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  “Well, I’m ready to put it behind me,” I said, injecting as much positive energy as I could into the words. “Where do I start?”

  Pen laughed and leaned over to retrieve the wine bottle. “Bars. Coffee shops. I hear you can meet people in the produce aisle at the grocery store.”

  “I’ve tried all that.” I left out the details of squeezing tomatoes for forty-five minutes, waiting for someone to hit on me. No one had, but a bag boy had followed me around the rest of the store, looking suspicious. “I’ve been waiting for something else to come along but nothing has. Please help me with these websites, Pen. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “Okay. Okay,” she said, pulling my laptop toward her. “I’ll help.”

  Relief flooded me so much I actually giggled and threw my arms around her neck. Her cry of disgust at the girly gesture was the cherry on top.

  “Okay. I pulled up all the sites I could think of. Should I join them all? Increase my chances?”

  “Definitely not,” she said, tapping my password into the lock screen. She clicked browser windows shut as she spoke. “If you’re on too many sites, you look like a slut. Or desperate. No Tinder. No one ever fell in love by swiping right.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain the swiping when we download the app.”

  “But you said…”

  “No OkCupid. That’s for straight people to cheat on their spouses.”

  I felt like I should be taking notes.

  “You shouldn’t be using any of these.” Her fingers flew across the keyboard and I scooted closer to look over her shoulder. “You need to be on Swingle.”

  “Why? Are you on Swingle?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Then why should I use it?”

  “I don’t use it because it’s where people go to look for a girlfriend, not a hookup.”

  The bottle was empty, so I struggled to my feet and grabbed the other. Maybe I should’ve bought three. “And you’re always just looking for a hookup.”

  “Hey now,” she said. “There is an art to casual dating. You’re right, though. I don’t want a girlfriend, which is why I stay away from Swingle.”

  “What if I’m not necessarily looking for a girlfriend?”

  Keys clicked and Pen swung the screen toward me. “No worries. You can choose your sexual orientation here. Hetero, homo, bi, or pansexual.”

  “Wow! They actually have an option for pansexual? There’s never an option for me.” But there it was, at the bottom of the list but definitely present. “That’s progressive.”

  Pen selected pansexual and clicked next. “I thought you’d like that. Wait ‘til you get to all the options for genders.”

  There were more than twenty options, including Kinner and Two Spirit along with all the terms I knew for cis, trans, and nonbinary people and a few I didn’t. I picked cis woman for myself. Pen barely made fun of me for having to select every gender option when we got to the “people I’m interested in” section. My head was buzzing with the choices and the wine wasn’t helping, so I slowed down. The progress bar showed we were only on page four of forty-two. I’d never make it if I kept up this pace.

  The problem was, the more pages we went through, the more nerves were getting the better of me. I couldn’t clean, so I reached for the next best thing. Sitting next to my phone on the coffee table was my Goonies floaty pen. I snatched it up, tilting it from side to side so the little fake doubloons tumbled around in their liquid chamber. The longer I watched the pirate ship and treasure moving around inside, the less I worried that this whole thing was a huge mistake. After a minute, I caught Pen’s side eye and half-smile.

  “What?” I asked.

  She stopped typing and shook her head at me. “I can’t believe you still have that thing.”

  “This is my favorite pen.”

  “I got it for you as a joke.”

  “Well, joke’s on you. I love it.”

  “The Goonies isn’t even that great a movie.”

  Now she’d gone too far. I pointed the pen into Pen’s face, the water bubbling up at my aggressive movement. “Don’t make me kick you out of my house, Penelope Chase. The Goonies is a classic and I won’t hear anything against it. Plus, you love action films!”

  “The Goonies is not an action film,” she said, turning back to the screen.

  “Um, excuse me.” Going over our old argument was almost enough to make me forget about the terrifying new step in my dating life. “Car chases, gunshots, explosions. What more do you need for an action film?”

  “In the ‘80s? Tits.”

