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“Sure,” she said. “But what if I get there and he’s not waiting for me outside? I could call the school and someone could go looking for him, or I could just text him directly and ask where he is. You see how the second one is a lot easier, and saves us all a lot of time?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
“But you still don’t want to get him one.”
“I’m just nervous is all,” I told her. “You hear about all these awful ways people use cell phones to take advantage of kids. And I really don’t want him going on the internet unsupervised; that scares the hell out of me.”
“I know,” she said. “And I don’t want to tell you what to do. I’m just saying it would make my job a lot easier. Not to mention, you wouldn’t have to buy him a smartphone or anything.”
“Do they still make flip phones?”
“Of course they do!” She said with a shake of her head. “What a rich person thing to ask.”
This made me chuckle. “I’m sorry, I really didn’t know! But would Will even be happy with a flip phone, or would he resent me even more for getting him the lamest phone in the world while the rest of his friends have smartphones?”
“He’ll get over it,” she said. “He has a tablet if he wants to get online for some reason. The phone is just a way for him to get in contact with us and vice versa.”
“Yes, exactly,” I said. “That’s all I would want him to have it for.”
“Great,” she said. “I’ll go get him one this afternoon. Maybe if I let him come with me and pick out the color, it’ll soften the blow of it being a dumb phone and not a smart one.”
At the café, I found a place to park right in front, and we went in. We were seated right away, just missing the lunch rush, and when the waiter came around I went ahead and ordered us each a glass of white wine.
“What’s the occasion?” she asked.
“To the start of the school year,” he said. “I know in a lot of ways your job gets easier once Will goes back to school, but it also gets harder. You’ll have to run a lot more errands for him, make sure he does his homework, that sort of thing. It’s a lot less fun than going to the zoo and the park, so I just want to let you know that I see and value all your hard work.”
“Well, thank you,” she said. “But that’s okay. I’m not worried about the workload. Will is such a good kid, it really doesn’t even feel like work most of the time.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it.”
The waiter brought our drinks, took our food orders, and left again. I held my glass up to make a toast. “To a good school year,” I said. We clinked and sipped. She smiled at me from across the table and I saw something I hadn’t seen for a few weeks flicker behind her eyes. She was trying to flirt using just her gaze. And it was working.
“Stephanie,” I said, putting my glass down and smiling back. “Why do I get the feeling that you’ve been… more friendly, lately?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Haven’t I always been friendly to you?”
I laughed. “Well, yes. Of course. But I mean—after you and I—you know. After we did what we did, there was a week or two where it seemed like neither of us wanted to spend any time alone with the other one. Things were awkward and tense, and so I figured it would be best to just keep our distance, and that seemed to be what you wanted as well. Now, I don’t feel like that’s the case anymore.”
She nodded, smiled down at her placemat. “You’re right. That’s not what I want anymore.”
“Alright then,” I said. “What do you want exactly?”
“I want… I want us not to avoid each other, how about that.”
“Okay…”
“I like spending time with you, and I know that before we kept our distance in an attempt to keep us from… repeating past mistakes… but lately I’ve been wondering whether or not it was really that big of a mistake in the first place.”
I took a moment to let this sink in. Was she saying what I thought she was saying? Did she want to have sex again?
Because if that’s what she was suggesting, then she and I were completely on the same page. I cleared my throat. “I’ve also been thinking that,” I told her. “Perhaps we were a little too quick to say never again.”
“Right,” she agreed. “The way I see it, we’re both adults, and we both like each other, so why are we trying to push those feelings away.”
“That’s a very good point. Especially since it doesn’t seem like our attempts to push them away have really worked. It sounds like both of us have been having those same feelings for one another the whole time.”
“I know I have.”
