Page 30 of Accidental Blind Date

I offer a halfhearted smile at her compliment. Yellow is one of my favorite colors. I’d wear it whether it looked good on me or not. But even the sunniest of all colors couldn’t lift my mood right now.

“Can I tell you a secret?” I ask, reaching for my glass. I’ve spent the last thirty minutes only nursing my chardonnay because the recent events have me questioning whether or not I can stomach it.

“Am I your best friend?” she asks, setting up her next bingo card, something else I haven’t touched. Joni doesn’t get away from the house and kids much. It’s not that her husband has a problem with it. But between her teacher hours and his mechanic hours (he works out of a shop and out of his own garage) and their four energetic minions, they hardly have time to pee let alone go out.

“The one-night stand man…wasn’t just a one-night stand.”

“Holy shit you fucked him again?” she gasps and leans in, grin wide and eyes wider.

“What? No,” I shake my head. “I mean…I’ve seen him since that night.”

“Okay…” she trails the word out.

I sigh. “I don’t know how to explain this other than to just say it.”

“You’re in love with him,” she stamps the statement while stamping her new card. She’s already on her way to a second bingo, which wouldn’t be unusual for her.

“What?! Also no! It turns out, his name is not Jax.”

“Sounds about right. I hate to say, and maybe I should’ve said it before I tossed you into the cesspool that is the dating app world, but a lot of people lie.”

“No shit,” I mumble, sipping more consistently on my wine now.

“I mean I wouldn’t know from experience of course because I have been with the same lovely man since high school,”

“Jordan is a good guy. You’re lucky.”

“Like I said, lovely. But I do know through friends at work that dating app men like to blur the truth, so to speak. They lie about names, age, how much money they make, how tall they are, how…endowed…they are. But lucky for you, you were only looking for an ONS. Unless you weren’t.”

“No, I was. And that’s the thing. His name isn’t Jax. It’s Dax. DaxHemingway,” I enunciate his last name hoping she will catch on. Joni is a schoolteacher, I would assume she knows about books.

“That’s romantic,” she waggles her eyebrows while marking off more spaces on her bingo board. “One more to go. All I need is a philodendron and I’ll win…a philodendron. I have to keep those in the macrame hangers in the kitchen because Elias tried to eat one recently and it turns out they’re very toxic. Can you believe I have to tell my almost seven-year-old son that he can't eat the house plants? He just sighed and said,but mom, I’m a dinosaur.I told him next time to pretend you’re a carnivorous dinosaur and eat your dinner for once.”

Despite the rabbit trail in the conversation, it makes me smile. Though it’s a bittersweet smile. Joni and I have been best friends since fifth grade. She has seen my whole life splay out in front of us, messy details and all. We both had the same lists growing up of what we wanted.

Find a boy.

Marry the boy.

Have babies with the boy.

Of course, my life also consisted of running my parents bookstore until I could pass it down to one or more of the said babies. Joni has checked off all the things on that list. I…have not. I completed steps one and two when I met Shane in college. I was an English major, he was a kinesiology major. We met at a coffee shop while I was studying, sipping on a caramel latte, and he was ordering a kale fruit smoothie, heavy on the kale and protein powder, light on the fruit.

Too much sugar in strawberries,he would later say many, many times in our marriage.

I should’ve known that a man who orders grass smoothies and says things like ‘your body will thank you!’ wasn’t a good match for me.

Maybe he should try eating a philodendron.

“It’s not romantic,” I say, hopping back into the conversation. “His name is Daxton Hemingway…”

Joni looks up at me.

“Of Hemingway Books…”

She blinks.

“Oh. Oh! Holy crap on cracker. You went out with the CEO of Hemingway Books?! Damn girl! BINGO!”