Page 36 of Sunny Side Up

sixteen

Dennis and I tended to stick to our neighborhood for dates.

Taking one another to our favorite nearby spots had become our “thing,” each of us pointedly trying to outdo the other in terms of local standing.

The other week, he’d taken me on a dinner-ingredient scavenger hunt to three different “secret” places in Chelsea: the butcher—where he learned I don’t eat meat; his favorite wine shop; and a cheese store where they literally just sold cheese, aka it was heaven.

Each shopkeeper greeted him like family when he walked in.

“Here he is!”

“Look who it is!”

“Uh oh, lock the doors: Here comes trouble!”

The pasta dinner he made us that night was incredible .

This Saturday, it was my turn: High Line Hotel for an early morning dog walk and coffee.

I loved watching Dennis’s face as we found ourselves a seat in the enchanted-looking courtyard behind the coffee bar.

I loved even more watching Dennis’s face as Harrison greeted us all, NBD, when we walked in, barely looking up, “Hi Sunny, hi Golden Girls, hi Sunny’s friend, hi new pup,” then brought us our usuals: a cinnamon latte (Dennis’s “fancy favorite”—I’d given Harrison a heads-up ahead of time; this was still a competition, after all), a cappuccino for me, two enormous croissants, and three little cups of dog-friendly whipped cream, all within moments of us sitting down outside.

“On the house.”

“Harrison,” I protested, but he waved me away. I looked up at Dennis and shrugged.

“VIP status,” he said, then he stuck his pinky out as he brought his coffee cup to his mouth, prompting the beginning of laughter that lasted for the next two hours.

“You don’t know who the Doobie Brothers are?” he asked me, horrified.

“I know who they are , I just don’t listen to them.” His mouth was agape as I said that, and then this: “Does anyone, who isn’t a dad over the age of sixty-five?!”

“Yo. This is a deal breaker. C’mon Georgie, we’re leaving.”

He stood up, strode away, and burst open the doors back into the hotel—without his dog, who remained at my feet, both Golden Girls snuggled into her. I sat in the courtyard, cracking up at his commitment to the theater of it all. He returned moments later with a doughnut on a plate and a knife.

“Dessert,” was his explanation.

Once he “cooled down” (his words), he said I had to listen to the entire discography, immediately. It was a staple of his childhood.

“What about you, Sunny D?”

“What about me?”

“Who’s your comfort-blanket band?”

I probably could have answered right away, but he dove in with ridiculous accusations that made it impossible to speak through my own double-chin chuckling.

“Enya?”

“NO.”

“The Riverdance soundtrack.”

“What?!”

“Michael Bolton. Enigma. Kenny G,” he prompted, absolute deadpan.

It wasn’t even so much what he said as how he said it—the ridiculousness of his words, the obscurity of his references, paired with his impossibly straight face: He had a way of making everything he said the funniest thing I’d ever heard in my life.

“Hall and Oates,” I finally cried, once the air came back into my lungs.

He nodded in approval. “Okay, okay, we can work with that.”

Everything with Dennis was so fun and easy, it felt too good to be true. Which I guess is why our only hiccup hadn’t sent me into a full-on tailspin yet: After our West Side Highway marathon make-out session, Dennis and I had seemed to stall on the physical.

As it currently stood, our relationship wasn’t sexual, but it was intimate.

He held my hand when we walked. He often placed his hand on my lower back while opening doors for me or while crossing the street.

We hooked our legs under tables, and more than once, I’d fallen asleep while watching TV with my head on his lap.

We brushed crumbs off one another’s faces and told each other when the other person had food in their teeth.

This was the kind of intimacy that I was more used to in long-term, committed relationships. This bit came naturally to us.

But when it came to anything beyond first base, it felt like something, or some piece of him, was holding Dennis back.

Maybe I just got too used to moving too fast , I wondered. Maybe the construction worker, and then the apps, scrambled my expectations of what was normal.

And then one night, while talking on the phone about nothing of substance, just keeping each other company while he cooked dinner and I folded laundry, he gave me all the confirmation I needed to relax about any sex stuff:

“Can I change the subject for a second?”

