Page 103 of January

Kyle nodded with a smile and then asked, “What are Bridgette and Jill up to tonight?”

“I don’t know.” Melinda shook her head. “Why?”

“Just thought we could hang out with them after dinner.”

“You want to hang out with my friends on our date?” Melinda asked, confused.

“Afterour date. But not if you don’t want to.”

“Babe, the date is kind of the whole night. You, me, and dinner followed by you and me at my place, probably naked.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to–”

“Are you okay?” Melinda leaned over the table.

“Yeah, I… don’t know. I feel like I really just started to dive into the city a bit, and I’m not used to having friends.”

“Kyle, you have friends back home, don’t you?”

“Not really, no,” Kyle said. “Having my own business is great. I work when I need to. I have regular clients. I wake up and go to bed whenever and have no commute, but it’s also just me. I don’t have a team of people or co-workers to go to lunch with how you have Jill. I don’t talk to people I went to high school with like you do with Bridgette because I was just the trailer trash in school who had jars of jelly or nothing at all on the bad days and cheese sandwiches on the good days until we got put on the school’s free meal plan for poor kids, so I got made fun of a lot. I guess I have a few friends from college whom I still follow on social media, but they’re all married or close to it and have kids of their own already.” Kyle paused. “Then, there’s me. I’ve got a chip on my shoulder the size of a mountain and couldn’t ever afford therapy, which I probably could use, and now, I’m sitting at dinner, on a date with a beautiful woman, but I’m talking about hanging out with her friends instead of having a whole night with her because I’m an idiot. I’m sorry, babe. I… I’m still trying to figure out how all this happened.”

“Howwhathappened?”

“How I met you. How you like me. How we’re doing this. How I ended up with two houses and money. How I… Just howall of it, I guess.”

Melinda didn’t say anything for a minute while Kyle finished her shrimp and took a long sip of her wine. They’d gone to a nice restaurant, though, admittedly, not as nice as Commander’s Palace. It was a beautiful night, and they’d walked here holding hands and not doing much talking. Now, she stared across the table at this woman whom she knew she was falling for, picturing her sitting at the lunch table in the cafeteria, with people staring at her and mocking her, and Melinda wanted to go back in time and kick each individual ass until they all found something better to do than picking on someone who couldn’t afford lunch because their mother was a train wreck.

“So, the guy who gave you the fifty dollars; he didn’t, like… flirt with you, did he?”

“He did,” she replied. “Happens a lot with the college-age guys.”

“A lot?” Kyle asked.

“Once every few tours. They flirt, ask me if I’m going out later, making sure to tell me where they plan to be to start off their nights, and I usually get a big tip.” Melinda smirked. “Then, I tell them I’m gay.”

Kyle laughed and asked, “Did any of them ever ask for their tip back?”

“Just once, but he said I could keep it if I’d let him watch me make out with a girl that night in the Quarter. I kept it. He left.”

“Did you make out with–”

“Hell, no,” Melinda interrupted. “And today, I did more than just tell him I wasn’t interested because I’m gay. I told him I had a girlfriend, so I’d be on a date with her tonight. He was good about it and walked off with his tail between his legs.”

“You told him you have a girlfriend?”

“I did. But he got confused when I said her name wasKyle.”

Kyle laughed and said, “Want to hear the story?”

“Yes.”

“Well, my mom was on her own when I was born. My dad wasn’t there; he’d been at work when she’d gone into labor. They called him, but I came out pretty quickly while he was still on his way to the hospital, so he missed the whole thing. He got stuck in traffic and wasn’t there to make sure the nurse heard my mom say, ‘Kyla,’ instead of ‘Kyle.’ My mom swears she said, ‘Kyla,’ but the nurse heard ‘Kyle,’ ran with it, and it got typed up on the birth certificate. From there, it just kind of stuck. They didn’t fix the error, and I was named Kyle instead.”

“Well, I would’ve liked Kyla, too, but I love Kyle.” Melinda’s eyes went wide, and she swallowed at just how that sounded. “The name. I mean, the name.”

“It works,” Kyle said.

“What’s your middle name?”

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