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Hunter
“What do you think about him?” Lydia asks, turning the screen of her phone toward me again. My eyes slide over and meet a profile pic of a guy with a smirk plastered across his face.
“Want my honest opinion?” I ask.
“Of course,” she says.
“He looks like an asshole.”
Lydia sighs and slumps in her seat beside me. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. But they all kind of look like that. I’m just trying to find the least assholey among them.”
“There’s no filter for that?”
Lydia laughs. “God. I wish.”
Lydia and I are sitting at our usual tables at the coffee shop we work in weekday afternoons. We started meeting here to work about six months ago, when Lydia quit her 9-to-5 to write full-time. I’d already been doing freelance dev work for a couple years by then, and when Lydia suggested that we start meeting up at coffee shops, I was all for it. Working alone in my apartment had been getting old.
Now, after lunch everyday, I pack up my stuff and head out to meet Lydia at the coffee shop, where we spend the afternoon working side by side. We tried out a few different coffee shops when we first started doing this, but this one was by far our favorite. It was never too packed, they played decent music, and the coffee wasn’t shit.
I slide my eyes back over to my laptop screen, finish up a quick email that I’d been in the middle of writing, hit send, and then look back over at Lydia. Her laptop is open in front of her, her current work-in-progress up on the screen, but her eyes are still focused on her phone. She’s back to swiping through profile after profile.
Lydia’s older sister, Hallie, is getting married this weekend, and Lydia is determined to bring a date along. She told me she wants to avoid the inevitable pestering she’ll get from her relatives if she shows up alone. I get where she’s coming from—I hate relatives asking me why I’m not seeing anyone, either—but I also wish it wasn’t stressing her out so much.
Leaning over to get a better look at her laptop screen, I clear my throat and start to read aloud the last paragraph she wrote.
“His hands were big. Muscular. She couldn’t help but think about those hands roaming over her curves, gripping onto her—”
“Hunter!” Lydia quietly shrieks, and slams her laptop shut. “Don’t read it out loud. We’re in public.”
“But what was she thinking about his hands gripping onto?”
“Nothing,” says Lydia. A pretty shade of pink rises to her cheeks.
“Nothing? Really? Sure seemed like it was something. Like maybe her br—”
Lydia gives me a severe look. “Stop.”
I grin. I love teasing Lydia about the books she writes. Don’t get me wrong, I think she’s incredible and I’m proud as hell of her for the success she’s had so far.
But I’m still going to tease her forever for writing steamy romance novels.
Lydia and I have been best friends since grade school. I don’t have a clue why we became friends so easily. We just did. And our friendship has never gone beyond being platonic. Not that she’s not pretty. Honestly, if I met her for the first time as the twenty-three-year-old I am today, I’m sure I’d amp up the charm and try to get her number.
Things are good the way they are, though. She’s a fantastic friend.
“Too bad you can’t take one of the guys from your books to the wedding,” I say, settling back against my chair.
“No kidding,” says Lydia. She returns to her phone and swipes through several more profiles before sighing. “Shit. I think I’ve swiped through every guy in a fifty-mile radius.”
I hear the defeat in her voice and feel bad for her. I hate that she’s stressed about it. And of course I want to do whatever I can to help her out.
“I could go with you,” I say.
Lydia looks up from her phone, her eyebrows raised in surprise. “What?”
“I could go with you,” I repeat. I give her a shrug. “Doesn’t seem like there’s any good options on that app. So let me take you.”
Amusement lifts the corners of her mouth.