  I rolled my eyes and spun my pen between my fingers. “You’re such a horndog.”

  “A horndog who bought you a cool pen.”

  “Like five years ago.”

  “You’re still playing with it, aren’t you?” She turned her full smile on me and said, “And you aren’t freaking out anymore ‘cause I made you roll your eyes.”

  “You make me roll my eyes literally every day,” I replied. She was right, though. My hands weren’t shaking anymore.

  We got through all the basics pretty quickly—name, date of birth, pronouns, and location. Penelope did all the typing while I sat back wavering between excited and terrified. Then came the more difficult questions.

  Pen read aloud from the screen, “I’m open to non-monogamy. Yes or no?”

  “No.”

  “That was quick. Not even willing to entertain the idea?”

  “Nope. I know you’re into that and I’m glad it works for you, but it’s not for me.”

  “Not judging you, Kieran. Just checking in.”

  She didn’t push and I was glad. She knew enough of my history to let it go, even if she didn’t agree with my old-fashioned dating habits.

  “Okay, let’s move on to profile pictures!” Pen rubbed her hands together in anticipation, the ring splints she wore for typing clicking against each other. It was a new set, the metal flashing brightly in the warm light. They wrapped around her knuckles so tightly they nearly disappeared into her pale flesh, accentuating the delicacy of her hands. “What’ve you got?”

  “Um…”

  “Come on, you’ve got pictures of yourself.” She blinked at my silence. “Don’t you?”

  I shrugged, trying to be cavalier about it. I didn’t like my face. It was too long and too severe. My shockingly straight nose had a weird bulb on the end and it dominated every photograph. My smile was even worse—so wide it squeezed my eyes shut. My skin color was somewhere between too bronze for most foundations and too pale for darker shades. Penelope made fun of my resting bitch face, but neutral was the only look that worked for me. At least I had plump lips, but my mouth was too big for my jaw.

  “I have my headshot from work,” I said, snatching up my phone and scrolling through the albums. It was mostly random screenshots from on-line searches I’d forgotten about and pics of my favorite art from museum trips, but I’d grabbed the decent headshot off the company website. “I look pretty good in this one.”

  Pen took the phone and squinted at the screen. “Not bad. You’re a little serious, but we can work with it.”

  HomeScape Settlement Services, the real estate title company where I worked, had hired a professional photographer two years ago. I’d worn my favorite suit that day, the one that fit just right everywhere, and I’d taken a lot of care with my makeup. Alex and I had broken up a few weeks earlier and I’d cut my hair for a fresh look. I’d grown it out since—the short curls thing never looked as good on me as I thought it would, but it wasn’t too far off how I looked now.

  Pen uploaded the headshot then examined it closely, deciding the best way to crop it for the website’s limited dimensions. “Good call on this one. You look great in that suit and super professional. It’ll keep the losers away.”

  I was giddy until she asked for more photos. I offered the other shots from the same day, even one where I was smi
ling more, but Pen said no.

  “Not more headshots. Something different. Don’t you have any selfies?”

  She scrolled through my photo file. I could tell by the look on her face that she wasn’t impressed. “I don’t like selfies. They’re weird. I always look terrible. I don’t know how to do it right.”

  Pen tossed aside my phone and fished her own from her pocket. “No problem. We’ll get some thirst traps of you later. In the meantime…Here. We’ll use this one.”

  I didn’t have a chance to ask what a “thirst trap” was because she showed me the picture on her phone.

  “Pen,” I breathed. “This is…actually good. Where did you take this?”

  She grabbed the phone back and started typing into it. A moment later, my laptop dinged with an incoming email. “The Indigo Girls concert last summer at Wolftrap. I showed it to you. You don’t remember?”

  I didn’t and I was sure that I would remember seeing a rare good picture of myself. Not good. It might be the best picture of me I’d ever seen. I swung the laptop screen around to look at it on a bigger screen. I was walking away from the camera in the warm light of sunset. I was looking back over my shoulder, my curls, slightly longer than in the headshot, flew out beside me like a cape, the setting sun picking up the copper tones in my normally dull brown hair.

