Page 24 of Lovesick
Leslie looked down at her hands. “Yeah. I guess it does feel like that sometimes. But that doesn’t mean I’mdyingfor romance. I’d really just rather he run the vacuum without me having to ask him to do it. Can the man just do achorewithout me initiating it?”
“So, let’s break this down.” I straightened, pen at the ready. Ink spilled frantically across the page titledLesliewhile I wrote. “Your idea of romance is doing chores?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’tnotsay it.”
“Don’t double-negative me.”
“Then tell me what you think is romantic.”
She threw her hands in the air. “I have no idea, Lizbeth!”
“How do chocolates sound?”
Her nose wrinkled.
I crossed that off. “Okay, not that. How about flowers?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s just something else to keep alive and feed.”
“Definitely not that.” Crossed it off. “How about dinner and dancing?”
“He’d trip and fall on top of me, and we’d both break an ankle. Then my mother-in-law would have to live with us and we’d get divorced. No thanks.”
“Do you watch rom-coms?”
“No.” She scoffed. “They’re too unrealistic. Like a good mother of four, I watch animated animals through a streaming service. At the end of the day, I try to pretend like I’m a single woman and go to bed at seven thirty after a glass of wine.”
“Sweet baby pineapple, Leslie. Give me something here.”
She spread her arms. “Iam, Lizbeth. This is the most romantic my brain gets. This is the most I’ve thought about romance in ... years. My life is not like yours. I don’t have the mental space to prioritize it.”
My shoulders slumped. While not ideal, it still all helped. I couldn’t let JJ ever talk to her, though. They’d agree on far too much.
“Well,” she sighed as she stood. “Good talk. I need to go root through my laundry and find where I misplaced my life.”
“Best of luck.”
She snorted. “I need it. Also.” She pointed dramatically to the porch. “I almost died on that ice.”
“I’ll fix it.”
After she left, I stared down at the paper with a frown. I wasn’t naive. I knew romance wasn’t a priority for some people, and I knew a lot of people thought it was frippery. Silly. A way to escape troubles. Which it was.
But it was also more.
How do I get JJ to see that? And, of course, there was a deeper question:Why does he need to?
That was the question I didn’t want to answer.
I straightened with a sigh. A slightly acrid smell filled my nose, then disappeared. I glanced around, saw nothing, and sniffed again. Must have imagined it.
My morning had consisted of making coffee and creating this binder. Using my brain to reduce romance to a ledger had been a fun challenge. Programming required far more creativity than most people realized. Organization was important, but so was flexibility when it came to data. Today felt good.
Hopefully, work at Pinnable would feel equally good.
I took my binder upstairs, set it lovingly on my bookshelf, and studied the titles. Sometimes, I just liked to look at them. When I lived with Mama and Dad, we never had money for books. I’d grasped onto them at the library like they’d save my life.
