Page 20 of Back for Seconds

June: hahahaha

June: no way, how did I forget to give you my number? im happy the old ladies were ultimately helpful.

Joey: Are you free for dinner tomorrow night? My place at 7?

June: dinner! a full meal. interesting.

June: usually people do something quick and easy for a first date—coffee, happy hour, a brief but electric game of connect four.

June: not saying that this is a date

June: but if you want it to be, it can be! it sounded like a date, that’s all

June: ya know?

June: anyway i’m gonna go stick my fist in the garbage disposal now

Joey: Is that a yes? :)

June: it’s a yes.

Chapter 8 June

Five days until Christmas

I barely had a chance to pull up to the curb at the Philly airport before Mom and I ended up in a tearful goodbye embrace. Her petite Pilates-five-times-a-week body pressing into me—strong arms thrown around my neck, pulling me down to her, our tears mixing together along with our laughter. We’d bonded deeply over the last year, clung to each other not just as mother and daughter, but as women.

“I’m going to miss you so much,” she said fiercely, pressing her lips into my cheek over and over. I could feel her mascara dripping down my neck and onto my hoodie.

“I’ll miss you more,” I told her. “Email me, ok?”

“Of course, baby.”

I gave her another potent squeeze, then shoved her off toward her airline check-in, in her floppy sun hat and puffy vest. I felt like a first-time mom dropping her kid off at kindergarten. Except my sweet baby girl was heading out on a dubiously marketed sexcursion.

Back in my car completely alone, I gave into the gnawing feeling in my gut and reread my texts with Joey from the day before.

I’d acted really, clinically and severely, uncool. Texting five times in a row was wicked, devilish work. I knew better. I hadn’t experienced anything like my attraction to Joey in a handful of years, but I also hadn’t just been dropped off on Earth from Planet Dweeb.

Joey just had this thing about him. He was so familiar; his body was big and warm, like a favorite sweatshirt. His smile was sweet and his eyes—angular, dark, and brimming with life and light like river rocks—held me every time we talked. He always looked right at me, like he cared what I had to say next.

It was easy to be around him. Easy to slip into friendship.

I’d been in his presence exactly twice and both times had left me with a levity in my chest, an unburdening around my rib cage. The usual, unending swirl of anxiety in my stomach, the unedited loop of worries of what to say and how to say it—that all seemed to pause when I was around him. It was nice. Brief…but nice. I felt like he liked me, actually me—not the idea of a person named June or the concept of a woman who has tattoos and a big butt.

That was something I wasn’t sure I could say about Brian.

What could I say about Brian?

I hadn’t seen him in over a year, and the finer details of him had faded. It was true, that old cliché: I didn’t remember what he had said or what he had smelled like, I just remembered how he had made me feel.

We were nothing to each other now. Nothing. And yet every time I laid down on the bed frame that used to be ours, in the room we’d earmarked for a baby or maybe a mutually owned and appreciated puzzle table, the memories came swimming back.

Our first kiss. After a night of dancing at The Billiards on the hottest, stickiest summer night I could remember. We’d spent all day drinking spiked seltzers on the beach and swimming in the shallow but violent surf, so we both had a little bit of sunburn. His eyes looked like a winter storm. We’d just been two friends back then. Two friends with something undeniable between them. He’d backed me up against the brick wall and slid his hand around my neck and kissed me. Kissed me like he wanted me.

It hadn’t been a fairy tale; it was a Richard Linklater movie, modern and romantic and filled with enough sunlight to carry us through anything.

The first time we cried together—my twenty-fifth birthday. I’d felt uncomfortable and ugly, insecure in a too-tight dress. Embarrassed for wanting to do something to mark the occasion. I was turning twenty-five, who cared?