Page 22 of Swiped

“OK, but it is also, like, criminally overpriced,” Rami grumbled and picked up a nearby artichoke.

A woman with blonde dreadlocks and a shibori-dyed sarong sauntered toward them holding a towering stalk of Brussels sprouts like it was her wedding bouquet.

She glanced at the artichoke and wrinkled her nose.

She neared Ian, clocked his kale, and batted her lashes as she stepped behind a pyramid of mangoes.

“What is happening?” said Rami, holding out the artichoke like a vegan Hamlet.

Ian snatched it. “Produce is too advanced for you, polliwog. Too symbolically loaded, like an art form.” He nestled the artichoke delicately back into place on the shelf. “You need to go to the meat market.”

Rami scoffed. “Do they even sell meat here?”

“No, buddy. Bulk foods. If you go there, you’re practically begging for a phone number.” Ian smiled at the dreadlocked woman with the Brussels sprouts. “Everyone knows that,” he said, and patted Rami on the back as he sauntered toward his cruciferous conquest.

Rami watched as she playfully tapped Ian with the stalk. “Everyone knows that,” he muttered, and pushed his cart toward the bulk foods.

* * *

Rami had been watching the “meat market” scene for the length of two Mumford & Sons songs and one Grateful Dead jam on the store speakers.

So, for him, an eternity. He’d seen an indie rock girl with bleached bangs and a nose ring fumble to fill a baggie with banana chips, and an indie rock guy with a bright orange bob and pink hoodie, swoop in to hold the bag for her with a winning smile.

They’d left together. He’d watched a slight young man in a gray cardigan scoop up a bag of unsalted almonds, twist on the tag and then stand there, pretending to browse, until a tall shopper in a sequined skirt filled their own bag of all-natural fruit juice gummies, and then Unsalted Almonds asked Gummies for the pen to write the SKU number. They’d left together.

It was all really just a lot of pressure. But he was here in this ridiculous, melted-Terminator-looking shirt, and how else was he going to find a date before the BuzzFill deadline? He took a deep breath and waded into the aisle lined with little plastic bins.

“Need any help?” he offered to a freckled redhead in front of the yogurt raisins. She smiled wordlessly and poured a waterfall of raisins into a reusable cloth bag like modeling for a marble fountain of the Platonic ideal produce shopper. “Yeah, OK, you seem good,” he mumbled.

He kept walking, slowly down the aisle. He put his hands behind his back so he felt more like he was strolling and less like he was creeping.

A dark-skinned woman with cropped curls gingerly dropped dried pineapple rings into a bag with plastic tongs. “Don’t want to accidentally get too many!” he said. “Expensive.” She ran her eyes over him, head to toe, then went back to the pineapple.

He was sweating. The flame-out with Lynn shadowed his mind.

How could he know if someone was interested in dating a straight, monogamous, cis man without some way of seeing that information spelled out?

How could he know their pronouns, availability, or if they believed in some heinous, immoral stance like meal prepping ?

It was so much more complicated than looking for a wedding ring.

He neared the end of the aisle, where the candies taunted him with their luxurious confidence.

Everyone wanted a miniature chocolate-covered pretzel drizzled in caramel.

Must be nice. A petite woman with a burgundy bob, intricate leg tattoos, and a black denim overall dress dropped pieces of white chocolate cranberry bark into a small box.

She looked up and smiled at him. Her eyes were dark and witty and lined in black.

“I’m addicted to this shit,” she said. “Too bad it’s expensive as fuck. ”

Rami tried to give her a rueful, knowing laugh.

His mouth was suddenly very dry. Somewhere in his brain, his neurons pumped out a normal potential response along the lines of, It’s ridiculously overpriced but also most places mess up white chocolate so egregiously that it’s worth the extra dollars if you ask me, Rami, a normal and affable man .

But all he said was “Hmm”, as the rest of his mind flashed vivid images of the woman screeching at him to leave her alone, and stop being a creep, and can’t a woman go shopping without getting hit on?

He heard her sigh as he hurried away. Another failure in his race against Nat. But at least he’d remembered that they were out of almond milk at home.

* * *

Outside, Ian’s bushel of kale poked out of the bag, covering his sharp, stubbly chin as he carried his groceries up the steep hill away from the co-op. Rami juggled two equally full bags against his ribs as he tried to keep up with Ian’s long uphill strides.

