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I fell asleep thinking: soon.

If she'll still have me.

Soon.

19

Definitely Ready

Harper

Let the record show that I, Harper Amara DuBose, downloaded a dating app of my own free will, with full cognitive function and absolutely zero external coercion.

This is important to establish, 'cause what follows is entirely my own fault.

It was Tuesday. A week and a half since I'd walked out of Cam's house, and four days since the game. Four days since I'd executed my very mature, very intentional goodbye-to-Cam's-basketball-world plan, which had gone flawlessly except for the part where it hadn't worked at all, and I was still lying awake at 3 AM thinking about amber eyes and halftime eye contact like a person with zero control over her own brain.

I'd finally told my therapist the truth on Monday. All of it. She'd listened for fifty minutes without interrupting, and then she'd said the word grief three times and the word avoidance twice, and I'd paid my copay and gone back to work and decided I was done with both those words taking over my life.

Hence, the dating app.

Mia was on my couch, watching me with the expression of someone witnessing a car drive very slowly toward a very obvious wall.

"Are you seriously doing this?"

"Why not? I'm single. I'm allowed to date." I held my phone up, showing her the profile I was building with the grim efficiency of an infant filing a tax return, or something else equally ridiculous. "See? Look at me. Being proactive. Being healthy. I'm putting myself back out there like a well-adjusted adult."

"It's been a week and a half."

"And? There's no required mourning period for someone who was never actually my girlfriend." The word settled somewhere tender in my chest. I ignored it. "We had one night, Mia. One perfect, devastating, life-ruining night. It's over, and I need to move on."

Mia tilted her head. "Do you actually want to move on, or are you trying to make yourself feel any emotion other than heartbroken?"

I considered this with what I felt was appropriate intellectual honesty.

"Can't it be both?"

She opened her mouth.

"Rhetorical question," I said. "I'm swiping now."

I swiped.

The app served up an apparently endless parade of human beings who were, by every available metric, perfectly nice. Nice smiles. Normal jobs. Bios that were either endearingly genuine or so aggressively curated they looped back around to genuine. A whole landscape of people who had done no wrong and deserved to meet someone who was actually emotionally available.

I scrolled through them like I was reviewing insurance claims, which was an accurate enough comparison that I put my phone face down for a full thirty seconds before picking it back up.

None of them made my stomach flip.

None of them had amber eyes. None of them were six foot three with shoulders built to carry the weight of an entire league. None of them had ever looked at me with that expression of barely controlled want that Cam wore like a second uniform, the one that said you are the most inconvenient person who has ever happened to me, and I cannot look away.

I swiped right on a woman anyway. Then another. Then I made myself stop, because I'd noticed I was only swiping on brunettes, and I didn't know how to process that.

I matched with someone named Elyse. Thirty-one, lawyer, dark-haired, attractive, but in a way that registered as objectively true rather than personally ruinous. Her bio mentioned true crime podcasts and the ability to cook, which were two separate green flags as far as I was concerned. Her opener was funny. Genuinely funny, not the performative humor of someone running a dating app playbook, but the kind that suggested she was actually like this in real life.

She was also, per her profile, out and proud, which her bio mentioned. She was clearly someone who'd been living that way long enough that it wasn't a declaration anymore. Just a fact.

Exactly what I should want.