Page 25 of April

Asher wanted to laugh, but Linden had just called hersexy, so her breath was caught somewhere inside her, and she couldn’t get it out at the moment.

“It’s a good thing you’re not allergic to cats. Lesbians tend to love cats.”

CHAPTER 8

Linden peered into Asher’s office as Asher was staring down at her phone and appeared to be swiping consistently and giving a new facial expression every few seconds, which likely meant that she was looking through app profiles. Linden smiled softly, watching her friend do the same thing she did not all that long ago on her own path to self-discovery. When Asher made a particularly shocked face, Linden had to laugh silently to herself because that was really cute.

“What did you see there?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest in the doorway of Asher’s office.

“Oh,” Asher said and looked up, surprised. “Nothing.” She dropped her phone on her desk. “Just a client text.”

“Did someone have a scandalous profile pic?” Linden asked, not believing her lie.

“You caught me,” Asher replied, looking a bit sheepish as Linden walked into the room. “And she had hardly anything on; bra and panty set, and it was sort of see-through.”

“Yeah, you’ll have those,” she replied.

“This is crazy. I’m not ready for this, Linden,” Asher told her. “It’s too much. It’s too soon.”

“No one is making you do anything, Ash. If you don’t want to use the app, you don’t have to. You have a profile now. You can just leave it and see if anyone messages.”

“Someone already did,” Asher revealed. “That’s why I picked up the phone.”

Linden moved farther into Asher’s office until she was around her standing desk and holding Asher’s phone in her own hand, moving to the messages tab of the app.

“Shit. She’s hot.”

Linden clicked on the woman’s photo and went to her profile. Her name was Emily. The blurb said she was thirty-nine, gay, divorced, and looking for a connection. That was vague, which concerned Linden, but vague was how profiles worked. Getting people interested without divulging every detail was important.

“She’s pretty, yes,” Asher said. “She asked me if I would be interested in coffee.”

“Already? Not even a chat or anything before that?”

Linden continued to scroll through the profile, noticing there weren’t any mentions of dogs, which was a good thing for Asher. Emily was a curator at the World War II Museum. She had dark-rimmed glasses that made her look like a sexy librarian, which Linden could get behind.

“Do you want to?”

“Coffee? I don’t know,” Asher replied. “I haven’t even accepted the message to reply to her.”

“Well, don’t leave her hanging, Ash.” She handed Asher back the phone. “You can just tell her that you’d rather chat on the app for a bit first.”

“I thought you said I didn’t have to do anything. I could just wait and see.”

“That was before I knew you already had a message from sexy Emily,” Linden said and walked back around the desk. “I have to run. I’m meeting Jill. Are you sure you don’t want me to bring you back anything?”

“I’m okay,” Asher said, not looking up from her phone. “We’re supposed to be going to NOLA Guides at two-thirty to meet with Melinda.”

“Yeah, I’ll be there. I have to drop Jill off after lunch anyway, so it works out. I’ll see you there?”

“Yes,” Asher said, still not looking up. “Do I just respond to her?”

“Ash, you can tell her that you’re not interested in anything, if you want. You also don’t have to reply at all. There’s no pressure. If you want to chat with her, message her back that you’re not ready for a meetup but you’d like to talk on the app first.”

“Right,” Asher said with a nod.

Linden smiled fondly at her friend and left the office. She needed to pick up Jill for their lunch date. Before Asher had texted her about breaking up with Gavin, Linden had been excited about the possibility of a date with Jill, trying to see if there was something between them. When Jill had replied, she’d still been excited, but now, Linden was more focused on Asher figuring out that she wasn’t straight and trying to meet women on a dating app. She wanted to stay in Asher’s office and not get any work done because they were scrolling through profiles and sending messages to women Asher found interesting, but this was Asher’s journey, and given the differences in their personalities, it would likely be completely different from her own.

???

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