Page 10 of You Were Mine

The “Tipsy Turtle” is a café down the road from our campus, and when I was in undergrad, it was always the place where everyone met to group-study before finals. After finals, it was the place where you got booze.

“Sounds great,” I answer. “I look forward to it.”

Our professor walks in, and I offer a sheepish smile.

“Showtime, I guess,” Brandon says.

“Oh, yeah,” Not realizing right away that that meant class is about to start. “I’ll see you, then.”

I walk back to my easel, and Brandon drops his robe, revealing—predictably—absolutely nothing underneath. Well, not exactly “nothing”. I pull out my paints and brushes, setting everything up. I have a very particular way about how I paint, as opposed to Logan who never plans ahead and tends to pull out whatever works at the moment.

“So, what’re you going to wear on your big date?” Logan asks.

I roll my eyes. “It’s not a date. He just invited me to catch up over coffee. I don’t even know if he’s interested in men, anyway,” I blurt back.

Come to think of it, I can’t recall Brandon ever mentioning any sort of significant other, but we hadn’t really talked much about our relationships.

“Oh, I’ll say he’s interested,” Logan scoffs. “From the way he looked at you? Yeah.”

“I didn’t notice him looking at me any specific way,” I say.

“Oh, Mark, Marcus, Marky-poo. Young grasshopper, you haveso muchto learn about the world of romance!“ Logan ends the statement with a flourish.

“Uh huh,” I say.

“Personally,Iwouldn’t go for someone like Brandon. He just strikes me as a man with all the personality of a saltine cracker, but to each his own.”

I don’t know—if Iweregoing to pick a romantic mentor—that I would pickLogan. His romantic specialty is of the “whirlwind” or the “let’s have sex because it’s fun” sort, and I don’t need that. Maybe it’s naïve of me, but I want something special. Something long-lasting. More like aHallmarkfilm thanCasanova. That’s probably not Brandon, though. Despite Logan’s insistence, I’m positive this is just a casual, friendly meet-up. It isn’t a date. I might not be an expert at romance, but I’m not so oblivious that I can’t tell when someone’s romantically interested in me.

Friday comes quickly, and while I don’t spend the whole day thinking about my meet-up with Brandon, Logan evidently has. Every five minutes there’s some question.

“What am I going to wear?”

“Should I go shopping for something to wear?”

“Does this shirt clash with these pants?”

“What will I order once I get there?”

When lunchtime rolls around, I’m sitting on the sofa and adding details to some preliminary sketches. Logan has fallen silent and is working on the dreaded paper portion of his thesis. Despite being art students with art theses to write, we’re still required by the department to write massive papers explaining our stylistic choices and processes. I haven’t even started that yet. I tell myself I’ll get around to it and that I won’t wait until last minute, but then I do, always. Organization has never been my strong suit. It isn’t Logan’s either, but he’s also a workaholic; kind of makes up for it. If there’s so much as a forum post due in three months, he’s on it. All his work is done months in advance.He’s been quiet for a while, though, so I’m thinking he must have run out of questions.

“So,” Logan says.

I swear he can read my mind.

“Coffee is a good standard first date. Just so you know. The one downside is that it typically involves a lot of conversation. Too much talk wrecks things. With booze you can get sloshed and just stare at each other. I personally prefer movies as first dates, especially if you want to jump straight into the—“

“Dammit, it isn’t a date! Do you even listen to me, or does everything I say just zip in one ear and right out the other?”

Logan smirks. “I listen, but I also know you wouldn’t recognize romance if it bit you on the ass. You need to get it together and channel your inner Lord Byron!” Logan declares, throwing in a dramatic faux faint onto the sofa.

It took me a few seconds to remember who Lord Byron was. Literature has never been my strong suit. “So, I’m going to die of malaria while trying to liberate Greece,” I reply.

“Sure, but you’ll look good doing it! And that’s the most important thing,” he says cheerily.

I pinch the bridge of my nose and glance at the clock. Okay, maybe I haven’t been thinking about this coffee meetallday, but I definitely have been thinking about it. It’s hard not to think about it because Brandon is such an attractive man, and when I think of spending an evening with him, my insides become all light and fluttery.

Do I kind of hope it’s an official date? Totally. But I really don’t believe it is. Logan is just turning everything into a soap opera for his own amusement. Why he can’t just find a series on MovieFlix or any of the countless streaming services we have to binge-watch for entertainment is beyond me.

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