Page 9 of Text Me A Kiss

Chapter Four

Katy

“All right, that’s it.”

Lowering my water bottle, I let the water puff out my cheeks and widened my eyes comically at Olivia. Her expectant look didn’t budge, so I gulped the water down in one swallow. “What’s it?”

“Tell me.”

“You’re bossy today. How much coffee did you have?”

“Girl, I will wash all your leggings on hot water with every article of red clothing I have.”

I considered. That was a serious threat, and I wouldn’t give it credence coming from anyone other than Olivia and the fact she’d done it once before already, and I doubted she’d hesitate to do it again. “Tell you what?”

“Give me a break. You’ve been smiling for no reason all day, and you’ve been too happy for a Kady living in New York City for, like, a week. Or, to me it seems like you have no reason,” Olivia added thoughtfully. “But just because I don’t know the reason doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason, does it? You probably have some reasoning, and I just gave you a reason to tell me that reasoning.”

Calculations flashed through my mind, and Olivia raised her eyebrows at my obvious mental struggle. “Okay, nope,” I said, giving up. “Not gonna decode that. Anyway, I made an account on a dating app last Wednesday. I’ve been talking to this guy from Chicago—”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “Of course, you’d talk to the guy from Chicago.”

I continued smoothly. “From Chicago, who goes to ballet shows, has been to Juilliard, knows how to talk dancing and art, and never seems to run out of compliments for me.”

Unimpressed, Olivia snatched my water from my unprepared hands and took a gulp. “Sounds too good to be true,” she said critically. “When I said you should get back out there and date, I didn’t—”

“—mean through an app, yeah yeah.” I waved my hand dismissively. “I already talked to always-in-the-back-of-my-mind Olivia. I’m just getting to know him.”

“Yeah? What’s his name? Where does he work?”

We abandoned the water bottle for the ballet barres at the side of the studio. Carefully, I raised my leg to a barre on a setting slightly below the highest, leaning gently into the stretch. “He told me he’s a business development manager. We haven’t gotten as far as names yet. We’ve been talking for a couple weeks, but we haven’t really gotten into personal life much. Like I said, just getting to know each other.”

“Sure... think you’re ever going to meet him?”

I snorted. “With my schedule? Doubt it. I can’t even find time to visit my parents, let alone meet some guy on a dating app.”

The door opened and Ellen swept in. We lapsed into silence. Time to focus.

But I couldn’t keep my mind on the mundane simplicity of our warmup. Olivia had asked a question that the back of my mind had turned over and over, but kept from the rest of my mind. It was stupid, right? To think about—to long for—the chance to meet this guy?

I knew what Olivia would say if I told her how much I really wanted to meet the man behind the messages.“Yeah right.”Voice-of-reason Olivia was rather sarcastic and rude.“You just want to go to Chicago.”

The more I thought about it, the more I knew that wasn’t true. I wanted to go back to Chicago, but not as a girl who went to a faraway college returning to visit her family. The work I’d put into my dancing at Juilliard, the homesickness I’d managed to work through—it would all be worth it when I got hired as a ballerina to dance in Chicago.

I really wanted to meet this guy, and not because of his location on a map. In just a few days of chatting whenever possible, we’d become good friends.

Or, maybe even more than just friends.

* * *

Two days later, I made a decision. I loved talking ballet and performances with Pridamant (a name from L’Illusion Comique—perfect!), as I’d started calling him whenever Olivia asked about him, but one day, something came over me. Or I had a realization. Or something like that.

Anyway, I had my phone in my hands while I stood at the checkout of a clothes store, and I was chatting with Pridamant, when I suddenly felt… playful. The app I clicked every time I received a message from Pridamant was a dating app, after all. He was a single man. I was a single woman.

Pridamant’s replies almost felt like they were trying a little too hard to be gentlemanly. Like the man behind the messages spent time thinking of what hewantedto say, then he backspaced everything and typed out what he thought heshouldsay.

I wanted more. I wanted to know how he felt about this—about me. Did he check his phone instantly every time it dinged, hoping for a message from me? Did he think about me at night after we’d said our “goodnight, talk to you tomorrow”s?

So, when I got home, I set my bags of clothes down, changed, stood in front of my full-length mirror, and took a picture.