You never lied about what this was, but I went along with it anyway. I bought the dress, drove to your house, and parked in your driveway, waiting for you to invite me inside.
There’d be no courting. No fancy dinner. No second date.
And you weren’t cruel about any of it, which somehow made it worse. You laid out the rules, told me the time and place, and I didn’t push back because all I wanted was to be picked by a man who picked a lot of women.
Which makes me sound pathetic. Like I’m one of those pick-me girls that other girls hate.
I understood all of it when the porch light flashed twice, and I walked up the steps.
What I didn’t understand were the nerves.
When I made it up your front porch, I made the mistake of catching my reflection in the storm door while I waited. Hair wrong. Too much dark around my eyes. The dress riding up where the woman in the store had promised me it wouldn’t.
I assumed you’d open the door and promptly close it when you saw how hideous I looked.
But you didn’t.
You opened the door and gave me that damn smile, the one that captured my attention in the first place. You let your eyes go down my body and back up, your smirk telling me you approved. Then you took my hand and laced your fingers through it like we’d been together for years.
“I’m glad you came,” you said. And you meant it. You said it with your whole chest, like a man who’s telling himself as well as me.
The lights were down when I followed you inside. Music going, just enough that I had to work to name the genre. A bottle of wine on the coffee table. Two glasses beside it. Tulips, my favorite, in a vase standing in the middle.
I saw the entire production of it, running on rails, and none of it subtle.
This wasn’t your first rodeo.
“To new friends,” you said, after inviting me to sit down. We touched glasses, and I understood the deal. There’d be no keys exchanged. No toothbrush left behind. No Sunday morning breakfast in bed.
We talked for a while. Well, you talked. My contributions were limited to That’s so funny and No way, and I totally get that. I sounded like a ditz, probably like some of your other conquests, but that was partly intentional. Not to trick you, though. To trick myself. To keep every answer on the surface where it wouldn’t cost me anything, because if I went any deeper, I might’ve wanted everything.
Of course you knew none of this was necessary. Men like you always know. You just had a way of making me feel comfortable, and that was what made me feel seen. Not the wine. Not my favorite flowers.
Once the conversation waned, you stood up and put your hand out.
I took it without question.
Your bedroom was dark except for what came through the open curtains, and the bed sat in the middle of it under a comforter that cost what I make in a month.
I stopped at the foot and did something I don’t usually do. I wondered who was last. Whether it had been a week. A month. Whether it had been that morning, and she’d folded that same comforter back, and you walked her out and put fresh flowers in the vase.
Then I saw the box on the nightstand.
Not in a drawer. On top of it, right there in the open, the black flap torn half off and a good portion of it gone. You weren’t hiding the count from me.
I stood in your bedroom looking at the receipt of every woman who’d been right where I was standing, and I waited to feel small.
But. I didn’t.
