Page 6 of Date and Switch

“Bryce Ellis.”

Her hand was warm and soft wrapped in my palm. It was then I noticed her nails were decorated with rainbows, unicorns, and glitter. Our eyes locked and her eyebrow raised as if she’d caught me looking at them and challenged me to make a comment. I raised my eyebrow in return though I had nothing to say. I thought they were kind of sweet.

“How many Sarah’s am I competing against?”

She took a seat again and dove right into the conversation with little preamble. There was something refreshing about the way she carried herself. No bullshit to cut through. No tap dancing around social graces. She was just herself.

“I wouldn’t necessarily call it a competition.”

I needed to do something with my hands. Sitting without any distraction was—disarming. “I need to get a coffee. It has already been a hell of a morning. What would you like?”

“Hey! I said I was buying you a drink!” She rocketed to her feet, digging through her backpack I assumed in search of her wallet.

“I’m one of those obnoxious people with a super complicated coffee order.” I stayed her search with a hand to her elbow. “I’ll get it.”

“A black coffee? Yes, that is super complicated.” She nodded her head towards my cup when I returned with her green tea lemonade and reclaimed my seat across from her.

“As I was saying,” I took a sip, ignoring her calling me out for my white lie, before continuing, “I wouldn’t call it a competition. My brother convinced me to still go on this trip even though Sarah and I aren’t together anymore.”

Every time I said her name my chest tightened. The cardiologist insisted I had no prescient conditions that would suggest a heart attack. I preferred my self-diagnoses to his. I suffered from a broken heart. A broken heart. Please. Was I hurt? Of course. Angry? Absolutely. Broken hearted? I couldn’t say. I don’t know if I’d ever been broken hearted before.

“My sister Felicity is the one who insisted that I apply as well.”

“Yes, I remember.” I winked at her. When had I become a winking kind of guy? But the eye roll that accompanied her huffed explanation drew the response from me without being aware I did it until after the fact. “I guess we both have meddlesome siblings who think they know better.”

Mentioning having siblings in common gave me a peek into who she was. She and Felicity were twins. I vaguely remembered her discussing that in her email. Felicity lived in New York. Sarah had been working in the banking industry, but banking had taken a bit of a hit recently with a lot of corporate buyouts and downsizing, which she had fallen victim to. Perhaps that is what called to me on a cellular level when I saw her email. I recognized someone else who needed an escape for a while.

She was the only person I’d agreed to meet. That had to mean something. Of the thousands of people who wanted to come with me, hers was the one email I replied to in the affirmative. While she talked, I imagined what it would be like to sit across from her at breakfast, or on the ship having drinks. I tried to picture her hiking Machu Pichu, checking out the pyramids, walking around Rome. Every time I tried to picture us in the absolute worst possible situation: rain, bugs, losing our luggage, getting lost—and each pretend situation I imagined us in, I could only picture her with some smart assed comment and a let’s muddle through this attitude.

“I know this whole idea is—”

What word could actually describe the clusterfuck that my life was. There wasn’t anything that could summarize what a strange situation I found myself in. The situation had no roadmap, no standard operating procedure or suggested business practice for moving forward.

“I don’t think there is a word, Bryce.”

“It’s unconventional for sure. What kind of questions should I be asking? Or really where do I go from here. You seem like you’d be fun. But it’s also seven months.”

Sarah took my hand in hers across the table. It was an intimate move, familiar, friendly. As if we’d known one another for years. As if that subtle caress was the most natural thing in the world.

“Is it strange? Of course. At the same time, if you decide you still want to take your vacation and you don’t mind bumming around the world with a stranger—it can go a few ways. We could discover that we’re both really fucking cool and have the time of our lives.”

She shrugged and wiggled her palms as if weighing each prospect in her hands.

“We could get on the ship and discover that we’re like oil and water and have literally nothing in common. Even in the absolute worst-case scenario, we’re on a ship with thousands of other people. The only time we’d be forced to see one another would be at night when we slept. That can’t be any worse than freshman dorms at college, right?”

That got a chuckle out of me. Nearly everyone who went away to college had a nightmare roommate story.

“If we were well and truly miserable, I’m certain there are plenty of ways to stay out of each other’s hair. More than likely though, it will be somewhere in between and that’s totally fine too.”

four

Shitting. My. Pants. That was the only way I could describe my meeting with Bryce Ellis. First the guy was intense with a capital I. Not in wound too tight kind of way. His focus was as sure as a laser beam. Every word I uttered, his green eyes tracked and tabulated as if mentally writing note cards and filing them into one of those old-school notecard boxes. He remembered I had a twin sister. Why my pulse skittered at that acknowledgement, I had zero explanation. Surely he’d seen hundreds if not thousands of “applications.” Yet he remembered some offhand comment I’d written in my email? Definitely a good sign.

I felt a good vibe with him. I didn’t notice anything weird that suggested the dude could be a serial killer. His didn’t have the super charming vibe of someone who was desperate to get you to like them. He was just an average stranger. My gut seemed to think he’d be a whole lot of fun. How could a guy that posted a drunken TikTok looking for a travel partner not have a vein of fun thrumming through that gorgeous body.

Shit. Did I say that? He literally just had his heart decimated. Here I was drooling over how he filled out that purple windowpane oxford and admiring his snugly tailored gray pants look.

Seven months was a long time to spend with someone I met forty minutes ago. Could I really do it? Common sense battled incessantly with the part of me that wanted to say fuck responsibility and I deserve to have some fun after this craptastic year.

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