The Ex Talk

“It’s hard out here sometimes, and seeing Mia and those photos made it worse. All my friends from high school, we lost touch. I tried to get dinner with one guy, but he had to take a work call halfway through and we never rescheduled. And then one girl and I tried to meet up, but then her boyfriend got territorial and thought I was moving in on her. It’s even weirder because it’s not like it’s a completely new city for me. You’d think it would be easier. But I don’t have friends here, not really, and my siblings are all busy with their own families. I’ve tried at work, but almost everyone has a partner or kids and I just feel . . . lonely, sometimes.”

It brings me back to Monday night. Not the kiss, but his drunken confession. I turn so my body is facing his, and then I graze his denim knee with a few fingertips. Touching him suddenly becomes easy, or I’ve become braver.

“Hey. You’re not alone. You have your fake ex-girlfriend slash current cohost slash fellow inept pasta chef with you.” I chew the inside of my cheek, debating how personal I want to get. He laid it all out there—I might as well, too. “I’ve never left Seattle, so it’s even more pathetic that I feel this way, too. I’ve really just had my mom and my friend Ameena for the past ten years, and a few boyfriends that never turned serious. So maybe we can be alone together.”

This time when he smiles, it lasts a little longer. “Thank you. It actually feels good to tell someone, after all this time. I guess I’ll have to get used to it if I ever want to date again.”

“Oh please, you’re twenty-four. You’re not a cat lady quite yet.” I scrunch up my nose. “It’s ridiculous that there’s no cat lady equivalent for guys. Fucking misogyny.”

“Cat man?”

“Sounds like a very gentle superhero.”

He puts on a dramatic newscaster voice. “He flies! He catches bad guys! He saves cats from really tall trees!” A pause. “So. What’s your hang-up, then? Why are you doing a show about our fake relationship instead of being out there having a real one?”

“It’s not exactly an easy thing to admit, but . . . I tend to get attached. Extremely fast.” I reach out a hand in hopes Steve will let me pet him while I tell this story, but apparently Dominic gives better scratches. “I was the first one to say ‘I love you’ to all my exes, and it was always too soon. They freaked out and bolted.”

“And you meant it, every single time?”

That makes me hesitate. “Yes? I’ve never stopped to really analyze it.”

I don’t tell him my biggest fear: that I wasn’t deeply in love with any of them. That I so badly wanted something beyond the small family my mother and I have that I was eager to jump into anything—even if it wasn’t the right time or the right fit. I craved those three little words so much that maybe I forced them from my own lips, hoping to hear them in return.

“It’s why I haven’t gone on a date in a while. It can be exhausting, giving that much when the other person is barely giving anything.”

“None of this sounds like a bad thing,” he says. “Difficult, yes, but not some fatal personality flaw.”

“Maybe not with the right person.”

“Then I guess you haven’t found him yet.”

We sit in silence for a couple minutes, a not entirely uncomfortable one. So of course, I decide to make thing awkward.

“There’s something else I want to ask, but I don’t want to sound too forward.”

“I doubt it can get more forward than what we’ve already talked about, so please, go ahead.” He gestures with the cider bottle.

“You’ve only dated Mia.” I bite down hard on my lower lip, wondering if I’m going to regret this. “Is she . . . the only person you’ve slept with?”

He nods, a blush creeping onto his cheeks. Suddenly he looks very, very twenty-four.

“What about you?” he asks, taking a pull from his cider. “What’s your . . . number? That’s how they say it, right? Your number?”

“I don’t know who ‘they’ are, but sure, I guess.” I run through a mental list. “Seven.”

“Ah,” he says, his brows flat, his expression impossible to interpret.

“But all the bravado,” I say. “That stuff you said at the station about your ‘raw sexual energy.’” No, of course the exact wording wasn’t imprinted on my brain.

He waves it off. “It’s easy enough to lie about it when the world expects men to be a certain way about sex.”

“The world is gross. I wouldn’t have judged you. I swear. Your taste in music, yes, but your number . . . definitely not.”

“I appreciate that.”

I shake my head, still wrapping my mind around everything. “I honestly assumed for a while that you were a bit of a player.”

“Sleeping with someone feels like a big deal to me,” he says, settling back into the couch, as though he’s grown more comfortable with the subject matter than he was fifteen minutes ago. “I don’t think I could do it casually. Maybe it’s because I’ve only been with one person, but I don’t know if I could ever have sex without it feeling personal and intimate.”