Page 1 of Every Step She Takes
Sadie
Nothing good happens when I drink red wine, and I’m already on my second glass of Chateau Ste. Michelle when the man sitting across from me starts talking about cryptocurrency.
This is why I told my sister no more tech bros.
I’m not sure if he is for cryptocurrency or against it or simply trying to educate the ignorant masses, but I nod along to his lengthy diatribe while discreetly checking my phone under the table. Only thirty-eight more minutes.
In thirty-eight minutes, I will fake a dental emergency or a dead cat or an early-morning meeting.
In thirty-eight minutes, I will use one of my innumerable standby excuses for bailing on a first date, and before too long, I’ll be in bed with a lavender face mask, watching HGTV and doomscrolling before falling asleep by nine o’clock.
In thirty-eight minutes, I’m allowed to call it. That’s the misguided agreement I made with my sister.
“And, of course, you know what an NTF is,” my date continues after a sip of his Imperial IPA. I just keep nodding and drinking my wine. So very, very misguided.
It was red wine that got me into this mess in the first place.
My sister, Vi, is a travel influencer who treats my house like a way station, but she kindly graced Mom and me with her presence over the holidays, in between her eastern Europe tour of Christmas markets and her spelunking trip to New Zealand.
After sharing an entire crockpot of her homemade glühwein, Vi and Mom started grilling me about my love life, like they always do.
My happiness—or, more accurately, my lack of abject misery—is guided by one simple rule: never discuss my love life with my family.
This used to be easily accomplished, because I had no love life to speak of.
While my middle school friends were getting their first crushes, I was still playing Barbies with Vi; while my high school friends were getting their first boyfriends, I was maintaining a 4.
0 and working six days a week at my Nan’s antique store.
In college, there were casual flirtations that never went anywhere, and a few drunk kisses that I usually regretted even more than the hangover.
Then my Nan died, and my whole life changed, and there wasn’t any time to think about romance or relationships or what I even wanted.
But that never stopped my mother from trying to set me up with every man under fifty who crossed her path.
It never stopped my little sister from coercing me onto the dating apps.
Discussing my love life with them only reinforces their delusion that I want their help.
But thanks to fucking glühwein , I did discuss it. I drunkenly told them that I am giving up on romance once and for all, that I don’t want to date anymore, and that I am perfectly content by myself.
Not surprisingly, this drunken declaration did not go over well. My mother cried about never having grandchildren and my sister confidently vowed to find me the perfect man.
I burped brandy and cardamon as I told her the perfect man does not exist.
“That’s because you’re too picky,” Vi said.
That’s what she always says. As if I should just settle for the first man who’s nice to his mom and doesn’t send unsolicited dick pics.
As if I haven’t tried to develop feelings for all the men I’ve dated.
Most of my friends from college have husbands now; several have kids; they all file joint taxes and have a built-in plus-one to weddings and an emergency contact who doesn’t frequently travel to remote locations with no cell service.
Developing feelings for one of these men would be the path of least resistance.
“Maybe I don’t need a man to be fulfilled,” I told them. My certainty was, unfortunately, undermined by a drunk hiccup.
“Maybe you need to give your dates a fair try ,” my mom insisted.
“Maybe you need to let me find you a man,” Vi said, rubbing her hands together in an ominous fashion.
Maybe you both need to let me live my life without your constant meddling. Is what I would have said, if I was ever honest with my family.
Thus, a glühwein-motivated arrangement began to take shape because Vi has the confidence of someone who has never been told no .
A benefit of being a younger sibling, I think.
She always had a safety net to catch her.
When our parents fought, I was there to distract her with an art project and a Broadway musical soundtrack played at full volume.
When my dad took off and my mom couldn’t get out of bed for nearly two years, I was the one who French braided Vi’s hair before soccer games and packed her school lunches. She always had me.
That’s how she turned her love of travel into a full-time job as a successful influencer under the handle cestlavi. It’s how she became a freelance writer at some of the biggest travel publications in the country. It’s how she bullied me into this agreement.
I would let my sister set me up on as many dates as she wanted before my thirty-fifth birthday. But if she couldn’t find the perfect man for me by then, both her and my mom had to accept that I’m happy on my own.