  It wasn’t only my hair that looked good. My body was twisted, which hid the few extra pounds I’ve been meaning to take care of for the last fifteen years or so. I almost looked skinny. And my clothes flattered my rounded shoulders and bony hips. The image cut off below my butt, so my short legs and wide feet were out of the frame. Most surprising, however, was my smile. It was big and natural, no doubt laughing at whatever ridiculous thing Pen had said to make me turn around, but my eyes weren’t squinty and my mouth wasn’t crooked. I looked like a model for some miracle drug, cured of depression and out living their best life.

  “Now it’s time for the juicy stuff,” Pen said, settling into the couch with my laptop on her knees. “Introduce yourself. How would your best friend describe you? Hmm…how would I describe you?”

  She took too long thinking about it, so I blurted out over the rim of my wineglass, “Come on, how would you?”

  “Calm down,” she drawled. “I’m trying to come up with a few different ways to say ‘hot.’ How about ‘Sexy single with killer jugs’?”

  “Why are we even friends?”

  Pen laughed and I couldn’t help but join in. She was ridiculous, but she was always on my side. “Yeah, okay. Maybe something else.”

  She typed for a minute and then clicked away without reading what she’d written. “Hey! What’d you say?”

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t talk about your boobs.”

  “What did you say?”

  But she’d already moved on to the next question, “Which describes you better: happy-go-lucky or impassioned?”

  “Can I pick neither?”

  “Nope. Have to pick one. I’m going with impassioned.”

  “Why? I’m not impassioned.”

  “Yesterday you lectured me for our entire lunch break about the importance of a comingled materials recycling program for the office because asking people who brush off recycling to separate their paper, plastic, and aluminum is a losing battle.”

  I had done that. I even used most of those words. Maybe I was impassioned.

  “See? I know you better than you know yourself. That’s why I’m writing your profile for you. Refill my glass so I can get to work.”

  Chapter Two

  I would’ve been fine if I’d gotten to the intersection before the light turned red. Preferably twenty minutes before, but it was definitely the red light’s fault that I’d be late to work. Traffic in Woodbridge was the worst in Northern Virginia, and the traffic in Northern Virginia was the worst in the country. My sister sent me an article all the way from Brussels about how DC metro traffic beat out both New York City and Los Angeles as the most congested. It listed traffic as the largest factor in the overall unhappiness of the population. It wasn’t a surprise to me, considering I sat in it every day. She kindly explained that traffic was the reason I was single and sad at thirty-seven years old. Moving to Brussels was the best thing my sister ever did for me.

  I left skid marks in the parking lot as I whipped into my spot. There was a similar pair behind Penelope’s fire-engine red SUV, but it was indicative of how late I was that Pen beat me into work. Her company’s office was next door to mine in the world’s most nondescript strip mall. Three Keys Real Estate had the office space on the end of the row, so they had more natural light. Penelope, being their most successful Realtor, had three windows in her office alone. My company’s office, connected by a dimly lit hall and our shared clientele to Three Keys, was far less glamorous. My boss, Randy Clune, started HomeScape Settlement Services when he was young and hopeful. That had been a long time ago. He made a decent living, to be sure, but in comparison, Three Keys was the popular jock to our dorky high school band member.

  I was so late that I didn’t have to use my keycard to get into the building. I slipped past Randy’s office without being noticed and hurried into my own. When I tossed my purse on the desk, the floppy top opened and my cell phone skidded across the worn wooden surface. I caught it right before it slipped off the edge.

  “Nice save,” came a baritone voice from the door. I should’ve known I wouldn’t be able to slip in undetected.

