Page 24 of Sunny Side Up

“Oh, it’s definitely for the best,” I agreed. “If it weren’t for the divorce, I don’t know if I would have met Brooke and Noor. They’re two of my best friends. Or, I guess we still would have met that night, but our divorces are how we bonded so fast.”

Over the next hour we shared anecdotes about our respective groups of postcollege friends and how, slowly, they’d begun to move away. About his childhood-into-adult best friends who’d moved back, or who’d stuck it out, then back to Brooke and Noor, who fascinated him endlessly.

“So Noor can walk into any restaurant she wants,” he asked, leaning in toward me, enamored by her world—he was something of a home chef himself—“and the kitchen is just like, ‘Here, try our entire menu so we can impress ya’?”

I nodded with pride. I loved bragging about my friends. I warned him not to get me started, but he kept pumping me with question after question.

“Big deal,” he countered with a sudden faux blasé attitude, leaning back.

That alone made me laugh.

“I get free shit all the time when I’m in my uniform. My man Alex at the bodega just up the street from here gives me breakfast sandwiches on the house all the time.”

“Well, that’s just elite,” I said.

He leaned in again, closer this time, and I caught the slightest hint of a fresh laundry scent. I leaned in, too, ready for whatever secret he was about to reveal.

“There’s this one Korean spot in Astoria,” his voice was low, conspiratorial.

“It’s impossible to get into—all the food critics love it—” My cheeks and ears tingled at the proximity to his mouth.

“My best friend from middle school, Tommy, his parents own it. Everyone in there knows me. I walk in and they just start putting food down in front of me. Best bibimbap in all five boroughs. Incredible. I gotta take you there.”

I let myself flash-fantasize about walking into the restaurant with him, part of our routine, everyone waving, the two of us sitting down at our usual table.

“The only problem is, if his parents are around, they start asking about my parents, and then we’d never get out of there. But we’d get free dessert.”

Never getting out of there, out of anywhere, with Dennis, sounded ideal. The bar could close with us in it right now and I’d be happier than a kid locked in a toy store with access to the candy machines.

I told him about Brooke next, about the secret celebrity corners of the styling world she used to inhabit, and how, now, her focus was narrowing in on the real money: private styling of fancy Upper East Side ladies who lunch.

“Yoooo,” he said, an excited glimmer in his eye. “You gotta send her a picture of me when I’m off duty. Get her to cast me as a fashion model.”

He did a series of poses—accompanied by accents—for the fake camera: Austin Powers tiger claws with a British “Yeah baby, yeah”; Zoolander ’s Blue Steel; some Rocky reference I didn’t get.

He made me laugh so hard that sound stopped coming out.

Dennis had a stunted knowledge of pop culture, which he revealed during a game of trivia we decided to play on my phone.

He excelled at the eighties and the nineties, but it was as if he stopped watching or listening to anything after 2007, if that—or whenever Talladega Nights came out on DVD.

I teased him as he incorrectly described practically every current celebrity, including Andy Cohen, whose name I’d long assumed was just part of our modern global lexicon.

(Dennis insisted the only Andy Cohen he knew was his middle school math teacher.) He didn’t watch a lot of television if it wasn’t the news (CNN) or some war documentary (PBS).

He was one of those rare souls who just used the internet for email and Wikipedia deep dives; he didn’t have Instagram or any other social media—and he read historical nonfiction and presidential biographies for fun.

Dennis was curious and bookish, but extremely humble, too.

And that laugh of his was some honest-to-god love potion.

As the trivia questions increased in difficulty and our laughter grew even louder, it felt like the air between us was speeding up, electricity pulling us together like a magnet.

Was he feeling it, too? The high of a full-belly laugh on a Tuesday night followed by a deep sigh of contentment, the lightness of worries evaporating, the rest of the world fading, time becoming absolutely irrelevant…

As he walked me home after the bartender’s last call, mist started to fall, not quite rain, not quite fog. We were laughing and bumping into each other all the way to the awning of my building.

I turned to thank him again, and the electricity between us stopped the words short.

Standing under the lights of my front stoop, I dropped my eyes to his mouth and bit the inside of my lip.

Then I stepped toward him, leaning in for the thing I’d wanted all night.

I couldn’t wait for our lips to touch, for his hands to pull me in, to touch my chin, or my back.

