Page 43 of Swiped
Nat leaned over the railing and let the salty sea breeze cool her face and lift the hair from her neck. She wasn’t sure if she could get through the next few hours alone, even if she deserved to. She pulled out her phone and texted Sara.
Nat: I miss you so much it feels like my teeth are gonna fall out.
I’m sorry I’ve been a terrible friend to you lately.
Please let me make it up to you?
She put her phone away and blinked back tears as a seagull screeched overhead. It was the best she could do, for now.
* * *
Rami steeled his nerves and waited for Allison to buzz him up to her apartment.
The gleaming silver doors bleated their approval, and Rami pushed inside the slick apartment tower.
It was so new, it still smelled like fresh paint inside.
He’d watched this place being built, right over the footprint of, among other things, his childhood video store and a mom-and-pop taqueria that he used to love.
Now it was a monolith of straight lines and shining glass in a city block full of derelict converted Victorians and the working families who clung to still being able to live in them.
He pushed the elevator buttons and watched the doors glide silently shut.
Getting himself worked up about gentrification was just a distraction, even he could see that.
He needed to focus on his mission, no matter how unpleasant.
He had come here to pick up Allison and escort her to the BuzzFill interview, yes, but he had also come here to break up with her.
Hopefully, there was a way both things could somehow still happen, despite how impossible it was to imagine.
Allison answered the door in a frilly white dress that literally looked like an angel costume to Rami. He had to admit that the universe, or whatever, did have a good sense of humor sometimes.
“I’m not wearing this,” she said in lieu of an actual greeting.
“I’m just trying things on and this is what I was wearing when you got here, but don’t worry.
” She gestured down her figure to what, in Rami’s eyes, was a beautiful garment that complemented her curves and fair skin with an almost elfin perfection. “I know this looks awful.”
“You look incredible, actually,” he said as she spun away on a bare foot and disappeared into her bedroom.
He slipped off his shoes and stepped inside.
He had been to Allison’s apartment only once before, and it had been late, and they had been drinking, and so he hadn’t been in the state of mind to really take it in.
To be fair, neither had she, and given her recent move, there hadn’t been much to look at, anyway.
But now more of her furniture had arrived, and Rami could examine the scrapes in the robin’s egg blue paint of her small bookshelf, and the array of stone skulls that grinned between the spines of her books.
They were mostly romance novels and a few of the usual novelty gift books about wet cats or rude birds that were the millennials’ fruit cake.
Nestled under a skull carved from rose quartz was a scribbled note.
It read: Abundance. I am the architect of my life!
He touched the edge with his finger and closed his eyes.
“Polar bears,” he whispered into the quiet.
As if in response, loud rustling and a crash of hangers clattered from Allison’s room.
He had to save her from her wardrobe spiral, especially if she was about to stay home alone.
“Can I help you?” he called into her room as he padded through the junior one-bedroom floor plan that he could only imagine cost most of her salary.
“Yeah, come look at this option!”
Rami took a deep inhale. Time to face the music.
He leaned against the doorframe and immediately lost his calming breath.
Allison twirled in a stunner of an emerald green dress.
The neckline plumped up her soft breasts, the waist nipped in above her hips, and the skirt flared over her legs in a swooping hourglass.
She was a vision. And he didn’t feel anything close to what he should be feeling to see her.
“Good? Too much?” Her face was blotched and shiny with the effort of trying on several dozen looks, judging by the piles on her floor. Her jade green eyes blinked at him in full earnestness.
“Allison, you’re stunning. Truly.”
Her pink lips perked up in a smile, and she smoothed her skirt a little. “Well good. And thanks.”
Rami stretched his steps around the clothes on the floor to reach her and took her hand. “I can’t believe you would go to all this trouble to pick something to wear just for me and this absurd interview.”
“Of course!” She smiled at him, but her eyes wavered, ever so slightly, though they were standing close enough for Rami to notice. “It’s important to you.”
Rami squeezed her soft palm and guided her to sit on her bed with him.
“It is important. That’s why I have to tell you something.
” He took a deep breath and looked into her beautiful face.
“You’re a smart, funny, kind and cool person, and you are truly one of the most gorgeous women I’ve ever known, let alone been lucky enough to kiss. ”
Allison blushed with a small snort of breath. “OK, geez . . .”
“I, on the other hand, have acted like an absolutely selfish piece of trash toward you, and it has to stop.” He watched her face go blank and then recoil, watched her eyes widen at him, and then narrow down to her hands.
