooh,” I say, sitting up a bit straighter. “There are multiple phases?”
Lex ignores my comment. “I’m a fact person. I live and die by numbers and statistics. It’s my job to gather data and decipher trends. And I’m really fucking good at my job.”
“Damn, girl. Should we cheers to that, too?” I top up both our glasses with the remainder of the unspilled wine.
Lex gives her head a shake. “What is with your obsession with cheersing?”
I shrug. “Gotta keep the positivity alive. Anyway, keep talking. You were going on about how you’re a badass bitch.”
Lex opens her mouth to speak, pauses to fit me with a look ofdid you really just say that?, then continues with the point she was trying to make. “I think we should do the same thing I do at my job but to your personal life. We gather as much data as we can on a number of different factors, such as length of time before a date becomes awkward, number of awkward moments, and perceived intensity of awkwardness. If we discover a pattern then maybe we can—”
“Break the curse!” I raise both my half-eaten slice of pizza and mostly empty wineglass in the air.
She sighs. “Sure. Why not.”
“Yay!” I hoist my glass toward her for yet another cheers. She rolls her eyes but still taps her glass against mine. “This is going to be so fun!” I bounce in my seat.
“Yes,” Lex agrees. “Everyone I know describes data analysis as ‘so fun.’”
I’m sure she’s joking, but it does nothing to quell the excitement rising in my chest. I’d long ago given up on trying to fix the curse and accepted my lot in life of dying alone and in shame, my tombstone reading,here lies the most awkward person to have ever lived. She was well loved by her herd of geriatric dogs.But now, with someone like Lex on my side, for once I can see a future—a real one. A future with someone to share my life with, to have a fraction of the type of love that Lex so beautifully described.
For the first time in a long time, I have real hope.
After finishing the movie and pizza, Lex and I bid each other farewell with a plan to meet for lunch in a few days togo over strategy. At the door I decide to skip past the formalities and go in for a hug. Lex stiffens in my grasp, as if unsure of what to do, before relenting and hugging me back. She’s so soft and warm and the perfect height for hugging—a bit shorter than me, her chin resting against my shoulder. I breathe in her scent—shea and honey and something else I can’t place, not sweet, but earthy, almost masculine.
