Kind Of Person

Two San Franciscans go from strangers to intimates to strangers...

Fiction

Emily wandered the San Francisco Ferry Building farmers’ market stalls, her straw tote bag in one hand and a bouquet of flowers (her weekly treat) in the other. She noticed a sign delicately propped up against a stack of artichokes that read: “Gilroy Artichokes, two for three dollars!” She loved artichokes, but not how the world catered to pairs of people. It seemed like a waste to go through the hassle of cooking artichokes for herself. There was the delicate clipping of the thorny leaves, the steaming, the creation of gluttonously butter-based dipping sauces, and the richness of the artichoke itself. That was the kind of food that needed a co-conspirator or at least a witness. 

 As she began to pick up a cauliflower, a hand appeared in front of her, and she looked up to see its owner — a tall, good-looking man she’d never seen before. 

“Sorry!” she said. 

“No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to bump into you.” They looked at each other a moment longer than necessary, and Emily felt a spark of attraction. He was cute, appropriately apologetic, and, according to his ring-free left hand reaching in front of her, single.

“These are pretty cool,” he said, grasping the romanesco cauliflower with one large hand, like a basketball. “I’m always trying to find the Fibonacci sequence in nature.” He pointed to the chartreuse spirals. “I guess I got a little excited.” 

His sweet, dorky oversharing betrayed his decidedly non-dorky look (dark-wash jeans and a soft-looking, faded cotton shirt, casually unbuttoned at the top), and Emily took this as a cue that he was either trying to impress her.

“You can have that one.” She drew her hand back from the table. “I prefer men to cauliflower.” When he laughed in response, she recognized it as a knowing laugh, one that assured her that he understood the reference to Virginia Woolf, and that he was the kind of person who had read and remembered such a quote and didn’t think she was weird for saying something so niche, unprompted, to a stranger.

“I’m Ben.” He stuck out his hand, and she fumbled to rearrange her basket and bouquet to shake it. When their palms touched, it reaffirmed her initial attraction to him. Ben’s hands were slightly calloused, in contrast to her last boyfriend, a software engineer named Mike, whose hands were almost girlishly soft. Emily felt a spark of optimism that she had met a cute guy with romantical potential who might remedy at least some of the traits she found unattractive in Mike.

Over lattes at a nearby coffee shop, Emily and Ben discovered a mutual love of Indian food, a non-ironic appreciation of ‘90s slow jams and — because nothing bonds people quite like a shared disdain — a loathing for people who talk ad nauseam about gluten. 

“I’m so glad you don’t have a thing about gluten,” he said. She teasingly scolded him to keep his voice down; they were in a coffee shop that offered three kinds of vegan milk, and she guessed that poking fun at food sensitivities wouldn’t be appreciated by anyone who could hear them. Ben feigned being hurt at her shushing, but then he winked at her, and it felt like this was all part of an inside joke between them, and suddenly it didn’t matter who else was around or what they could hear.

Two hours of effortless, volleying conversation had passed when Ben said, “I’d love to take you to this place that makes the best sourdough.” Emily was delighted to hear him suggest that they would do something together in the future. Most of the guys she had dated recently were hesitant to suggest any kind of plans so soon after a first meeting. So far, he didn’t seem to exhibit any of the pitfalls she had recently experienced with other men.

Ben asked for her phone number and texted her almost immediately after they parted ways. Several days of back-and-forth texting ensued, each little blue bubble a stepping stone in getting to know each other. He sent her obscure literary quotes peppered with nonsensical GIFs, which made her laugh, even though she wasn’t always clear how the messages were connected. She didn’t want to step out of the coziness of their exchanges to clarify what he meant, so she played along in an effort not to lose some of the momentum she was hoping to build.