“Yeah, that’s true.” Her voice was soft, and her chest heaved with fast breaths. “I know you’re worried about this internet contest thing, but it’s been feeling a little bit . . . wrong.” She met his gaze with a more confident tone. “I mean, wrong between us.”
He rushed to agree. “You’re totally right and I’m so, so sorry. I should’ve never put you through this and we can just call it all off. It’s not your problem to solve.”
Allison sighed and chewed her rosy lip. He had been expecting her to cry. It didn’t look at all like she was about to cry. In fact, her face looked brighter. “So, you’ll show up to this thing with Nat all alone?”
The full weight of that reality swirled around him with a wave of dizziness.
He shrugged it off. “Yes. I tried and I failed, fair and square.” Freed from its facade of being Allison’s happy boyfriend, his brain hit him with a new revelation.
“This whole thing has been about me railing against how the apps make us treat each other as products, like dolls just to fill a need . . . and it really seems like that is how I have been treating you.”
She gave a rueful laugh and looked at him. “You don’t even really like me, do you?”
“I do! Allison, I do!” He knew this was only half of the truth. “But also . . . maybe not in the way that I thought.”
She nodded. “I know. We don’t have anything in common, really, and you talk about your work all the time and sometimes I can barely stay awake.” She rolled her eyes in disgust. “And I said I wanted to hear about Stargate because I thought it was about astrology, and it was not .”
Rami laughed in spite of himself. “A fatal mistake.”
“In that moment? I kinda wanted it to be!”
Rami let the quiet settle around them. He couldn’t dare bring up the contest. How could he ask anything more of her?
Allison cleared her throat with a pointed ahem . “You need someone more like Nat, don’t you think?”
Her words hit Rami like bitter medicine. “Is it that obvious?”
She rolled her eyes with a nod. “I mean, I tried to ignore it but I saw the way you looked at each other in the check-in interview. And she really likes to talk about tech stuff.” She wrinkled her freckled nose. “Like, even as much as you.”
“That she does.” Rami sighed. “She also found an actual boyfriend during this whole ridiculous charade, and I’m pretty sure that I’m never going to see her again after today.”
“Well, that’s too bad.”
They sat side-by-side in silence for a beat. Allison took a deep breath and rolled her shoulders back with a sigh. “I just moved here, you know? I don’t know anyone else, really.”
“Did I take advantage of that?”
She shrugged. “Probably? But so did I.” She twisted a strand of her red curls. “You seem like a nice guy, but also I think I just wanted some attention.”
Rami nodded with a hmm . On principle, he refused to be triggered by being called a “nice guy,” but he also knew that Allison meant it sincerely. “So, maybe we both kinda used each other a little bit.”
“I think we did, yeah.” She punched him lightly on the thigh. “It was still fun, though.”
“It was, Allison. I’m glad I met you.”
“Yeah, me too.” She held out her palm. “Friends?”
He shook her hand. “Friends.” He was about to ask her to celebrate their new understanding over a nice, spicy curry — a joke — when his eyes caught the time on his watch and broke the moment.
Specifically, he broke a sweat. He raised his wrist to his face in the vain hope that he was simply misreading it.
They were scheduled to be downtown in twenty minutes.
Allison grabbed his wrist. “Oh geez! We’re gonna be late!” She bounded up and rushed to her dresser, grabbing makeup products like a mad scientist.
“We?” he echoed. “You’re still coming?”
Allison scurried into the bathroom with fistfuls of colorful plastic tubes. “Yeah, I’ve always wanted to go viral again!”
Too many questions jockeyed for the front of his mind, but as always, sheer morbid curiosity won out. “ Again ?”
“You really didn’t even google me, huh? That’s so weird.
” She popped her face out of the doorway, newly glamorous in black lashes and red lips.
“I posted this video of me tasting a pickletini at the sorority house one night and it got picked up by all the morning shows. I got sent so much free stuff, it was bonkers.”
Rami’s head swiveled as she breezed past him in a cloud of sweet floral perfume. He heard her gathering her keys and slipping into heels by the front door.
“I came so close to getting an SUV from a local dealership, but maybe this time I can get one of those cute little Vespa things!” she called. “Come on! We’re gonna be late!”
Rami’s brain blinked back online, and he knew that against all odds, he was being given a gift. Even if he didn’t deserve it, he would be a fool not to just go with it and pay back his great karmic debt later. He hurried toward her. “So, you’ll still pretend to be my girlfriend? On the internet?”
She winked a matcha-colored eye. “Just for tonight.”
Rami’s hands clutched at his chest, as if he were wearing a waistcoat and she’d just agreed to attend his ball. “You’re an amazing woman. Let’s get you a scooter.”