“I would pay you to.”

We’d spent the last ten minutes divulging our most embarrassing moments.

“I don’t want to be too forward here or creep you out, but I haven’t really felt like this with anyone else. Not in a while. I’ve been trying to take things slow but… I’m crazy about you, Sunny.”

I froze, unable to form a full sentence. This gorgeous man just said he was crazy about me and all I could think to say was, “Me?”

“No, Sophia and Blanche. Yes, you. I don’t want to put pressure on you, or this, but I also think I have to protect myself a bit until we know where we are going. Like, I can’t be telling you about the time I pooped my pants in front of the second-grade class if you’re planning on—”

“I won’t hurt you, Dennis,” I blurted out. Because it flat-out killed me to think of ever hurting him, even a little bit.

As soon as I said it, I knew it was a lie. Guilt kicked me in the gut. What happened to being straightforward and all that?

I told him another lie when he asked what I was doing tomorrow night.

“Dinner with the First Wives Club,” I said.

The truth was that Ted was taking me to a Knicks game. Which, up until Dennis’s confession a few moments ago, had seemed totally kosher. Now it felt complicated.

“Oh, that’s right. Say hi to Diane Keaton and Bette Midler for me.

” I found it hysterical that this was one of the few pop-culture references he actually got.

“Obviously I know The First Wives Club . My grandma loved that movie. Watched it with her all the time,” he’d said when I told him our group chat’s name.

Thinking of Dennis watching movies with his grandma made me feel even guiltier.

Like she was glaring at me from up above, cursing me, calling me a hussy.

But when I saw Ted the next night—and this is how things got so complicated—I was so dazzled by his charm and his smile and his scent (that scent) and the rumbling sexual electricity between us that I forgot about Dennis.

The whole Wedding Date Deadline had been making me anxious, so I’d turned up the volume and started seeing both Dennis and Ted more often.

I’d hoped this would help me to make a decision faster, because the guilt I’d been suppressing was beginning to bubble up.

Neither guy knew he was on a timeline. Neither guy knew there was another guy!

(What poetry, by the way, that my newsletter’s acceleration in the press—not to mention the future of SONNY’s success—wouldn’t be possible without the internet; whereas the current state of my love life revolved around two men who barely acknowledged the internet’s existence.)

Granted, I didn’t know if they were seeing other women.

What if they were Wedding Date Deadline-ing me ?

! But Ted and Dennis were both so invested in me, so present, so consistent, it didn’t…

seem like it? Also: Ted was so straightforward about what he wanted, I didn’t take him for the kind of person who wavered between two of anything.

He set his sights on his goal and went for it.

Dennis, meanwhile, was so sensitive underneath that burly, kind of gruff exterior that masked everything with sarcasm and humor.

… I couldn’t picture him wavering between multiple women, either.

He’d been wary enough about making the move with just one of me.

Not sure what that said about me, then. I’d been cheated on before.

Lied to, led on. I didn’t want to do that to either of these incredible men.

But Noor and Brooke kept reassuring me, each in her own way, that adults dated more than one person at a time.

This wasn’t a crime. I hadn’t made a commitment to either of these men, nor had they to me.

Neither guy was calling me his “girlfriend.” (Not even sure Ted would use that word, period. “Partner,” maybe?)

During a commercial break in the middle of our now-weekly First Wives Club FaceTime sessions, Noor had summed it up like this: “No ring? Not a thing.”

Brooke was more tactful in her dating approach and advice, hav ing done plenty of reflecting with her therapist on the years before she and Ezra were engaged, when the chronic cheating started.

“You owe it to yourself to take time to decide which guy you could see yourself with in the long run,” Brooke had said.

“And look, maybe it’s neither! That’s also fine.

Ultimately, I think it’s going to be one of those agonizing cases where you won’t know until you suddenly know .

And in the meantime, I know you haven’t ‘defined the relationship’ with either, so maybe you can find a way to set expectations that, while you’re loving getting to know these guys, having so much fun, want to keep it up, you’re still free agents… ”