On the fourth day of texting, Ben invited Emily to a food truck fair the following weekend. She was thrilled to accept the invitation, and that Sunday, Emily found him on the giant lawn (at a prime spot with a postcard-quality view of the Golden Gate Bridge) where the food truck fair was happening, spreading out a large red picnic blanket. They both chose to try the first food truck they saw because it featured elote, Mexican-style street corn on a stick. Emily was wondering if there was an elegant way to eat it when she realized Ben was watching her with a sympathetic smile, likely wondering how she was going to approach it.

“These things are so awkward to eat,” he said. “Anything on a stick is, really. My old roommate is an artist and did an exhibit a few years ago that showed pictures of like, forty years’ worth of failed presidential candidates eating corn dogs at the Iowa State Fair. Here they are, these politicians, so serious and everything, talking about public health policy and taxes and defense spending budgets or whatever, but trying to figure out how to eat a corn dog on a stick while everyone’s staring at them. I went to his exhibit. It was hilarious.”

“Wait, the failed candidates?” she asked. “Why only the ones who lost?”

He shrugged. “It’s funnier that way. It was like, Bob Dole and Al Gore and I think maybe even Ross Perot….hmm, who else…?” he trailed off in thought.

“Please do not say Hillary Clinton was in there,” she said.

“Nah, this was before that. Why though? Are you not a fan, or...is it the fact that eating a corn dog on a stick is sort of suggestively...um, phallic, and it seems kinda misogynistic to play it for a laugh when it’s a photo of a powerful woman doing it?”

The fact that Ben knew this, that she didn’t have to tread the delicate waters of trying to seem attractive and appealing to avoid the stereotype of the man-hating feminist while still asserting her views, or worry that she might have to defend her stance and then listen to him contradict her with his own loud, straight white male take on it, made her appreciate him almost more than anything else she had learned about him so far. She noticed, for a moment, how low the bar was set for her expectations that on a date, she relished the joy of not being with a mansplainer. 

“The best part of the exhibit was that they had corn dogs there for the appetizers. So you had to stand there in front of those pictures and do the same thing. After a while, you couldn’t really tell if you were laughing at those politicians or yourself cause you were doing it, too,” he said. “And of course by ‘you,’ I mean ‘me.’ I didn’t care though, I ate a lot of those suckers. So now, I can’t help but crack up every time I try to eat not only corn dogs but also ice cream cones, popsicles…and I guess, elote. So feel free to laugh at me too,” he said, taking a bite.

“How about a truce? I won’t laugh at you if you don’t laugh at me,” she said. “Cause this looks amazing, and I really want to try it.”

“I wouldn’t laugh at you, Emily,” he said. 

She smiled, tilted her head, and bit into the salty, cheese-laden corn-on-a-stick. When she got home that night, she Googled “Iowa State Fair Hillary Clinton” and found only pictures of the former Secretary of State wearing a striped tunic, cooling herself off with a paper fan, sipping a lemonade. Then, for good measure, she replaced the names of several recent male candidates in the Google search — Bernie Sanders, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Andrew Yang — and found that if you didn’t think about the phallic aspect of them, the photos were kind of funny.

***

On a Friday night when she and Ben didn’t have plans, Emily organized a girls’ night out dinner with some of her girlfriends at a tapas bar in the Mission District of San Francisco. She had chosen the restaurant partially because of its central location in the city, but also because it was an opportunity to order the restaurant’s famous garlic and chili prawns. This was something Emily would never let herself eat on a date with Ben (or anyone else, for that matter) because she would have worried too much about having garlic breath to enjoy herself. With her friends, though, she took the opportunity to eat and say whatever she wanted.

 “I think I really like him,” she announced before they had ordered appetizers.

“Let me see his profile,” her friend Amanda said, reaching for Emily’s phone.

“We actually met in real life, if you can believe it. I didn’t think that happened any more,” she said.

Natasha, her friend from work who had been married for nine years, said, “I feel like I missed out on the apps. It’s not like I’m unhappy with Greg, but I always kind of wonder what that would have been like. All those single guys right at your fingertips to choose from, like human baseball cards, available to talk or go out whenever you want.”

