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“Keegan,” Julia sighed.
“But no one would knock her socks off like you,” she defended. Erin was mid sip, and she choked at the thought.
“How do you knock socks off?” Erin grinned, placing her glass back on the table. She enjoyed her torture too much, soaking up the way Julia fidgeted her legs.
“This is so not funny, you two.”
“But,” Keegan chimed in, “we’re having fun!”
“I’m not doing it,” she stated, rolling her hazel eyes as she slumped back into the couch, “but even if I did allow you this last one, it’s not happening next week.”
Keegan’s phone buzzed on the table, slightly jostling their glasses. She picked it up, adjusting her reading glasses and sighing at the sight of Ben’s name on the tiny five-inch screen.
“I’m going to take this in the guest room,” she said, already standing and moving towards the hallway.
When the door clicked in the distance, Erin took a seat closer on the couch beside Julia. The redistribution of weight sent flutters inside her, just knowing Erin was that much closer.
“Do you go on a lot of blind dates?”
“No,” she sighed. “I wish I didn’t have to go on any! Keegan does not have a career in matchmaking.”
“Soccer mom wasn’t your type?”
“Very funny! Neither was the parent of one of my 10th graders or the finance paralegal.”
“Finance paralegal? Sounds sexy.”
“Ugh,” exhaled Julia, squeezing the bridge of her nose. “Not when the only thing she wanted to talk about is how so few know the alphabet well enough to correctly file their advising financial transactions.”
“So, why do you do it?”
She tilted her head interestingly, just like so many times before. Julia never understood why she puzzled Erin so much. There was something adorable in the way she got a little curious wrinkle between her eyes, as if it was paper mache lovingly smoothed over.
“You don’t know Keegan. It is far easier appeasing her instead of hearing her complain about how you didn’t do it for months.”
“That’s fair.” Erin slid a little closer and Julia pretended not to notice. “If you’re willing to do that, why don’t you go out with someone you might actually want to date, since she sucks at setting you up so much?”
Julia thought about it for a moment. The idea quite literally never crossed her mind. She had no interest in fanning conversation over a ridiculously expensive salad. It felt tediously exhausting. She had so much better things to do with her time. Well, we’ll just go with that excuse.
“I’m too old for dating,” Julia joked instead.
“Stop it!” They laughed for a moment, the game still playing in the background. There was a brief silence, neither sure how to fill it. “If I asked you out on a date,” she paused, “like a date, date… What would you tell me?”
Chapter Twelve
Erin’s face was just a foot away from Julia’s and she swore that chardonnay mixed like heaven on her breath. It carried notes of pears and sweet oak through the air, wrapping her in the breeze of springtime rain drizzling on soft grass.
They just looked at each other, Julia carefully thinking about her next words. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t give into the feelings she dumbly admitted to Keegan just days before.
Blind dates were meaningless and she could pretend for a few hours and then act like it never happened. It got her out of the house, out of her bed on the weekends. This? This was something completely different.
This was not meaningless, and she wasn’t ready for whatever came after. She wasn’t ready to share her space with someone else again, to trust them with her thoughts and body, knowing they’d hold all the cards and be able to throw them away at any point–a wrapped fragile crystal figurine gripped in the calloused hands of a giant, trusting it will caress and not crush.
She wasn’t ready for another goodbye.
“I, I,” Julia stuttered.
Everything was short circuiting. Erin made her feel so young, like she wanted for once to be that reckless again. Like she wanted to turn off her brain and finally follow her heart. But every step forward felt like two steps back.