There were rules: I had to promise to keep an open mind about each man; I had to give each date at least an hour before dismissing him; and I had to kiss every man who initiated it, so I could find out if we had chemistry.
Vi called this the butterfly factor . As in, “What if you think he’s a dud, but then you kiss him and feel butterflies ?” Because my sister is ridiculous.
While I was reluctant to sign up for five months of horrible, hops-flavored first kisses, I was even more reluctant to argue with my sister. So, thanks to familial pressure and the lubricating wonders of mulled wine, I agreed.
I went from going on one or two dates per year to going on four dates in the month of January alone, slotting in an hour wherever I could: after a twelve-hour workday; on a Saturday morning after spin class; between tearing out the old carpet in my bedroom and retiling the kitchen backsplash.
First, there was the marathon runner who insisted we hike Tiger Mountain so he could not-so-subtly assess my overall health, turning a first date into the Presidential Fitness Test of my middle school nightmares.
Then there was the guy who took me to a film festival in West Seattle to watch Full Metal Jacket and stuck his hand down my shirt during the scene where Vincent D’Onofrio dies, effectively ruining all nipple-play for the rest of my life.
And there was the Zillow executive who insisted we sit on the same side of the booth, like a serial killer. At minute fifty-two, he started stroking my love handles while telling me that he loved women “with a little something to hold on to.”
But for every walking red flag, there was a decent-enough man too. I’ve been on sixteen dates since Christmas, endured nine butterfly-less first kisses, and when the timer ran out on my obligated hour for each date, I found a polite, if abominably dishonest, reason to leave. Like I always do.
And at a certain point, when you can’t make it longer than an hour with sixteen different men, you start to wonder if maybe the problem isn’t with them at all…
But now my thirty-fifth birthday is in four days, so my sister pulled out the stops with the seventeenth man, who is currently taking another sip of beer.
Grant Foster owns a successful tech start-up, volunteers at an after-school program that teaches kids how to code, and eats dinner with his grandparents once a week.
He has a border collie and an electric car; he’s financially stable; he goes to therapy and talks openly about going to therapy; and he’s conventionally handsome, with Chris Hemsworth’s physique, Chris Pine’s eyes, and Chris Evans’s smile.
He’s the best parts of all the Chrises, and he’s the kind of man I should be attracted to, minus the current tangent into tech-mansplaining hell.
I don’t know even what my boxes are, but I know the man sitting across from me checks all of them, and I’m still counting down the minutes until this date is over. ( Thirty-two . I check again while he’s explaining the difference between blockchains and Bitcoin mining.)
Part of me wants this date to fail. I want the clock to run out on my sister’s scheme, for another birthday to come and go without my life changing in any significant way, for my family to never again ask about why I haven’t met the one and finally abandon me to my self-chosen spinsterhood.
But there’s also a part of me that wants Grant to be that one . I want this to work, because that would be so much easier than the alternative: questioning the reason why it doesn’t work, why it never works.
“I’m boring you,” Grant says suddenly. I didn’t think he was paying any attention to me, so his abrupt recognition of my existence causes me to spill some of my wine. He must’ve caught me checking the time again. ( Twenty-nine minutes .)
“I’m sorry. I tend to get tunnel vision when I’m talking about my passions.” He bashfully glances down at the scuffed table, and I feel a surge of compassion for the guy.
“It’s okay,” I reassure him. “Just wait until I get going on the intricacies of reupholstering a chair. Besides, I totally wanted to know more about non-fungus tickets.”
“Non-fungible tokens,” he corrects.
“Tokens, yes, right. I wanted to learn about those.”
He flashes me the Chris Evans smile. “No you didn’t.”
“No, I really didn’t,” I admit, and he laughs at himself. Most men never laugh at themselves. Grant rolls his broad, muscular, Chris Hemsworth shoulders, and they strain against the fabric of his Henley, and maybe this can work.
“I want to know more about you,” he says, leaning forward so he can hear me over the noise of the bar. “Tell me: Who is Sadie Wells?”
And shit . I want to go back to the lecture on fungus tokens, because I don’t have the faintest fucking idea how to answer that question.