“You’re really not missing anything, Natasha. Let me put it to you this way,” Emily said. “Meeting someone through an app is like getting drunk on beer. You probably won’t enjoy it right away, but if you stick with it long enough, it might get you where you want to go. Meeting someone in real life, though, is like getting high off a joint: you have fun instantly.”

“So are you having fun with him all the time? I mean like, it’s still in the exciting, lusty, butterflies stage, right? Like you can’t keep your hands off each other?” Natasha said.

“Well, we haven’t had sex yet, but I would definitely say I’m having fun. We text all the time. The thing is, I can’t tell if I should hold back a bit, you know? Make him wait a little bit before I respond, so he can miss me. I feel like that’s how you're supposed to do it, but obviously, I’m not great at the game playing,” Emily said.

“But you really like this guy?” Natasha said.

“Yeah, I think I do,” she said.

“Then quit the game playing. You’ve been dating long enough that you know what you want. If you want to be in a relationship with Ben, act like it.” Natasha was very matter-of-fact. The others nodded.

After Emily and her last boyfriend Mike had broken up, the thought of learning how to use the latest apps and sitting through cheap meals with boring strangers making bad small talk had filled her with dread. But since she had met Ben, she was finally excited about dating again, which she considered personal growth, although she frequently had to remind herself not to get too invested or let her mind wander too far into the future. She had used dating apps in the past, and before the advent of those, dating websites, but none of the men she met were able to shake off their “internet stranger danger” dust. But with Ben, somehow she felt that his real-world, organic arrival into her life supercharged her attraction to him.

She thought about Ben when she was stuck in traffic, and in work meetings, and whenever her phone lit up because she was hoping it was a message from him. He started sending her “Good morning!” texts, usually while she was drinking her first cup of coffee before work, and they settled into a comfortable texting routine. But when he would text her in the evenings, it was a little more sporadic and usually more flirty, and she would remind herself of Natasha’s advice and not to wait too long before responding. She wondered if Ben had a rule of thumb to guide how quickly he texted back, but after re-reading through two weeks’ worth of texts and carefully assessing his response timing, she suspected that he did not. His behavior never seemed to be quite as deliberate as hers was.

***

Towards the end of their fifth date, Ben invited Emily back to his apartment to “come up for coffee.” This was a mutually accepted euphemism for sex, and Emily had prepared herself for earlier in the day just in case this might happen, choosing a pretty matching black lace bra and panty set and shaving her legs.

Perched on the arm of a leather sofa, she surveyed Ben’s apartment while he rooted around his kitchen for wine glasses. He had an absurdly large TV, which she had found to be typical for single men his age in San Francisco, and she teased him that it could double as a drive-in movie theater. He owned several bookshelves, one of which, rather endearingly, housed a boxed set of the Harry Potter books. She liked that aspect of dating where you are invited into a person’s home for the first time, and sometimes into their bedroom. There was so much to read into their life that you couldn’t get from a dating profile or text messages. There was a framed photo of Ben with his arms around two older adults, likely his grandparents, and Emily found it reassuring and safe to think of him as a beloved grandson. There was a KitchenAid stand mixer on the kitchen counter, which struck her as slightly unusual for a bachelor. Did he like to bake? Or use the pasta maker attachment? Or maybe neither and he had won that in a breakup and division of assets with an ex-girlfriend? Was he the kind of person to be that vindictive? 

Ben approached her with a short tumbler of wine.  “I don’t have any real wine glasses,” he said sheepishly. Emily pictured an ex-girlfriend in an apartment somewhere nearby, sitting high atop a stack of their formerly shared wine glasses. 

“That’s okay. I think they serve it like that in authentic Italian restaurants.”  She regretted saying this as soon as the words came out — what a pointless thing to say — but suddenly, she was imagining the two of them sitting across from each other at a candle-lit table, years from now, with Ben holding up a tumbler of wine. “Oh look, just like we have at home!” she imagined him saying in a joking tone, a sweetly nostalgic reference to this moment early in their relationship. Her heart swelled with affection for this imaginary version of him, and she cautioned herself to slow down.  

