“I just don’t want to see you how you were when it went to shit with the ex again,” Mateo said. “You’re a hopeless romantic. You’ll go on a few dates with this girl, sleep with her, fall head over heels, and she doesn’t even live here, Frankie. You’re setting yourself up for failure. You might not like my advice, but I say nip it in the bud before that happens.”
I clicked my tongue against my bottom teeth. The last thing I wanted to do was stop something good before it started. When I left the airport, I’d already decided to reach out to Ophelia sooner than later. My finger hovered over the message button on her dating profile the entire Uber ride back to Pompano. I had to mentally castrate myself not to seem like such an eager teenager.
She’d be around the area at least through Christmas. But now with Mateo breathing down my neck about it, I was taking all the plausible disasters into consideration.
Ophelia wasn’t the kind of girl you rebounded with. She was the kind you took out to the pier after dinner and kissed in the mid-day monsoon instead of running from it for cover. Cap may have been right that I got attached too easily, but even more than that, trying to justify seeing her any way as a rebound felt borderline disrespectful.
“Don’t look so deflated.” Mateo mussed my hair like a brother would. “We’re meeting Tally out at Jugg tonight. We’ll find you something to play with the old-fashioned way.”
A lone drop of rain fell at our feet, followed by another, and several more after that. My roommate stood from his chair and collected the empty bottle out of my hand, walking toward the sliding door inside. “Grab a shower, wash your balls, and…find a Sharpie.”
“A Sharpie?” I squinted.
“Don’t worry about it. Have I ever steered you wrong?”
“I stopped counting.”
The door closed behind him as a humored, “Yeah, yeah” snuck through the crack.
I scratched at the day-old stubble shadowing the underside of my jaw and stared out at the yard as the sprinkler system kicked on ironically in the onset of a storm.
I’d be better off leaving the girl on the plane. She was visiting friends anyway; it’s not like she’d leave them to spend time with a stranger. The entire scenario screamed Dateline. It was unfortunate, I hated it—but it was what it was.
A crack of lightning turned the gray sky white as I stood for the door, my clothes covered in a thin sheet of rain. I pulled my phone from my pocket and opened Ophelia’s profile again, swiping through the pictures one after the other. My thumb hovered over the message for a second too long before I sighed, and then deactivated my account altogether.
4
The obvious first step to a night out drinking was carb loading, which is why after driving through the stormy sunset, Nat and I ended up sitting on a splintered bench at the outdoor patio of Sand Saloon.
“I can’t believe he caught you looking at his dick.”
“A picture,” I corrected my friend. “A picture of the crotch of his pants. It was, like, the absolute most humiliating thing you could ever think of.”
“That would probably be if he caught you stalking his mom's sister’s neighbor’s Facebook profile where he was tagged in a picture from six years ago.”
I squinted with a bite of juicy burger halfway to my mouth. “Yeah…that oddly specific scenario would have probably been worse.”
“Anyway, he was a good sport about it. That shows maturity in a man. He’s self-aware.”
“Maybe it just means he was the one looking at my grandma’s best friend's son-in-law’s Facebook profile and figured that he shouldn’t judge.”
Natalia rolled her eyes and I peered over the side of the patio where it hung into the water. Two kids a few booths down were throwing French fries over the barrier to a famished shoal of largemouth bass while their parents argued quietly across the table.
Oddly, the kids reminded me of my own siblings back home. Or maybe they reminded me more of myself. At that age as an only child, I didn’t realize what kind of problems lay right beneath my nose because I had no worry over “grown-up” things. My parents had many hushed arguments hidden behind the background noise of the television while I played in the living room. But ugly words always sounded sharp.
That’s not to say they didn’t have their better moments, too. I knew what love was, what it looked like—but it was never in my sphere, never really in my home, not in the years I could remember, anyway. But then as a teenager I began to notice it again. My mom with Josh, and my father with Amy. I saw it in my best friend’s parents, and in my Aunt Shelly and Uncle Ray.
“But, you said he made you laugh. That’s hard to find,” Natalia pondered. “Most guys nowadays are so into themselves it’s disgusting. It’s like they expect you to be enamored by their existence alone. The bar is in Satan’s asshole.”
“If that’s what you think in West Palm Beach, then the bar in Pine Ridge is in that little space between his asshole and his sack.”
“The gooch.”
I nearly spit the Bay Breeze I was drinking all over the table. Pineapple juice stung the inside of my nose and Nat giggled as she passed me a clean napkin across the bench.
“Exactly,” I said, recouping. “I’m swimming in Satan’s gooch pool, and you’re out here telling me your bar is low.”
“The tides are changing, Phee. Here I was, thinking I’d be spending my Christmas season helping you get laid, when it looks like you don’t even need me. I’ll be picking your ho-ho-ho ass up at a Publix tomorrow morning with your reindeer ears on backwards and Hook(Up) guy’s dick print on your cheek.”
“This is a family establishment, Natalia Russo.”
She rolled her eyes. “Show me a picture. Is he hot hot? Or hot because he’s got a fun personality? Because you’re not hooking up with fun personality guys anymore. I’m putting my foot down.”
“You are like a meninist’s worst nightmare,” I said, swiping my phone off the table to pull up Frankie’s profile. “Do you ever just, like, look at a man's thighs and wonder what kind of horsepower they have?”
Nat pointed the soggy, limp end of her French fry at me. “See, this is why you’re my people.”
I opened the app and there was another match there. The blond holding a husky who I found myself much less physically attracted to than I did at the airport that morning.
“He’s a little older, is that bad?” I asked. Frankie wasn’t old by any means, but nine years would be a bit of an adjustment. “Should I be worried he’s hiding a wife and kids or something?”
“I like older. They know what they want. Maybe he’s divorced?”
“Well thank you, ex-wife, he’s aged like fine wine.”
I scrolled top to bottom and side to side on my phone, hitting the back button and refreshing the page once, twice. My stomach tensed uncomfortably when the face I was searching for had entirely vanished. “No way. That fucking goochhole.”
“What? What happened?”
“He unmatched me.”
“Shut up.”
Nat plucked the phone out of my hand and inspected the screen, scrolling just as frantically as I had been a minute ago, looking for the lost remnant of my flight-date’s profile.