Sumira let out a long breath and put down her phone. “I told you he’s a fuckboy, didn’t I?”
“Maybe he’s busy?” Amy suggested.
“It’s just…” I sat up straight and brushed potato chip crumbs from my shirt. “I’m Rachel freaking Weiss, right?”
My three best friends eyed me warily. They might or might not have become numb to my inspirational-speech voice over the years.
“And I, Rachel Renée Weiss, do not obsess over men. They come tome, they blow up my phone, they cry over me and occasionally stalk me when I dump them. That is the natural order of things.”
Sumira and Eva gave noncommittal shrugs while Amy nodded earnestly.
“Stephen Branson wields some mystical power that has upset Mother Nature’s delicate balance.” I tossed my hands up in exasperation. “It’s like, I don’t even know if he’stheguy for me, but I can’t get past the way he makes me feel. No one has ever played me hot and cold like this. I don’t like it. But I feel like I need to conquer it.”
“Ahh.” Sumira looked as if she’d realized something. “Rach, I’m sorry, but I think you’ve been dicknotized.”
We all looked at her.
“It’s like hypnotized. But with a dick.”
We raised our eyebrows at each other and then, without a word, Eva and Amy went back to their phones.
I pondered Sumira’s words. “But how did he manage to dick-notize me with such a modestly sized one?”
Ping.I nearly dropped my phone in surprise. How was that for timing?
“He just texted me.”
“What did he say?” Eva and Amy clustered around me to peer at the message while Sumira looked on, her perfectly threaded brows arched with curiosity.
I read aloud. “‘Just thinking about you. Wondering how you and the girls are doing.’”
“He asked about us?” Sumira sounded intrigued and bemused.
Ping.“‘And by girls I mean those ripe, juicy—’”
“Okay!” Eva threw out her hands to stop me. “We get it.”
I burst out laughing. It took a minute before I could compose myself, gasping and wiping away tears of mirth. His timing. His raunch. The way he unknowingly trolled my besties for a second there. Man, he was good.
“You know what?” I smiled. “I’m going all in. No Jdate. Just Stephen.”
“Really?” Eva looked skeptical.
“Really. He better gird his loins. Mama’s coming for him.”
And on that decisive note, I texted him back.Tongue emoji. Sweat emoji. Peach emoji.
His response came almost at once.
Stephen Branson 8:32 PM:
My place tonight?
A week in, I was still feeling confident about my decision. After putting all my eggs in his basket, I was determined not to overthink every little interaction. I no longer worried about coming on too strong. We hung out three times in one week. He seemed, for the moment, as invested in our budding relationship as I was. It felt good.
But by the next week? I was back to remembering why I’d been hesitant in the first place. It seemed like every day he took a little longer to text me back. The cycle had returned: boning, waiting by the phone, and spiraling anxiety. When had I ever been the sort of girl to wait by the phone? I enjoyed being in the same room with him, but when we were apart, I didn’t like the way I felt. I felt needy. And I hated feeling needy. It made me want to text him every night to see what he was up to, which, of course, would be too much.
But tonight I was forced to put him out of my mind, because I was the one who was busy. I had a fancy sustainability dinner to go to. Much to my chagrin, I’d earned the title of sustainability ambassador at work. All because I’d hidden the paper coffee cups in the kitchen and replaced them with mugs from Goodwill. In a corporate work environment, one must be careful about showing any kind of initiative. Managers eat that stuff up. Yet it often only gets you elected for more work disguised as exciting projects—or in this case, even worse: a work event. My manager lived forwriting recommendations to higher-ups, filling out kudos reports, giving out stickers that read “I did a great job today!” (What a strange man. It really was tiring having a manager who was so eager to see the good in everything.) And it was due to Kenneth that I would be sitting at a banquet table listening to smug capitalist hypocrites congratulate themselves all night.