She took a sip. It was a good wine, as far as she could tell, and this must have registered on her face.

“Got it from a client.” He shrugged. “I’m not a huge wine guy. I’m more of a beer drinker.”

“I like it.” She made sure her voice was in a low tone when she said this so that she didn’t sound patronizing. She was always doing this — monitoring and editing every aspect of her responses to the men she dated, terrified of making a bad impression. Her therapist called it “fear of negative evaluation,” and although she was aware of it as a concept, that didn’t stop her brain from doing it.

He sat down next to her and took a sip from his glass. He turned his face toward hers and put his hand on her knee. “So,” he said. 

“So,” she responded, trying to think of anything to say to avoid awkwardness. She wanted this evening to be entirely pleasant and worried that any inkling of unpleasantness could immediately and irretrievably sour it, and by extension, their whole relationship.

 “I like your place,” she said. They talked about apartments and layouts and neighborhoods, dancing around the fact that what they really wanted to do was kiss. They kept sipping wine and became progressively tipsy, as if that were a mandatory precursor to making out.

Emily’s eyes scanned Ben’s eyes back and forth, and then she let her gaze slide down to his lips.  Ben correctly took this as an invitation and leaned in, cupping her jaws in his hands. Kissing one guy was not necessarily very different than kissing any other guy; they all had the same set of lips and gummy tongue and, thanks to the popularity of Invisalign for adults working in tech jobs, identical rows of straightened teeth. She liked kissing Ben, though; it felt natural and good and reactionary, moving in smooth, reflexive motions instead of an ad-hoc choreographed dance as it had been with boys when she was much younger, where she tried nervously to remember the steps she’d read in teen magazines.

Dancing a routine that had played out across millions of apartments and thousands of years, their bodies moved in tandem from sitting side-by-side, to facing each other, to Emily straddling Ben on the sofa, and finally to his bed, in varying stages of undress. 

Two thin, unforgiving, and stiff pillows lay flopped on top of a flat blue sheet, which was bare on the mattress without the benefit of a mattress pad.  The familiar scent of Downy Spring Rain wafted up from the fitted sheet — the only thing in the immediate surroundings that struck her as recently cleaned. Was he expecting to bring her home? She debated whether she thought that considerate or presumptuous. Maybe both. Then, she considered that she had done the same thing by wearing a matching underwear set.

Emily lay her chest on Ben’s, shifting a few times before settling in, careful to distribute her weight in such a way that would be comfortable for him. She rested her forehead on the bed, then turned to look at him. His pleasantly masculine five o’clock shadow barely concealed a scar on his neck. She delicately touched the raised, pink flesh with her fingertip. 

“What’s this from?” she asked. 

“Oh, that. Well.” He cleared his throat. Emily wondered if she had stepped too far into his private life, a notion that seemed silly to entertain while resting her naked body atop his. “In high school — a long time ago, obviously — my buddy was driving, and he, we, got into an accident. A piece of glass cut me there, but I’m fine. It was a long time ago.” He stopped, and she waited, curious to see what he would volunteer to fill in the silence. 

“He was drinking, so obviously, I shouldn’t have let him drive. I mean, I was too…anyway, it was bad. He didn’t make it, and I just walked away with some broken bones and this cut. I always think of him when I see that scar. Sometimes I grow a beard so I don’t have to see it or think about it. I felt guilty for a long time, and I ended up drinking more, ironically, ‘cause I couldn’t deal with it. But my mom made me talk to the school counselor or whatever, and that helped. I’m not an alcoholic or anything. I just didn’t have any other way of not feeling like shit all the time after the accident, you know…after Ryan died.” His voice cracked and he warbled as he spoke.

