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“Yes. Although I’m starting to have some serious reservations.”
Martin comes over with our wine. As he opens it, I ask her, “Why is that?”
She pulls a face before leaning toward me and whispering, “This is not for public consumption, but I’m starting to feel like it’s something only a pathetic spinster would do.”
“Spinster?” I laugh. “What is this, nineteen hundred?”
“Ha ha.” She does not seem amused.
“When you watched the show before applying to be on it, did you look at the women that way?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
“So why would you think of yourself like that?”
Martin pours our champagne before asking, “Is there anything else, Mr. Ferris?” He must be at least fifteen years older than me, but thus far, I have not been successful in getting him to call me Tim.
“No, Martin, thank you.”
After he leaves, Paige declares, “I like you, Tim.” She hurries to add, “As a friend.” I don’t know why but that makes me bristle. “As such, I’m going to talk to you like I’d talk to Missy, Faith, or Anna.”
“Speaking of Anna,” I interrupt, “did she have her baby?”
“No. It was just Braxton Hicks contractions.” She seems to realize this isn’t a term I’m familiar with, so she explains, “False labor. The body does that to prepare women for the real deal.”
“You’d think it was enough that you had to do it once without the additional excitement.”
“Women really do get the raw end of this procreation deal,” she grumbles before going back to her original thought. “If I meet someone on this show, I might have to move for them. I want to get married and have a family, and it’s possible that will never happen here in Elk Lake.”
“Huh.” I don’t allow myself to question why I dislike the thought of her moving away so much.
“Don’t tell the girls.”
I take a sip of my wine before saying, “I would never gossip about you. In fact, I’m starting to think this is a kind of us-against-them scenario—not like we’re battling, but we’re clearly on different sides of coupledom. As such, I think we should be allies.”
“I like that idea. I’ve been feeling pretty sorry for myself lately, and even though my friends were single in the past, they seem to have forgotten what it’s like.”
“I’ve been feeling sorry for myself ever since Eva left,” I confess. “Like I’m a pathetic loser.”
“You shouldn’t say things like that.”
“You shouldn’t either.”
It’s not the twinkle in Paige’s eye that worries me, but the way she rubs her hands together like she’s come up with a devious plan. “I have an idea.” I can almost hear the mic drop.
“Okay …” My palms suddenly become sweaty.
“I think we should form a pity pact,” she announces.
“What in the heck is a pity pact?”
“I propose to take on your sadness so you can free up your time to move on with your life, and you’ll do the same for me. You know, empathy on steroids.”
“I’m not sure that’ll work,” I tell her skeptically. “I mean, you don’t exactly know how I feel.”
“And you don’t know howIfeel. But we both know what it’s like to feel awful about our situation, and neither of us seems able to move beyond our frustrations. Maybe if we swap our sadness, we can quit feeling sorry for ourselves long enough to get on with it.”
“In other words, we’ll put our real lives on the back burner by thinking only of the other one’s problems?”
