“So guess what?”
“Why are you whispering?” Gillian asked. They’d met for their monthly lunch date, this time at a Belgian restaurant not far from the community center where Rachel taught her wheelchair patients to navigate obstacles.
“I’m not whispering.” She glanced around again to ensure none of her seniors had ended up in the restaurant, then spoke more firmly. “I can be quiet without whispering. It’s allowed.”
Gillian leaned forward, sliding the small vase of daisies aside. “Why are you being quiet?” she whispered.
Rachel narrowed her eyes, but Gill just smirked. She sighed. “Fine. I took Theo home on Wednesday.”
Gillian started. The wood chair leg screeched against the floor. Gillian winced, then slid back to the table. “Sorry. I was surprised.”
“I noticed.”
“In my defense, it’s been three years since you had sex.”
She regarded her friend, who seemed serious as all get out. “Gill, it hasn’t even been three months.”
“What?”
She tapped her fingers against the table as she counted back. “Well, I know I’d finished my taxes, so maybe a little more than three months? But it was around then. Why did you ... hang on. How did you think I haven’t been with anyone since Hannah? Even mamas got libidos, you know.”
“I know.” Gillian’s cheeks hinted at a flush. Gillian, queen of the dating apps, proclaimer of sexual freedom for all, gifter of Rachel’s post-divorce vibrator.
“You thought my last sex was with Sergei? Sergei?”
“Well, you haven’t had relationships since the divorce.” She tilted her head, frowned her brow. “Have you?”
Rachel smiled. “No, sweetie. I’ve been uncoupled. But I’ve picked guys up.”
While their server delivered their meals, she worked on unraveling Gillian’s misconception. “Not a lot, and okay, maybe I’ve been more private about it than you are with your hookups—I’m not judging, you know I’m not—but we roomed together for two years. How would you think I’d stop having sex after Sergei?”
Now Gillian was the quiet one. “I’m glad I’m wrong. Sorry for the weird reaction. It’s a relief, if I’m removing all varnish here. I thought that sniveling turd of a louse had....”
The sheen of her eyes meant Gill wanted to march on Sergei with pitchforks, but lacked the spoons.
Rachel reached over and squeezed her hand. “You thought he broke me. You thought he’d sucked the life out of me and turned me into someone who only works and moms and needs her best friend to drag her out to a monthly lunch to remind her that she has more to her than that.”
“No. No no no. I don’t take you to lunch because of that. Rachel, don’t think that way.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Don’t think that way?”
They laughed; Gill was the one who bristled most about people telling her how her mind should operate.
“Fine. Be autonomous in your thinking. But listen to me: I take you to lunch because I love you and I want to hang out with you. And because someone has to listen to my stories about horrid men.”
“Ohh.” Gillian had the best bad hookup stories. Rachel slid to the edge of her chair. “Who was he and what did he do?”
“I thought he was a typical hot nerd type; we ran into each other at the library. But when we finished, still laying in his bed mind you, he told me he bet my students would be so jealous of him.”
“No.”
“Yes. And now I can never go back to the library in case I encounter more people with a Hot for Teacher fantasy, and that means I’ll never finish my conference paper. So dealing with headaches like that, I never thought you were missing out by not hooking up. Though, I admit, it’s true I don’t think you get enough time to enjoy yourself on your own. But that’s because you have a two-year-old, not because I’m trying to—to reprogram the way you operate. I love you exactly as you are.” She lifted her own eyebrows, and went on with a wicked lilt. “But I thought you never had anyone to help you with your orgasms.”
“Gillian!”
“Well, you never said. I thought you were off men.”
She had to smile at the approval in her friend’s voice. “You are such nonsense. Now I wish I’d mentioned it every time I hooked up.”
“If nothing else, I wish you had, too, so I could be ready to rescue you if you needed me.”
“Oh, that’s Serena’s job.”
Gillian munched a fry, considering. “You told Serena?”
“We always put each other on alert when we go out with someone new. Or, now I gather I put both her and Dillon on alert. It’s gotten a little unequal since they fused at the hip.”
“Why not me?”
“First of all, why aren’t you tethered to me to start with?” She pulled out her phone. “We’re going to start tracking each other, then we’ll feel better. And anyhow, I wasn’t meaning to exclude you. It’s something she offered, back when Hannah and I were moving into the apartment. At the time I didn’t plan on dating for ages. You’re right about the louse turd, or it felt that way for a while. But then I met this hot paramedic at work and thought, better to grab the moment when I had it, you know? So we grabbed the moment, just the one night, and I checked in with Serena before and after, and that turned into the system. I never thought about it like I was leaving you out.”