She wanted to say “I love you,” even though she knew that would be ludicrous. She wanted to say, “I’m flattered that you’re telling me this; thank you for trusting me with this; I don’t think less of you; I want to take away this pain from you; you are the kind of person I think I could love.” Instead, all she said was, “I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes and kissed his cheek. She lay her head down on his chest again, and he continued talking.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s actually kind of nice to talk about him again. There was a little card about the classmates who died since graduation at the ten-year high school reunion, but Ryan’s name wasn’t on there, since he technically didn’t die after graduation. It feels like they just forgot about him. I still go to his parents’ house sometimes when I’m back home and play basketball with his little brother. He’s not so little anymore. He looks like Ryan probably would have. The last time I was home, we had a couple of beers, which actually wasn’t weird, you know, considering …what happened…” He trailed off, seemingly lost in memories. “I hope you don’t think I’m still like that…out of control or immature or whatever,” he said quietly. 

In truth, she didn’t really know what he was like. She had affectionate feelings towards him, but if she was honest with herself, they mostly came from projection, hope, and imagination. She knew a decent amount of biographical information from conversations that had happened over coffee and cocktails and texts. She knew that he went to Princeton, which made her assume he was ambitious — that he could be a dependable provider, if it ever got to that point — and that he was intellectually curious and most likely a feminist, though in reality, she hadn’t tested any of these theories. 

“No, of course not. High school was a long time ago. I like to think we’ve all changed a lot since then.” His revelation felt weighty, and she felt a surprising twinge of regret that she didn’t have a similarly revealing story to share. But she liked his vulnerability, and it invited her to be a bit daring with her emotions. “Besides,” she said, looking up at him and gathering her courage. “Don’t worry. I like you.” This admission felt even more risky than the fact that she was naked.

He grinned, and she chose to take that as a confirmation of his returned feelings, rather than a convenient way to dodge answering whether or not he reciprocated. She debated what to say next. He had opened up to her, and it was clear he hadn’t talked about this in a while — she sensed that this wasn’t a rehearsed bit to get sympathy or appear vulnerable — she could hear that his heart was racing. She took a deep breath, and they lay like that for a few minutes. Emily wrapped the comforter around them, cocooning them in the safety and cozy warmth of the bed. 

Ben reached his large arm up to push the comforter back. “Oh no, no you don’t,” he teased, as he peeled the comforter back to reveal her bare bottom. “Don’t hide under there!” Ben raised himself up and in doing so, gently flipped both Emily’s naked body and the sad energy that hung heavy between them. She laughed, even though nothing particularly funny had happened, but she hoped that in doing so, she could signal to Ben that she understood that the melancholic part of the night was over; that she wasn’t going to dig up his emotional landmines; that their intimacy for the rest of the night would be sexual, rather than sorrowful.

When they were having sex — no one would have called it “making love;” they were definitely not in love, that much she knew for sure — they explored and moved and whispered. Emily realized that because she had never slept with Ben before, they didn’t have a shared vocabulary for sex. In past relationships, she’d always had a conversation to establish one because, for her, the anatomical terms were too cold and distant (breasts); colloquial names too childish (boobies); but there was a range of terms that allowed a reasonable selection of personal preference. Emily preferred “boobs” over “tits” but wasn’t tied to it with any serious conviction.  She had a guy friend who used the irksome “titties,” and somehow, the addition of that affix made that word ridiculous to her and anyone who used it unserious.  She wondered if Ben referred to his “dick” or his “cock,” the only two reasonable choices, as far as she could tell.

She was about to raise the question of word choice when it dawned on Emily that although this particular sex wasn’t out of the ordinary, it would be utterly absurd if Ben were hitting any other part of her body with this same force and repetition (or any other part of his body, for that matter). This thought struck her as so odd that she actually let a small laugh escape her mouth. 

“What?” Ben said, tensing up. “Are you okay?” 

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m fine.” She smiled. 

“Why were you laughing?” Ben said, as if he didn’t believe her and couldn’t relax until he was reassured.

“Nothing, I’m just…happy,” she said lamely.

“Ok. Can you do me a favor?”

“Of course. What do you want me to do?”

“Don’t laugh while I have my pants off.” This request triggered an involuntary guffaw in her, but it seemed to bring them together again in a shared and intentional joke.

