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“We told her that we don’t have any immediate wedding plans, but that didn’t stop her from starting to hoard ingredients to make the wedding cake,” Linley said.
We both laughed.
“She’s relentless,” Linley said. “But she loves Gray, and he adores her, and not just because she feeds and dotes on him. I just love him so much, Em.” There were tears in her eyes and under the absolute happiness of my friend was just a little current of jealousy. I wanted to be making plans like hers.
“I’m so happy for you,” I said, for what felt like the millionth time, reaching out and squeezing her hand.
“Thank you,” she said.
* * *
“They moved in pretty fast,” Natalie said when we got in the car. “I’m not judging, they seem really happy together. I don’t know if I would be ready to commit like that.”
“I know,” I said. “I can’t imagine being so sure about someone.”
“Same,” Natalie said.
She looked out the window and didn’t say anything else until we made it to her parent’s house.
“Thanks for the ride, Em,” she said. “Gretchen is coming over tomorrow for planning, so expect lots of screaming texts.”
“I’m ready,” I said. “You were there for me when I had to deal with her.”
“It’s a good system,” Natalie said. She didn’t give me a hug when she got out of the car and I didn’t know why. Was something up with her?
* * *
Natalie did text me the next day a bunch of times. Gretchen’s latest idea was a destination wedding, but she didn’t understand that flying to another country while she was massively pregnant wasn’t going to work.
I answered her back in between cleaning and pretending to clean.
I also did the thing I said I would never do and checked out some online dating sites. I didn’t make a profile or anything, but I wanted to see what was out there.
It was time to do something about being so lonely. Linley and Gray were happy, Paige and Esme were deliriously in love, and I wanted that. I wasn’t going to find that sitting in my house and lounging on my velvet couch.
Since there were no options in Castleton, I was going to have to start looking outside the borders.
I wasn’t ready to make a profile yet, but I started thinking about what I wanted to say about myself, and which pictures I wanted to use. Maybe Natalie could help me. She hadn’t talked about dating, but that made complete sense. She was still fresh off her breakup, and she’d just moved back to Castleton and gotten a new job. That was a lot without adding dating on top of that. Hopefully she could help me, though.
* * *
I asked Natalie to come over after work on Wednesday night. I’d done as much research about online dating as I could, and I was ready to go for it. But I needed to run everything by someone before I committed to posting. I also wanted to hear how her first meeting of the knitting club had gone on Tuesday.
“So, it’s not much, but this is what I’ve got so far,” she said, showing me some pictures on her phone of her needles with about an inch of knitting with light blue yarn on them.
“Hey, that’s better than I could do,” I said.
“Everyone was super nice, but I was definitely one of the younger ones there. Beth said she was kind of hoping I could help bring in some new people,” she said, laying back on the couch.
“I could see Paige wanting to join,” I said. “You should mention it to her.”
“I will,” she said as I pulled out plates and silverware for us to eat.
“Okay, so I wanted to hang out with you, but I also wanted your help with something,” I said. “Can you read this and tell me what you think?” I pulled up the draft of my dating profile on my phone and handed it to her.
She was confused for a moment and then seemed to get what was happening.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re doing online dating?”
