Page 77 of Flirting Lessons

Ugh, now she was being paranoid. Maybe Taylor thought it would be fun precisely because it wasn’t the type of thing either of them would do on their own?

Yes, that was probably it.

“Put your name tag on.” Avery nudged Taylor as they walked to the back of the room. There should be more name tag events in this world, it made everything easier.

“Right,” Taylor said, and slapped her name tag on her chest.

When they joined the group at the big table in the back, Avery looked around for two seats together, but everyone was clustered down at one side of the table, and it would have looked weird and unfriendly for them to sit at the end. Plus, the whole point of this was to flirt, so they had to be in the middle of the action, right? She didn’t need to sit next to Taylor.

Even though she wanted to.

She shook her head at herself and started to walk over to the other side of the table, when Taylor nudged her.

“Let’s grab that corner,” she said, and pointed to two unoccupied seats that someone had been standing in front of.

They slid into them, and Taylor raised her eyebrows at Avery in a way that Avery knew meant it was time for her to start flirting. Fine.

“Hi!” she said to the table at large. “I’m Avery, and this is my friend Taylor.”

General hellos followed. The person next to Avery turned to her.

“Hi, I’m Cat, and my pronouns are she/they. What are you painting?”

Avery smiled at Cat. They had short, curly hair, with a handful of slightly faded pink streaks, and many piercings in their ears. Well, at least the ear closest to Avery.

“Hi, Cat, and I’m she/her. I’m painting a vase, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet. I guess it depends on where I want it; if I’m going to put it in my living room, I might want to paint itorange, or pink, or yellow…you know, something bright. But in my bedroom, I’d want it to be darker and moodier. What about you, have you done this before? What are you painting? Oh, a mug! What are you going to do to it?”

Avery was talking too much; she knew she was. Like in the car with Taylor. She had been nervous then, and she knew why, but she didn’t know why she was nervous now. Earlier it had been because she was seeing Taylor for the first time since they’d slept together. But now, she had no idea; she’d stopped getting nervous about flirting lessons a while ago.

Right, that’s why she was nervous. Because Taylor was right next to her. It had been one thing to flirt with Taylor watching before, but now it felt different.

She laughed at herself. It was just a weird fucking situation—she was sitting here, holding a piece of pottery, next to her friend whom she’d slept with a few days before, and said friend was there to help her try to get someone else into her bed? That was legitimately something she’d never come close to dealing with before.

At this point, she had the option to be stressed and feel weird about this, or just have fun with it. And she’d been stressed and felt weird for most of her life, so this time, she was just going to fucking have fun.

She’d just had sex with Taylor—Taylor—which gave her a huge ego boost, and her entire mission was to flirt with adorable Cat and paint pottery and drink some of this not-terrible white wine they’d just handed out? Excellent, she could do that. A month ago, she never would have even thought that. Maybe Cat wouldn’t be interested, or wouldn’t flirt back with her, or whatever—so what? She’d still had sex with Taylor a few days ago!

In the time she’d taken to have this slight mental breakdown and rebuild, Cat told her she hadn’t decided what colors to paintthe mug yet, but she knew she was going to make the inside a different color from the outside.

“I follow all of these pottery people online, and watching them throw things and paint is so soothing, and one of them always paints the inside of her mugs and bowls a contrasting color, and it looks so cool, so I thought I’d try that.”

“What a great idea,” Avery said. “Maybe pink, to go with your hair?”

Cat brushed back her hair and smiled shyly.

“Oh, thanks. I was actually kind of regretting these pink streaks; they seemed so bright, and I wasn’t sure if they were really me, but I like that idea.”

Avery tucked her own hair behind her ear.

“Well, I only just met you, so I can’t tell you if they’re ‘you’ or not, but I love the pink streaks.”

Cat reached for the pot of pink paint.

“Thanks. It was a whole breakup-related hair thing, you know how it goes. I didn’t want to cut it, like I did last time.” She laughed and shook her head. “So, this time I got pink streaks, probably because I told my ex I was thinking about getting them and she told me she hated the color pink, and it was so infantilizing, so of course I got them to spite her. But then I regretted them. Classic story, I know.”

“Sounds familiar,” Avery said. “A while ago, I got some bookshelves, those white IKEA ones, and I wanted to paint them one color on the inside, in the back of the shelves, and then another color everywhere else. I’d seen the idea somewhere and I thought it would be cute. But my ex thought it was a stupid idea, that it would look bad and I’d be wasting my time. At the time, I said fine, never mind. But the week after I moved out, I painted those shelves.”

“And,” Cat asked, “how did they turn out?”

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