“Deal,” she said, flipping herself on top of him, taking the upper hand.

When Ben finally reached the evening’s inevitable conclusion, Emily looked up at his face.  It was jarring to see him so unguarded, vulnerable and reveling in pleasure, especially considering how confident and in control he usually appeared. She wondered how many other people had ever seen him like this. Emily added herself to a group of women, which she hoped was reasonably small, who could recognize this version of him. He kissed her forehead and flopped down next to her. She appreciated that he didn’t seem in any hurry to get up and walk away from her. 

Emily fell into a restless and unsatisfying sleep. She wanted to toss and turn as she normally would if she were alone, but she didn’t want to wake up Ben or disturb his sleep. She had known that these pillows would be entirely inadequate, and she thought of the expensive, fluffy down pillows that were obediently lined up on her bed at that moment, seven blocks away. She drifted in and out of dreams, at one point running away from sewer alligators, before finally deciding to turn over. As she did, Ben reached out — still asleep, she assumed — and cuddled her so that they were spooning. Was this a leftover habit from a long-term relationship? Who, exactly, did he think he was cuddling? She pushed the self-doubt and sabotage out of her mind. She tried to relax her body into his arms and her thoughts into something nicer than sewer alligators and ex-girlfriends. When she woke up in the morning, they were both lying on their backs, no longer spooning, but holding hands. Because hand-holding brought a sense of comfort and familiarity, it felt this was the millionth time they’d woken up holding hands instead of the first, and she was overcome with fondness for him, and she immediately disregarded the discomfort she’d felt while he slept.

When Ben opened his eyes, he looked over at Emily and smiled weakly. 

“How did you sleep?” he asked. 

“Fine,” she said. There was no point in complaining about how unfamiliar she had felt while trying to sleep. And wasn’t some discomfort part of the nature of sleeping with someone new? Not just having sex with them, but actually sleeping next to them? Hearing them snore. Seeing them drool. Lying on a mattress that doesn’t have your particular body imprinted on it. That momentary panic upon waking in a foreign room when your brain cannot yet place your location and wonders where you are and how you got there. She also didn’t want to talk too much because she hadn’t brushed her teeth yet and would be mortified for Ben to notice her morning breath. Neither one of them had brushed their teeth the night before. This lack of hygiene would be unthinkable in any other circumstance but was okay in this case because they’d been too busy having sex, which was pretty much the most enviable excuse for anything. 

“Good,” he said, sitting up. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat for a moment leaning forward, collecting himself. Emily was a little disappointed he didn’t want to cuddle, but maybe he was worried about morning breath, too. In one swift motion, he used his flexed foot to scoop his boxer shorts off the ground as he walked into the bathroom. 

She heard the doorknob click behind him and deliberately tried not to hear anything else, out of deference to his privacy and wanting to maintain her attraction to him. She didn’t need to hear him peeing, or God forbid, anything else. She’d heard friends describe the moment their boyfriends or husbands stopped closing the bathroom door as “the death of intimacy,” and swore she would never let that happen to her relationships. 

He came out of the bathroom a moment later, a toothbrush poking out of the corner of his mouth. “What’re you up to today?” he asked in a garbled voice usually only heard at the dentist’s office. She took a deep breath. Within that question hung so much. Was he asking how available she was to hang out with him? Should she play it cool and say she already had plans? Or be honest and say she wanted to spend the afternoon together, and if that went well, the next few months? 

“I’m not sure. I’ve got some stuff to do, but nothing totally firmed up,” she said in a tone that was as non-committal as possible, picturing her heart as a delicate little red balloon, floating up full of hope. “What about you?” 