Gillian finished setting the app up on their phones and passed Rachel’s back to her. “I’m sanguine. You don’t need to justify yourself. And I’m very glad Serena was on top of it. You told her about Wednesday?”
Rachel nodded.
“Good. So that leaves one bright glowing unexamined question on the table.”
Rachel dug a tiny fork into one of her mussels, reluctant to meet her friend’s eyes for a moment. She had a feeling she knew what the question would be.
And she was right. Gillian dabbed at her lips with her napkin and asked, “Why, after months and months of not mentioning the people you banged, but days after insisting on re-rolling the dice for your perfect man, did you tell me about Theo?”
Hermes help him, but he caught himself googling ‘how soon until I call her’ like a proper fool. He’d made pointed mention of going to Fort Worth for a long weekend, back before kissing goodbye in the apartment parking lot. She’d failed to offer any indication of what was next for them. He could have asked. He should have suggested something. Anything indicative of future plans. He wasn’t clear why he was so keyed up over it.
Over her, sure. Rachel was ... great, in fact. Of all the available words, ‘great’ fit the bill. Bright and fun and direct and flirty and intriguing and in bed: electric. So, sure, he was a little keyed up over her.
Before sinking into the endless vortex of the r/relationships subreddit, he switched his browser to social media and searched for her, because that’s what his last girlfriend had done between early dates: messaged him a dinner invite. It had propelled them into the next few dates, which led to a few months of exclusivity.
Except none of the Rachel Groff profiles were her.
Fine. Hermes was no help, nor was technology. He went in search of Sergei. Maybe the guy needed his help handling Hannah again.
And then he stopped mid-step, because he couldn’t keep using a two-year-old to finagle his dates.
Theo diverted himself into a walk-through of the facility. Everything hummed along in that chill weekday way. A few large groups in for a late lunch, a few solo heads at the bar. All the staff seemed in control of their jobs. He couldn’t get further resolving their expeditor’s complaints about sauces until Ron answered his email. Nothing else tugged at his attention, and Sergei wasn’t around, and every square inch of his office felt like it had shrunk by twelve percent in ungeometric ways.
He lifted a hand in farewell to the bartender and headed to the shed adjacent to the loading dock. A few minutes’ effort and he’d loaded his kayak atop his SUV. An hour on the bayou would, gods willing, clear his head and leave him stuffed full of tranquility. And maybe some sort of plan, as well.
So maybe it messed with her mind some when Gillian made connections between sex with Theo and a game playing at finding her life partner. Maybe it made her over cautious.
Never mind that her second set of rolls suited Theo the same way the first set had. It was all guesswork and confirmation bias anyway. Any rules saying she had to get all relationship-minded with guys she slept with were outdated tools of the patriarchy. Rachel had long ago stashed all those tools in a tumbledown shed, thanks all the same.
And none of it influenced her decision to text Depy after she pulled into Elixir on Wednesday, asking her to retrieve Hannah from the parking lot.
She only did it because it was so hot out, and if she turned off her car to take Hannah in to Sergei, the interior wouldn’t begin to cool again until she was almost home. They were in for a long boiling summer, including a multi-day road trip up to see her sister and parents. Any time she avoided overtaxing her faulty a/c, she felt she was preserving its lifespan.
Depy managed to keep her voice sweet even as she said; “I’m surprised you aren’t sniffing after Mr. Boss Man in there tonight.”
“There are spare panties in the bag, but she did a great job on the potty right before we left home, so if you stick with the schedule I emailed you shouldn’t need them.”
“Pah and bosh.”
“Pah and bosh right back at you,” she said, but light so it seemed like she was teasing. “I had to throw out those pink overalls you sent because Sergei didn’t wash out the stain. Up to you if you want tonight’s outfit ruined, too.”
Depy pressed her lips closed, her favorite moue of disapproval. Probably she wanted to ask why Hannah wore the new dress if it was apt to get ruined. Too bad she’d pitched so many fits about never seeing Hannah wear the clothes she purchased.
She waved a final goodbye and backed out in her still-cool car. An hour and a half of nothing scheduled, and flying high on scoring points against Depy. What could be better?
Ignoring the traitorous image of Theo’s naked ass that flashed in her overheated mind, she navigated home for some quality time with leftovers and her DVR.