  I turned my best smile on Arthur, refusing even in my head to call him “Arty the Party” as he’d recently asked us to do. I may have issues, but at least I wasn’t sufficiently into my midlife crisis to match Arthur. He looked a little better today than usual. His face, normally scruffy enough to mistake him for a disreputable sailor, was clean-shaven, though there wasn’t much that could be done about the uneven tan lines around his watery eyes. His suit wasn’t too wrinkled and his silver hair, thinning everywhere, particularly in a softball-sized coin at the back, was neatly combed. His wife must’ve dressed him this morning. Or maybe one of his two teenaged daughters who lived in mortal fear of his mismatched socks ruining their reputations.

  “Morning, Art. How’s Susie?”

  “Gorgeous and perfect in every way.” His wife was an executive for a nonprofit in the city and she was, I had to admit, gorgeous. Way out of his league. He could be sweet, but I’d never understand how a relatively plain fifty-year-old man with absolutely no panache and a challenging sense of humor could hold on to a bombshell ten years his junior. “You’re late. I’m pretty sure my uncle didn’t notice because he wouldn’t notice an alien invasion if it happened in his front yard, but it’s not like you.”

  Beautiful wife, new BMW in his driveway and the boss’s nephew. Arthur was everything I usually hate in men, but he was actually a nice guy. If Randy had spotted me coming in late, I’m sure Arthur would’ve played interference until Randy forgot.

  “I’m not late,” I said, hiding my phone behind my back as it rattled with yet another notification. “I have five minutes until the staff meeting.”

  “It’s a good thing,” Art replied, turning to leave. “You might be able to do something about those bags under your eyes.”

  The minute he left, I shut the door and leaned heavily against it. It wasn’t just the bags. My eyes were bloodshot. I looked like hell and it was all Penelope’s fault. After she’d finished writing my profile we’d sat around chatting while she sobered up enough to drive. She could tell I was still nervous, so she entertained me with stories of her coworkers until I started giggling. Once I start laughing with Pen, it’s tough to stop and she didn’t leave until after midnight. When my alarm went off this morning, it was the victim of some intense profanity.

  My phone buzzed with another alert. I put the screen close to my stinging eyes.

  Someone’s into you! Check your Swingle app for the details of your new admirer!

  The notification was stacked on top of at least five others. It had been l
ike this all morning. I’d been in too much of a hurry to check them before leaving the house, but I had a few minutes until the meeting. I listened at the door for Randy’s heavy footsteps on their way to the conference room. There was only silence.

  With a nervous excitement I hadn’t felt in years, I logged in to the Swingle app. The little red heart over the mailbox icon had the number ten inside. Not bad for a few hours of a live profile. The first message I clicked on was from MarkH429, but there must have been something wrong with his profile. The contents of the message were greyed out and all that came up on my screen was a form letter from Swingle. That was okay. If he liked me, he’d try again. The fifth time I got the same message, I started to worry it was my profile that was messed up. I’d paid the nineteen-dollar monthly fee, but maybe this was an attempt to get more money from me?

  Before I could check into the problem, the telltale shuffle of Randy’s footsteps neared my door. I shoved the phone into my pocket and rushed out of my office, making it to the staff meeting just behind my boss.

  Chapter Three

  Penelope and I had a long-standing tradition of meeting for lunch on Wednesdays at Layla’s Lebanese Restaurant. Pen swore they had the fluffiest hummus in the United States, but I went for their trademarked Garlic Whip. Somewhere between the consistency of mayonnaise and whipped cream but with the soft bite of raw garlic, the spread was a delight to put on anything. I made the mistake once of asking what was in it and the owner ranted at me in Lebanese for a solid five minutes, assuming I was some kind of culinary spy sent to steal his prized recipe. Penelope said if I got us banned, she’d never speak to me again and I’ve been silently polite to all the employees since that day. The owner still glared at me from the kitchen every time I came to lunch. Every Wednesday for three years. He really knew how to hold a grudge.

  Pen was already at our corner table, flirting with Rebecca, our usual waitress. Rebecca gave one last good-natured laugh before leaving to get my unsweet tea. Pen’s sparkling water with lime was already sweating on the table.