“Oh, I have to meet up with some people,” he called out, now back in the bathroom. He spit into the sink. Her balloon heart deflated. “I have to be somewhere by ten, actually. I gotta go. What time is it?” He wiped his mouth on a towel and walked over to the bed where Emily was still sitting, clutching the top sheet in her hand to cover her bare chest. She wasn’t doing it for modesty, that would be silly, Ben had just seen her naked body, but she felt the need to protect herself somehow. Even if only holding on by a thin bed sheet, she was still clinging to the time when she was welcome there, where he wasn’t clearly letting her know she needed to leave. He didn’t seem aloof or cold, exactly, which frustrated her, because if he had, she could have called him on it and demanded an explanation without seeming overly sensitive. Instead, he seemed casual, friendly but not overly so, and simply moving on to the next part of his day. She decided to adopt the same approach. 

She pulled her knees toward her chest, hugging them tightly, and then tilted her head down and to the side, striking a coquettish pose with a shy smile. “Are your friends going to be mad at me if you’re late?” she asked.

“Nope! They don’t even know I’m with a girl,” he said, cluelessly breezing past the informational bomb he had just dropped. Immediately, she thought of all the time she had spent foolishly reviewing and assessing so many moments of this relationship, if you could call it that now, with her friends; meanwhile, his friends didn’t even know she was in his life at all.

“This was really fun,” he said, leaning over to kiss the top of her head, seemingly oblivious to her disappointment.

***

“Are you dating anyone?” Emily’s Aunt Barbara asked her when she called one Saturday afternoon from St. Louis. “Yes, I think so,” Emily said slowly, mentally running through a recap reel of her relationship thus far with Ben as she spoke. 

“You think so?” Aunt Barbara asked. “What does that mean?” Aunt Barbara had very traditional ideas of what she semi-jokingly called “courtship” and hadn’t been on a proper date since Uncle Steve took her to the King Tut exhibit in 1979. 

 “I just mean that we’ve gone out a few times.” She left out the bedroom details, as was undoubtedly the preference for all parties involved. “But he’s not my boyfriend or anything…yet. I haven’t met his friends.” She stopped talking and wondered why she’d included that last detail. “He’s a nice guy,” she added, lest Aunt Barbara think she was getting strung along. 

“Well, I hope so. You deserve a guy who will plan dates at least a week in advance. That’s how we did it when I was young, way, way back in the sixties and seventies. You know, asking for a date one week in advance, holding open all the doors, and he should bring you flowers, too,” Barbara said. Ben did none of those things.

Emily was glad to have a sympathetic ear in Aunt Barbara and grateful for her willingness to listen, but by the time she hung up the phone, she was feeling a little resentful of Ben. She hated the extra explaining that came along with her uneasiness about the relationship, that she couldn’t simply say, “Things are going great! Moving right along as expected!” Talking about her relationships always required some measure of reassuring her listener that it would all be okay.

***

In the two weeks after they slept together, they only went on one date. Emily had invited Ben to a movie, and she chose one that was part of a superhero franchise Ben had mentioned wanting to see. In the theater, they sat in total silence, and because she wasn’t interested in the plot, Emily spent most of the film subtly observing Ben’s body language when the flashes of light on-screen illuminated it. His legs pointed toward her, which she interpreted as a good sign, but he never fully shifted his weight toward her, never put his arm around her, never held her hand. She bought a large bag of popcorn thinking it would be romantic to share, but he told her he wasn’t hungry and watched with a look of disdain when she dispensed two pumpfuls of liquid butter onto the bag. The theater was chilly and she yearned for some comfort, but when Emily briefly placed her head on Ben’s shoulder, it was cold to the touch.

The frequency of their text messages dwindled to a stop. Emily badly wanted to reach out with a cute GIF or just to say that she was thinking about him, but that would have begun an agonizing countdown waiting for a response. She decided that the agony of not knowing what had happened was worse.

“Hey,” she typed. “Is everything okay?” As she hit the send button, she felt slightly embarrassed, like she was setting herself up to be rejected. She knew that is a question which, by virtue of needing to ask it, is an answer to itself. 

Moments later, the typing bubbles appeared. Then the bubbles vanished. 

“Hey.”

More bubbles. 