“What if I actually like cashew cheese?” he asked Ian, between huffing breaths. “It’d change everything I know about myself.”

Ian chuckled sagely. “Better luck next time, pal.”

Rami squinted up the hill. It seemed to stretch endlessly above them, leading straight into the sun. “Whatever, I can’t imagine being happy with someone who would make me pretend to like,” he glanced into one of his bags, “Kool-with-a-K Ranch Kale Chips.” He grimaced. “Gross.”

“Look out!” a panicked female voice cried out.

“Oh no!” she wailed, as Rami heard a terrible metallic thunder rumbling toward them.

He peeked up over his bags. A stray shopping cart was zooming down the massive hill, straight for him.

Rami lunged for it. He felt the wire frame scrape into his arms as he tossed his bags into it.

The extra weight slowed it, and he caught the handle just in time to stop it from careening down the rest of the hill.

The wheels twisted over his toes, and he grimaced in pain as a woman with bright pink braids and a long, flowing skirt ran down to him and the cart.

“Oh my God, thank you!” she cried and wrapped her tattooed arms around him. “I swear, I had visions of it taking out a baby stroller or something.” She pulled back and fixed him with light hazel eyes and an impish, crooked smile.

Ian cleared his throat. “Don’t worry, he’s saved all the babies in the vicinity.”

The woman giggled and looked at Rami’s groceries, spilled all over her once wayward cart. “Kool Ranch!” she said. “Those are like my crack.”

Rami’s heart was still racing with the adrenaline of the murderous shopping cart. “Me too!” he said, very loudly. “I love them!” He looked at Ian, whose eyes were closed and his face as serene as if in prayer. “But . . . I guess I can share?” He offered her the bag.

She giggled again and took the chips. “Thanks,” she said, tucking a cotton candy-colored braid behind an ear clustered with silver hoops. “I’m Gemma. Nice to meet you.”

* * *

Nat was curled up on the living room sofa with a blanket and Pixel snoozing at her feet. The room had gone dark with sunset, but she was too absorbed in messaging Nick to notice. She watched his typing dots blink as she waited for his latest reply.

Nick: You’ll have to tell me more about that tonight, beautiful

She giggled, warmth winking in her chest like glitter.

Nat : One more thing to look forward to . . .

Things had been tense at the BeTwo offices since the lunch confrontation with the twins.

A frostiness had settled between her and Jo, which Nat took as a silent admission of the dislike she’d clearly harbored all along.

Justin reverted to being spacey and ensconced by clamshell headphones at all times, which Nat took as a silent admission of his unwillingness to stand up for her.

But it was fine. It hadn’t been healthy for Nat to think of her employees as part of her social life.

Even if the twins had been lying about their affection for her, as they apparently had, Nat could understand it.

It was their job, and Nat had been naive to the power imbalance.

Just one more thing not really covered in the hashtag-girlboss discourse.

So that was also just one more reason why Nat was so excited about Nick.

He hadn’t been the only guy she’d messaged, but it seemed like after a few exchanges, most of the chats just simply, inexplicably, cut out.

She currently had six separate threads where the last thing she’d written was, “And how about you?” followed by days of silence and/or being suddenly unmatched.

Of course, she’d reviewed these abandoned conversations to see where it was that she’d gone wrong, but she’d never expressed an opinion more controversial than mentioning that she liked pineapple on pizza, which seemed to be a hot question given how often it was asked of her.

Ever the good scientist, she’d of course tried the opposite approach and lied that she didn’t like pineapple on her pizza, just to see if that would result in less sudden silences.

It hadn’t. She’d even scoured Reddit forums to see if liking pineapple was actually some kind of slang for a disgusting sex act or, God forbid, a right-wing dog whistle of some kind, but it was not.

It was all very confusing, and it made Nat think and rethink, and then rethink one more time, every word before she typed it into a BeTwo message.

She felt like there surely must be some internal logic to the pattern of sudden silences that she just wasn’t seeing, but the nagging conclusion was that something about her messages was wrong.

Luckily, Nick seemed to want to communicate with her, both in the app and in real life.

It’d been nearly a week of messaging, but their first date was finally happening in a few hours.

Aligning their schedules for a meetup had been a challenge, plus she’d honestly appreciated the time to warm up her rusty flirtation game through the safe distance of BeTwo messages.

And she had to say, they’d gotten quite flirty, indeed.