Dating-ish (Knitting in the City #6)(5)

       
        

Janie was the exception. My walking, talking encyclopedia of Amazonian adorableness-also from Iowa-wasn't laughing. She looked perturbed.

But I was laughing.

How could I not? What other choice did I have?

Crying? Nah. I was finished with crying. Crying was my past, laughing was my present and foreseeable future. Unless it was crying induced by laughter or an allergy to cats. Because I'd recently decided I would be adopting cats. All the cats.

Forget men and romance. The answer to my aching loneliness would be all the cats.

"Tears. On my face." Sandra waved her hands in front of her eyes and then wiped at the corners. "I'm wearing mascara, thank God, so you can all get the full effect."

"What are you talking about?" Elizabeth, still in her ER scrubs, asked from Sandra's left, nudging her with an elbow while snickering. "What full effect?"

"You can literally see how funny this story is by the black trails of mascara running down my face." Sandra pointed to her cheeks, subduing an errant giggle. "Sodomy jokes. They get me every time."

"I didn't know that book was even in print, The 120 Days of Sodom, by Marquis de Sade." Janie, the only one who hadn't laughed like mad, frowned at me. "I know it was translated a few years ago, but I thought you could only get it as an e-book." She stood hovering to one side of the couch, several red curls having come loose from her bun, her black, horn-rimmed glasses giving her the aura of a stern librarian.

Holding a two-liter bottle of water, she was stretching her back and appeared to be agitated by the news that The 120 Days of Sodom was available in paperback yet no one had seen fit to notify her. Everything irritated her these days. She'd had the worst morning sickness for fourteen weeks, and had been dwelling in a perpetual state of perturbed dissatisfaction-her words, not mine-since entering her second trimester. This was her first pregnancy, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be her last.

"How is it possible that you didn't read the title of the book before you bought it?" Fiona's sympathetic look persisted as she rubbed her belly; like Janie, she was also pregnant; unlike Janie, she seemed to take her pregnancy woes in stride.

Where Janie was remarkably tall and carried her pregnancy entirely in front, Fiona was short and her rounded belly was visible from all angles. This was Fiona's third child with her husband Greg. They'd been married for fifteen years and were still ludicrously in love with each other. But strangely, it wasn't at all nauseating. Neither of them were perfect and they embraced each other's faults with adorable aplomb.

#RelationshipGoals 

"I don't know. I just rushed into the bookstore-which, as it turns out, was an erotic bookstore, so make a note of that-and grabbed the book closest to the cashier. I was in a hurry."

"But why did you need a book at all?" This question came from Kat, the youngest member of our knitting group at twenty-four, and also historically the least vociferous. Although lately, I'd say during the last year in particular, she'd become more talkative.

"I didn't want to be that person staring at my phone. It felt too normal. I wanted to seem cultured, interesting." Even as I said the words they felt puerile.

God, I hated dating.

I hated it.

Hate.

"You are cultured and interesting." Elizabeth shot me a pointed look before returning her attention to the sweater-in-progress on her needles.

"Yes, but you don't know how it is out there. Men have this FOMO-fear of missing out. I feel like they're always looking over my head, looking for her. First impressions count a lot when meeting an online match for the first time. I don't know how to explain it. It's like the stakes are higher these days. You don't warm up to a person, no one seems to have time for that. You only have fifteen seconds or less to make a good impression before the person makes up their mind."

"That sounds very stressful." Ashley sighed discontentedly. "What ever happened to taking the time to actually know a person?"

"People don't do that anymore." Sandra flicked her wrist toward Ashley's image on the laptop. "It's all swipe left for sex or right to murder."

"Not quite, but, yeah. It's pretty bad out there." Kat chuckled, the sound was shaded with sorrow. "Split decisions based on what a person looks like, how impressive their job title is, and how much money they make. It's all about ego with these men, as if people can't just like each other anymore. They have to check certain boxes. At least, that's how my last few dates felt."

"That's unhealthy." Sandra appeared to be offended on Kat's and my behalf. "And it's unwise. I was just reading a study out of Princeton where perceptions of attractiveness change dramatically over time. A group of college students rated each other's attractiveness at the beginning of a semester and then again at the end. Lo and behold, the best-looking guy and girl at the beginning were more often considered dogs by the end, because they were fundamentally unlikable."