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“Is it accurate, though?” Brigid asks.
I uncurl my spine and sit myself up, wiggling my chipped ladybug toes against the cushions as I stretch my back. “Not anymore.”
“We stan a lass with good posture,” Penny chirps. “The point is, we love the you that you are right now. He’s interested at all because unhinged, drunk you wrote him an unhinged, drunk novella. Customer service you isn’t the sarcastic mess that drunk you happens to be. He has to be smart enough to be interested in the real version of you, doesn’t he? He obviously knows how to read people. Are you against giving him credit because you hate him and flinch at the notion he’s seen any part of who you really are?”
My nose scrunches, and I grab some extra Spicy Eels before marching myself out of my little farmhouse and to the mines again. “I dislike giving anyone credit for things they don’t have to work for.”
Brigid cuts in, “Okay, so let’s say you take this offer and stop feeding him customer service Marci. You’ll still have that down payment whenever he realizes you were right. As long as he’s not malicious, you get an amicable breakup. And I really don’t think he’s malicious if he went through all the trouble of answering his own questions and printing them off for you. You don’t lose, unless, of course, by the point of breakup it’ll sting to have him tell you that he can’t stand your character?”
“Oh, no. I’m totally used to people telling me that the second I’m comfortable enough to be myself around them. The issue here is that I am very much not eager to be myself around the bouncing, bubbling manchild.”
“Is he really that immature? He always seems so pretty in pictures and interviews, which I watch, hoping I’ll catch a glimpse of you being super adorable in the back with your little LeoPad.” Penny joins me in the mines, gathering coal like a princess while I beat up all the Dust Sprites and protect her.
“I feed and dress him every day, while he smiles foolishly and never stops moving. He’s a picky eater, too. I’m supposed to plan his meals around a nutrition guideline that would put public school lunch ladies to shame, and yet I’m still needing to adjust and adjust and adjust because he didn’t provide me with a list of foods he doesn’t like. And, sometimes, it isn’t even the food he doesn’t like. It’s the combination. He sorts mixed vegetables, Penny. I once got him stir-fry noodles then watched him disassemble it for an hour during a Zoom call with his shareholders. Every leek, chicken, and broccoli was segregated into three distinct piles before he took a bite. A cold bite. And that wasn’t okay, so he made me heat it up in three different frying pans. That I had to go out and buy and now keep in the break room to take with me whenever we travel anywhere.” I rake in a breath, let it out slowly. A manic laugh leaves me. “If I were his wife, I’d end up killing one of us. Possibly both, him and then myself to avoid prison.”
Brigid clears her throat. “Wife is already off the table. Completely off the table. That boy doesn’t need a wife. He needs a live-in mother, and that is not going to be you.” A pregnant pause slips into the static, and I don’t like it. “However…three and a half months of giving it a chance…then going debt-free?”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Penny murmurs. “He’s absolutely giving off little helpless puppy vibes, so not husband material, but also not unsafe.”
“Leading him on for money is incredibly dishonest. Maintaining this relationship for three months at such a capacity that he doesn’t break up with me before I get all the money I need to pay off my debts then saying ha ha no when he thinks I’m going to go through with marrying him is dishonest.”
“Is it though?”
“Yes.”
Brigid clears her throat. “But…is it? He kind of seems to like normal you, so maybe you don’t have to pretend. He can’t blame you if three months isn’t enough time for you to accept a proposal. You’ve told him the truth. If he wants to take you on a few dates and find out for himself, you’ve been perfectly honest.”
“Truly,” Penny chimes in, “to not let him find out for himself insults his intelligence, which is unkind. Get the told you so moment, or get the full amount to pay off your debt. Either option sounds great to me.”
I sag back into my couch cushions, realizing Penny and I have done just about an entire day in the mines. Except I’ve stopped moving forward, so she’s just running circles around me beside a neglected ladder to the next cave level. Once I’ve returned to my true form as a shrimp, I mutter, “That is the most depressing I told you so I can think of. I told you I sucked and we wouldn’t work out. I told you I was entirely disagreeable.”
“You said that an affront against your character wouldn’t bother you,” Brigid reminds me.
“It wouldn’t bother me. I’m just explaining that there is no joy to be found in this particular telling so.”
“Fair.”
“Do it!” Penny cheers. “Do it for me, please? Let me live vicariously through you. I’ve always wanted to date a rich man. I’ve been stuck with losers who have said no to dessert at restaurants a little too fast for a little too long. I am dying for a Coca-cola cake from Cracker Barrel and someone with enough spare change to get it for me.” She sniffs. “I would simply go feral for that kind of man. Do you hear me? Feral.”
The bar is on the floor. It’s embedded in the tile.
Why is my precious Penny dating the moles who would dig under it?
Brigid says, “As the happily married woman among us, I won’t ask you to do it for me. I won’t say that men aren’t wholly disappointing sometimes, even when you do love and cherish them, unto death. I will just confirm that you have been perfectly honest with him, and you can continue to be because I sincerely can’t think of an angle where this benefits him beyond accepting that he likes you for you. It’s one autumn. Can you stomach one autumn in exchange for a lifetime of being debt-free?”
One autumn.
One autumn of crippling embarrassment.
One autumn of dropping the customer service façade and being my raw, sarcastic, disagreeable self for a man’s perusal and judgment.
One exhausting, dreadful autumn.
“Fine,” I mutter. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow during lunch.”
Riveting spreadsheet. Are you aware I can access the edit history? You deleted HOT fourteen times.
– Finnegan
