Page 2 of For You & No One Else (Say Everything 3)

Watching them, Eliza had seen that real lovecouldexist, and now she didn’t want to settle for anything else. Sometimes she felt like Veruca Salt, stomping her feet and demanding her own glass elevator, her own Golden Ticket. Maybe she was asking for too much, but setting high standards had worked for her before—straight A’s through school, scholarship to college, master’s degree by twenty-three. Her own business by twenty-eight. Great friends. So she’d figured, why not with relationships?

The plan had been a good one. Results, though, had been dismal.

Once she’d started telling guys that she didn’t go home with anyone on the first date as a rule, she’d quickly learned that she was a woman guys liked to sleep with, not one they wanted to invest any time in. One guy had straight up told her, “No offense, but who would want to date a shrink? I don’t want someone trying to get into my head.”

On the flip side, she’d had a few dates where the guys wanted free therapy, not a date. Those nights were their own special kind of torture.

She should’ve ditched the app a long time ago and stuck with imaginary book and movie boyfriends and her vibrator. She’d even tried on occasion to cut the right-swipe habit. But then a few days would pass, hope would spring up like a weed, and she’d find herself opening the app again.

She paused on the photo of a guy with dark hair and what looked to be a confident but kind smile.

ALIGNED Dating Profile

Ryan L.

Age:32

Location:Metairie

Occupation:Financial planner

Likes:Jazz music, travel, boating, and finding the best microbrews in town

Account Status:Open for alignment

The guy was cute, didn’t have any red flags that she could tell, and had a steady job. He also was cuddling an adorable dog in one of his photos. You couldn’t set a bar much higher than that on a dating app with such limited information. Before she could talk herself out of it, she swiped right.

She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Only then did it hit her that swiping right on Christmas morning would probably look ten kinds of pathetic. Who was on a dating app at this time on this day?

Christmas orphans, that’s who. How freaking Dickensian of her.Please, sir, can you spare a date?

She quickly closed the app, vowing not to look at it again today. She stared at the screen. Any distraction the app had provided melted away, dragging her back to reality.

Orphan. Orphan. Orphan.

Her phone went dark.

The room hummed with silence.

Her brain flooded with all the thoughts she’d been trying to avoid and pushed the panic button. The tidal wave of emotion that welled inside her was enough to make her audibly choke.

No, no, no.Before the tears broke free, she rushed to her feet, muttering “we are not doing this” under her breath in a white-knuckled pep talk. She’d been wrong to plan a chill, stay-at-home day. She couldn’t sit here with nothing to do.

Everything else was closed, but she didn’t need to be. WorkAround, the shared workspace where she rented an office, would be empty but open. She could get some filing done, maybe outline a new video. That would make the day go by quickly, occupy her brain. It could just beTuesday. She liked Tuesdays. She poured herself another coffee, this time in her travel mug, and ignored the slight trembling of her hands.

She grabbed her bag and was out the door before she could overthink the plan. The sounds of happy voices and her neighbor’s cheery reindeer songs blasted from an open window nearby. She resisted putting her hands over her ears and sped up her pace to get to her car.

Run, run, Rudolph.

***

As expected, the bottom floor of WorkAround was silent as a library when Eliza let herself in around lunchtime. The effect was a little eerie. Normally the place would be a hive of activity with people typing away on their laptops at the rented hot desks, others chatting in the strategically placed groupings of furniture, and the gurgle and whir of drinks being made at the in-house coffee bar. She loved walking in to all those sounds, all that energy.

When she’d first started looking for office space to rent for her therapy practice, she’d been dreading getting stuck in some isolated, soulless office building where no one talked to one another. So when she’d found WorkAround, a concept built on collaboration and start-ups and a constantly rotating corral of creative people, she’d been hooked.

The rent had been a bit of a stretch, but she needed to match the image on her YouTube channel—the successful professional therapist who could afford a nice office. Unfortunately, if her client load didn’t increase or she didn’t find an additional stream of income, she wouldn’t be able to keep renting here long-term.

That grim thought had her even more motivated to get some work done today. She needed to catch up on client notes, outline a new video, and come up with a new thirty-day challenge for January. She did a new wellness challenge each month on her channel. Those videos garnered some of her best numbers. People—herself included—loved a life experiment. This month, the challenge had been about getting better sleep. She’d been an utter fail at it personally, but her followers had seemed to get a lot out of it.

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