Page 11 of Just (Fake) Married
Which left me with cleaning out the apartment and sex.
What was more attainable than sex?
More dates? The apps didn’t provide the best options, because in this part of the country, you needed a three hundred mile radius to get any hits, and the few times I’d tried it were all complete misses.
What if it didn’t have to be about guys and dating?
Morefun.
Too vague. I crossed out more fun, and wrote:
Making out.
Making out like they did in the movies and in books. I wanted that hand on my cheek and that slow motion leaning into each other, that second of breath. Of hesitation. Will we or won’t we? Until finally, when we couldn’t stand the suspense anymore…contact.
Locked away in a place I rarely visited, was the memory of a kiss like that. A high school party, a dark pantry, and one of the hottest guys in school. It wasn’t fair that the best kiss of my life was with my nemesis.
A person who had not only forgotten the kiss entirely, but also thought I’d punched him in the face.
The jerk.
I should have punched him in the face.
He’d spent the rest of the year being teased for getting punched by one of the Calloway girls. And I spent the rest of that year (and sort of the rest of my life) trying to forget what kissing him had been like. My first C&C.
My ex-boyfriend had been an okay kisser. A solid six out of ten, a five out of ten when he got real excited, which, when I thought of it that way, seemed sad. But he’d been good at other things.
Like…science. And paperwork. The truth was, the guy knew his way around an Excel spreadsheet better than he did my body.
My love life was so sad.
I was going to reclaim kissing. I’d get back on the apps. I’d let my sisters set me up on blind dates. I’d flirt with tourists and some of the part-time cowboys. I’d even go on a date with Mrs. McCormick’s nephew in Cheyenne.
Yep. Forget cleaning the apartment upstairs – I’d found my New Year’s Resolution.
Making out.
I wrote it down on my paper, circled it, and then ripped the paper off the pad. Normally, I’d walk it over to the potbelly stove to ceremonially burn it in fire, but Mrs. McCormick reappeared, and set ammonia, rat poison, a bunch of kale, and duct tape onto the desk along with the antacids I’d already set aside for her.
I dropped the list in my purse under the desk.
“That’s quite an assortment,” I said. I kind of wanted to take a picture. It looked like the shopping of a healthy serial killer.
The door to the store blew open. More cold wind, more Jenny barking and Bruce honking.
The two Darryls stepped into the store and shut the door behind them.
“Girls!” I shouted, trying to shush Jenny and Bruce.
“I have to ask, Harmony. What are you going to do with that goose?” Darryl J. asked as he pulled off his balaclava, making his bright red hair stand on end.
“Her name is Bruce and she’s mine now. Or I’m hers. I’m not sure who adopted whom.”
“Yeah, but that wing,” Darryl H. said, as he stuffed his balaclava in his back pocket and ran a hand over his tight braids. “Sooner or later, you gotta do something. A bird with only one wing is bad luck.”
“What?” I cried. “That’s not true, is it?”
“Ask my abuela,” Darryl H. said. “She had a goose with one wing and she lost at bingo for three straight weeks. She cooked up that goose and she started winning again.”
