#chapter Thirty-Eight
“I saw him only once after that. Chad and I had a fight, and I ran out of the house. Literally ran to Ian’s house, which was really far away. We fucked that night, and I was going to tell him I was leaving Chad, but I didn’t. I guess I wanted to get all my ducks in a row before I told him, so that he’d have no excuses. That he’d know it wasn’t…that he didn’t have to feel guilty…” Maura swallowed hard. “Guess that didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped.”
Shelly poured more wine into Maura’s glass and pushed the plate of bruschetta toward her. “This is good. Eat this.”
Maura sipped wine and took one of the squares of toast heaped high with Shelly’s homemade bruschetta. So far she’d been able to avoid the platters of cookies and cheeses, but she couldn’t hold out for much longer. The food at Shelly’s parties was legendary, and she’d gone all out for this one. It was her daughter Melody’s eighteenth birthday and she’d just been accepted to Princeton. The celebration was on.
“It was the only real fight we ever had, at least the kind with shouting. It was the worst one, anyway. I was so angry with him for the things he said. But I let him go down on me.” Maura shook her head, blushing at the memory.
“It’s a little thing I like to call ragefucking.” Shelly laughed.
“Well, if Daniel had tried to so much as blow me a kiss, I’m pretty sure I’d have kneed him in the nuts.”
Shelly gave Maura a knowing look. “Were you in love with Daniel?”
“Nope. But I liked him. I thought maybe we could try to make something. I didn’t mean to hurt him.” The wine couldn’t quite erase the bitterness of the memory. “But if that’s the way he was going to react to things, better I found out first, I guess.”
“Ragefucking only works if you’re crazy mad in love with someone.” Shelly offered this bit of advice as she scooped a carrot through a bowl of hummus. “Something to do with hormones.”
Maura rolled her eyes. “Uh huh.”
“So what did you tell Daniel when he called you?”
“I said that I understood why he was angry, and I apologized, but I told him I was not going to be his long distance girlfriend and that honestly, I thought he needed to get his shit under control.” Maura paused with a grimace, remembering. “He got kind of cold and distant after that, but he didn’t yell at me again.”
“He’s a shit show,” Shelly said flatly.
Maura laughed. “Well. Yeah. But like I’m not?”
“You should just tell Ian you miss him. Call him up, tell him you’re going crazy without him, and that you need to talk to him,” Shelly said.
Maura shook her head. “Can’t. Won’t. Can’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to tell him that.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because,” Maura said carefully, “then he’ll know.”
“And that’s a problem because…?”
She sighed, loving that she had a friend good enough to understand, hating that the friend was good enough to also call her on her bullshit. “It’s been over a month. What if he doesn’t miss me? What if he’s not waiting around for me to call him? What if he’s actually happy and relieved and fine with not hearing from me, ever, at all?”
“Girl, I never knew you to be scared of stupid stuff like that.” Shelly gave her head a woeful shake. “Damn. What the hell has this dude done to your self confidence?”
“He ate it,” Maura said. “And now it’s all gone.”
“Bullshit.”
It was, maybe, bullshit. Maybe not. Maura sipped her wine, then shrugged.
“So. Ian sends you a date request through Luvfinder. What, he can’t just call you up? Send you a personal email? What’s his deal? Is he trying to be cute, or what?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t answered it yet.”
Shelly groaned and stabbed the air with her carrot stick. “Maura! What the actual fuck are you doing?”
“If he thinks he can just send me a date request and that I’ll jump on it, well, he’s wrong.”
“It’s been like, forever since he sent that message. That’s not jumping on anything. Besides, he’s not wrong. What are you doing? You should at least call him and ask him what he’s up to.” Shelly paused to point again with the remnants of her carrot before crunching it loudly. “I can’t believe you.”
Maura could barely believe it herself. “I don’t know. It’s like…have you ever been really, really sick?”
“I had a hundred and four degree fever the last time I got the flu. That was pretty sick.”
“Yeah. Something like that. So you’re feverish and sick and kind of out of your mind, but eventually the fever breaks and you start to feel better? And you wake up and realize you’re finally going to be okay?”
Shelly nodded, but looked wary. “…Yeah?”
“That’s kind of how I felt after breaking it off with Ian that last time. This weight lifted off me, I felt this…relief. Like I wouldn’t have to try any more, you know? It was all over, and I was the one who’d finally chosen it. I mean, I didn’t want it. But I chose it. Which seemed important at the time.” She hesitated, putting into words things she’d only thought about before. “Like it was some kind of game, and I won.”
“But you didn’t, sweetie. Did you?”
“No.”
Shelly smiled. “He came back to you. That has to count for something, right?”
“He always came back to me. Always. I tried to break it off with him a bunch of times, and he was the one who always came back. It’s why he made me so mad when he tried to tell me how it was just me pushing us forward. Like it was all my fault. I hated that, him not owning his shit.”
“So he’s not perfect.”
Maura laughed ruefully. “Wow. No. Definitely not.”
“Nobody is. Except Keanu Reeves.” Shelly gave a happy sigh. “He’s perfect.”
They laughed together at that. There wasn’t much time to talk about it after that, because Melody came into the kitchen to give her mother a hug and kiss and tell her that people had started to arrive. Shelly went into perfect hostess mode, and Maura found her way from the kitchen into the living room to mingle with the other guests.
Maura’s phone weighed heavy in her pocket. She could remember a time when being constantly connected to the world had seemed like a burden. Repulsive. She’d resisted getting a cell phone for a long time because of that. But once she had a smartphone with all its access to the internet, it had become her Precious. Like Gollum’s ring. She was never without it, and even when she wasn’t using it, there was a comfort in knowing that it was there to help her answer random trivia, find her way when she was lost, buy stuff, listen to music.
Keep in touch.
Luvfinder had a special app. She’d never bothered to use it, but it was easy enough to download. In a minute she had the small red square with its happy heart logo staring at her from her phone’s screen. Tapping it, she entered her information into the login screen and pulled up her messages. She had almost a dozen other date requests, with one or two repeats but the rest all new. She hadn’t updated her profile or posted anywhere on the site, but that didn’t matter. She was female, and for a lot of these guys, that seemed to be enough.
Cupping the phone in her hands, she scrolled through, deleting the messages one by one until she came to Ian’s. Luvfinder had a set of five generic message templates. He’d chosen the plainest one. Black and white, nothing cutesy about it. Simple, elegant, straightforward. All the templates had spots for contact information, along with places for the sender to choose what sort of date they were offering. Movie, coffee, dinner, sporting event. The list was long and comprehensive, and still left a place at the bottom for the sender to fill in anything that hadn’t been listed.
Ian had checked every single option.
Skydiving. Horseback riding. Scuba diving. Go cart racing. Mini golf. Was he crazy?
She could ignore the situation totally. Or, she could hit ‘accept’ on the date request and see what happened from there. Everything with Ian had always been like standing on the edge of a cliff, and Maura had always leaped.
Before she could stop herself, she hit ‘accept.’