Page 72 of Spiced!

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s early. It’s too soon to hope or think or feel or whatever.”

“I know it’s early.”

“One Sunday doesn’t mean anything definitive.”

“Nobody said it did.”

“I’m not going to read into it more than it is.”

Tasha was quiet for a moment. This wasn’t her ordinary contemplative quiet. This was her diagnostic one, the pause she used right before she told a patient the thing he’d driven forty-five minutes to a dentist specifically to not be told.

“Can I make an observation,” she said, which was not a question and never had been.

“No.”

She ignored me.

“You keep saying it’s early and too soon, and that you’re not going to read into it.” I heard her set down her coffee. “You’ve said three versions of ‘let’s not get ahead of ourselves’ in four minutes, which—for you—is practically hyperventilating. I know your tells, Brendan. I’ve been reading your face since you were twenty-two and afraid to tell your mother you’d switched your post-graduate major. You’re not managing your own expectations here. You’re managing something else.”

“That’s a stretch, don’t you think?” I asked, a bit defensively, more to the imaging on my desk that to Tasha. The pictures offered no support whatsoever.

“Is it the guy, or is it you?” she asked.

I opened my mouth to say the guy, obviously, because that was the safe answer. Also, I liked deflecting to Tasha the way I liked a root canal, which is to say she performed both on me regularly, and I never enjoyed either, but the words didn’t come, because it wasn’t true, and Tasha could hear a lie forming in the shape of a breath.

“Interesting,” she said, to the sound of me not answering.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said a paragraph, perhaps a whole page. It just didn’t have words in it.” She let that sit, then, gentler, because Tasha only ever hit you as hard as she was about to be kind, “He sounds like a good one, puddin’. If there’s a reason you’re holding him at arm’s length, it might be worth finding out whether the reason is his or whether you brought that particular baggage with you.”

This was the problem with keeping a forensic dentist as your closest friend. She spent all day finding the soft spot under the hard thing and had no professional hesitation about drilling.

“I have to go be a doctor,” I said.

“You have to go think about what I said, then be a doctor. In that order.” A beat, then even gentler, “Brendan, I’m not asking you to pick out curtains or decide what veggies to plant in your cute little gay garden. I’m only asking if you want to see him before Saturday and to think about why you’re hesitating.”

“Yes,” I said again. “I don’t know when or how yet, but I can’t stop thinking about him. Damn it. Yes, I want to see him before Sunday.”

I could practically hear her smiling through the phone.

“That’s enough for a Tuesday. Thank you for your report,” she said. “Text me after Saturday. If you see him before then, I expect another full report. Don’t disappoint me, Brendan.”

“I don’t text you after Saturdays.”

“Alan texts me after Saturdays. It’s the same result. I will haunt your dreams if you fail to comply.”

With that lovely threat in the air, she hung up.

I tossed the phone onto my desk and stared at Marisol’s imaging, and tried to find where my theory had been before the call interrupted it.

My phone chimed as a group chat creation notification popped up on the lock screen. I bit back a curse as I read it.

Alan had established a chat group and named it “Operation Get Brendan A Life” with no apparent irony, which meant he either had no irony about this particular subject or he had too much of it. I could no longer tell the difference. There were four members: Alan, Tasha, Marcus, and me. Marcus had sent a thumbs-up emoji at six fifty-eight in the morning, which was fourteen minutes before his scheduled arrival time.

I turned the phone face down.

It chimed four more times.