To hold me close, to pause, nose to nose, breathing one another in.

But, no.

Rather than meeting me halfway, considering the proposition before him, or even going for the old “let ’em down easy with a hug” move, Dennis jumped back like I’d just threatened to tase him. He coughed and checked his watch. Yikes.

“Shoot, I gotta get home to Georgie,” he said quickly. “And brush up on my Andy Cohen trivia.”

I was starting to black out from embarrassment.

“This was fun,” he said, while beginning to walk away backward. “I’m glad we ran into each other.”

“Oh, yeah! Totally. Totally. Dogs and Andy come first!” Then I waved like a park mascot (idiot) and turned to go inside, baffled.

Maybe he just wanted to be friends?

“See you soon, Sunny.”

But like? He sent me that serial killer note! He made the first move!

“See you soon,” I called over my shoulder.

I hoped.

As I turned the lock on my door, I sent a fifteen-minute-long voice note to the First Wives Club group chat, detailing everything from the moment we all had left Polo Bar to Dennis’s blatant kiss rejection after what was, hands down, the best nondate I’d ever been on.

By the time I’d brushed my teeth, climbed into bed, and was plugging my phone into the charger, Brooke texted back to the group.

Brooke: Can’t listen right now, why is this 15 minutes long?

Obsessed, can’t wait to listen. Had too much to drink at dinner, apparently, because I texted the NYU med school resident I’ve been talking to on Bumble.

He wanted to come up to my place after his shift for a late-night anatomy lesson…

he’s still here. Literally just snuck a guy into my parents’ apartment.

High school throwback. Kids at Ezra’s, thank god.

Ew, wonder if Nanny is too??? Will recap tomorrow. LOVE YOU.

I laughed, grateful that Brooke was putting herself out there again. And glad that at least one of us had gotten some on this shitty Valentine’s Day.

In the immediate aftermath of her divorce, Brooke had confided in me how nervous she was to start dating again.

Because she and Ezra had started dating in college, it had been years since she had slept with anyone else, let alone had a one-night stand.

Were there new dating rules she didn’t know about?

Moves to practice? How much hair were people working with down there nowadays, anyway? !

With a steady stream of pep talks and nights spent barhopping (despite what I’d told Dennis, I did do some, but only when the First Wives Club was in session), we’d been rebuilding our confidence together.

Now it was like Brooke was rewriting her lost twenties—sleeping with an NYU med student, no less, a rite of passage—and I was proud of her.

It was inspiring. Putting herself out there, finding out who she was outside of her ex-husband, her kids, her past.

How many of us were rewriting ourselves, halfway through our story, when we thought we’d already had an ending?

I glanced at the clock and realized it was no longer Valentine’s Day.

A relief. I opened my laptop and propped it up on a pillow in my lap, deciding to channel my hyperactive thoughts about tonight’s events into my next Sunny Side Up post. I wrote about the SSU readership’s favorite mailman, who’d already seen me cry, who did not bring me flowers, it turned out, yet took me out for ice cream at a bar, clearly pitying me.

I wrote about the trivia, the laughter that felt like a life raft.

I wrote about how I had leaned in for a kiss like Pepé Le Pew, and how he’d jumped back like, “HOLY SHIT, A SKUNK.” When I finished, I reread the whole thing as though I were a stranger reading it for the first time.

I laughed out loud at my own jokes, at the scenes I recounted from the cab ride home, where it felt like the universe was messing with me.

This was good. It made me feel less alone, and I was the one who wrote the damn thing. I hit publish.

Invigorated by my productivity, I decided to delete the rest of my dating apps, something I’m told every good single person does with regularity.

My Wedding Date Quest would have to wait.

I had to focus all my energy on running my two companies right now.

I couldn’t deal with having a third job, which the apps had become.

Maybe if I stopped trying to force the dating thing, stopped leaning in for the literal and proverbial kiss, it would just happen.

Isn’t that what everyone always tells you?

“The One comes along when you least expect it”?

I didn’t even need The One to come along; just a solid wedding date.

That felt like way less of an ask from the powers that be.

As I reached over and turned off my lamp for the night, I paused to look out my window.

The city was twinkling. Someone on the sidewalk was singing. My dogs were snoring.

I went to bed smiling.