Page 61 of Later Bloom

“Mm. Is he?”

“So have you noticed the humongous crush you’ve got on him yet, or do we have to keep pretending still?”

Aubrey can’t really decide whether the question comes as a surprise or not. She smiles though there’s something like sadness in the curve of her lips. “At this point I almost wish that were the case. He really is nice, isn’t he?” She means it so earnestly.

“Mm. Fine. I’ll respect it. Listen, will you do me a favour and go chat with Renée over there?” Florence points at the younger woman who sits on her own, on the other side of the room. “She’s my cousin, and she’s very sweet, and you’d have a lot to talk about.”

“Like what?”

“Ask her if she’s got a boyfriend.”

“You ask her if she’s got a boyfriend.”

“No, I mean—she needs advice. Girl talk, some words of wisdom. I can never find the right words with her. I don’t know, I don’t have a way with things the way you do. Go on. Please.”

“This is so weird,” Aubrey hisses on her way to the girl, whose name she now realizes she’s forgotten. She takes a seat on the short, fluffy ottoman next to Florence’s cousin and offers a stiff smile.

“Hey,” she says with a wave of her glass, desperate now to cling on to this distraction.

“Hey,” the cousin echoes.

“Florence sent me over. She said to ask you strange, personal questions.”

“She said that?”

“More or less. I’m Aubrey.”

“I’m Renée.”

“Renée! Yes, Renée. So, you like your cousin’s party?”

She must hardly be twenty, though she looks much cooler than Aubrey did at that age. Thinking back on this decade feels so strange. She’d felt so old and wise at the beginning of it, like maybe she had yet to figure things out but she was an adult at last, and she was ready for adult things, and her friends spoke of marriage and houses and babies already. But who she was at twenty was so far from who she ended up being at twenty-five, at twenty-eight, and she looks at twenty-year-olds and thinks, Jesus, how young they are. In motion at all times, always on the edge of shifting. And she feels like one of the older people she’d looked at when she was younger and thought were so lame, that they didn’t get it at all. But they got it, very much.

Renée smiles politely and shifts in her seat. “I thought maybe I might meet some people if I left the house, so. Here I am.”

“Meet some people?” The words taste so familiar on Aubrey’s tongue.

“Yeah, you know—my cousin knows some cute guys. And I get to drink for free.”

This makes Aubrey smile. She recognizes in Renée a hint of Florence’s spunk. “Why do you want to meet someone?”

Aubrey senses a reluctance to answer in the way Renée searches for something in the room. So she adds, “Sorry, you don’t have to tell a random person this, obviously. I just think I might relate.”

“Ah, well. I’ve just never met a guy that I really cared for. Ever, I mean. And I’m twenty, so. My folks are starting to get to that point where they wonder if they’ve failed me, or whatever.”

“Mm. Like you should’ve had your first boyfriend by now, and you haven’t, and they think somehow it might be their fault.”

It feels so easy, slipping into this conversation. It reminds Aubrey of when she’d first met Florence. Renée stares at her shoes. “Right.”

“You know that’s where your cousin’s at, too.”

“No, yeah, I know. That’s not helping with my parents. Makes them think it might go on for a while still.”

“Right.” Aubrey drops her chin in the palm of her hand and looks at Renée’s dark hair, her makeup, her pretty dress. She wishes so much to hear Renée say that it doesn’t matter at all, that she doesn’t care and she hopes actually that it would go on for a while. That there’s more to life than finding a partner and having firsts at an early age. She so desperately seeks a different version of this narrative.

“Maybe it will,” Aubrey says softly. “It’s gone on for a while for me, too.”

“Really?”