“Yah I know I haven’t been around too much. Sorry about that. Been so busy.” His response was unmistakably icy. Her face flushed hot with anger: anger at Ben for treating her that way, anger at herself for overblowing this relationship in her mind, disappointment, rejection, embarrassment, and an irrational hatred of whoever designed those tortuous damn typing bubbles.

She sent back, “can we talk? In person?”

They agreed to meet later that week at the hipster coffee shop with three kinds of vegan milk, cement floors, and Edison bulbs dangling from the ceiling. When she arrived, Ben was already there, sitting at a bistro table.

“Hey!” He closed his laptop. “How’ve you been?”

Rather than delay the conversation with niceties, she dove in immediately. “Well…confused, honestly.” A look of guilt and anguish spread across Ben’s face. “I don’t understand what happened,” she said. “I thought things were going well between us.” 

“If you wanted this to be serious, if you wanted commitment, or whatever…I don’t think I can give you that right now, honestly,” he said. “That’s just really fast for me.” She respected him at least for not feigning ignorance that she was disappointed in how things had turned out.

“I wasn’t asking you to buy me a ring or anything.” Instantly she wished she’d said something more ridiculous, like pick out a china pattern, or even burial plots, to illustrate the point, instead of an example that she didn’t want him to think might have been secretly true. 

“You just went so quiet…and so…cold. I just thought...we had something good between us. I thought maybe this was going somewhere.” Words fought their way to her mouth, but she choked them back, unable to release them out loud and, in doing so, confess their truth. She wondered if the people around them were listening and found her inarticulate. The idea that eavesdropping strangers were judging her on verbal skills was embarrassing enough, so she didn’t mention that his distancing felt particularly harsh after sleeping together.

He opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out. His eyes darted back and forth, seemingly evaluating his approach. He paused and then finally offered, “I’m sorry. I really am.” And as if it were going to be a satisfying answer, he added, “I’m just…I’m just not that kind of person.” The vagueness and distance of this answer felt like a withdrawal of the intimacy he’d shared that night in bed, as though she had been offered admission once into his emotional life and then was ushered out immediately after the tour was over and return tickets were no longer available.

“Okay,” she smiled, blinking back tears. She surrendered to the idea that she wasn’t going to get closure. There was no way she was going to beg him to change his mind, or worse, to ask him what she had done wrong. She walked to the counter to order a cup of coffee. Obtaining a cup of coffee seemed particularly important now, as if she were there expressly for that purpose, and certainly not to talk to Ben. She would begin erasing his effect on her life immediately.

“I’ll have a large latte with no foam, please,” she said to the barista.

“For here or to go?” he asked, his tattooed finger poised over the button to charge an extra ten cents for a paper cup.

“To go.”

“What size?”

“Large.” She desperately wanted to get out of there.

“Large no-foam latte.”

“Yes, please.”

  “Will that be all?” 

Emily turned to see Ben out of the corner of her eye.  He was intently reading his laptop screen, his scruffy hair drooping in front of his eyes and headphones holding back the rest of it.  He had let his five o’clock shadow grow into a proper beard, concealing his scar. The beard seemed to illustrate how long it had been since they’d seen each other, the way the rapidly changing heights of her nieces made clear how much time had passed since she last went home. He reached out his right hand for his coffee cup and took a sip, never breaking eye contact with his screen, unaware of anything going on around him and closed off to the world.  Only a few weeks ago, he had been naked with her – stripped down and honest – and now here he sat, wearing an impenetrable leather jacket and cool façade. Just another face lit up by a computer screen’s glow in a coffee shop. He set the cup back down with a definitive thud. 

“Yes,” she responded slowly, turning her attention back to the barista.  “Yes. That’s all.” 

Of course, she would wake up holding someone’s hand again one day, but it would never again be Ben’s. The man who would one day send her “good morning” texts and flowers, open doors, and plan dates in advance was, in that moment, still a stranger to her. Just as Ben had once was, and for all purposes, now would be again. She swiped her credit card, signed the receipt, and stepped aside for the next person.