Page 14 of Flirting with Forever

Mary frowned. Her thirty-one-year-old son who found her age so repellant it was literally the first thing he’d commented on. And now Mary was on this strange waterslide, where around every bend, there was Estrella shoving some young thirtysomething guy in her path. She wasn’t going to complain, but maybe she should hedge her bets a little bit and date some older guys on the side as well.

“Hmm?” Mary pulled herself from her thoughts to answer Fin. “Oh. Estrella.”

“I love that woman,” Fin said emphatically.

“Me too. I just wish she had better taste in men. She’s been trying to set me up lately to varying levels of failure.”

“Weren’t you going on a date with her son?” Kylie asked as she ambled into the room and tossed herself into the overstuffed armchair.

This was one of the many things that Mary loved about coming over to Tyler’s house these days. Used to be, in the past, his condo was homey but a little too quiet. It was one-note. Only influenced by Tyler and his presence and his choices. These days, though, since he’d gotten custody of his fourteen-year-old sister, Kylie’s backpack overflowed with textbooks in the corner, her sweatshirts hung on the coatrack. She looked utterly at home as she draped her feet over the opposite arm of the fluffy chair and shoved her face into her phone, barely waiting for the answer to the question she’d just asked.

Mary liked to see Kylie acting like a teenager. When she’d first come to Brooklyn around Thanksgiving, she’d been like a mini adult, all her corners tucked in and nothing-to-see-here-folks. But the other day, Kylie had even been five minutes late for work, and it had thrilled Mary to her core. Not that she rooted for her employees to be late, but that Kylie wascomfortableenough to be a little late. That was real progress.

“What’s that?” Fin asked, bolting upright and smiling when Tyler tugged her back down into his side. “You went on a date with Estrella’s son?”

“Dateis a relative term in this case.” Mary sighed. She hadn’t told anyone about her mishap with John, but she figured this was as receptive an audience as any. “I arrived at this super fancy restaurant in Greenpoint, he told me he’d hoped I’d be younger, I picked up my jaw off the floor and left. End of date. Not exactly a love story for the ages.”

“You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.” Tyler sat up, a rare anger burning in his eyes. “That’s the rudest freaking thing I’ve ever heard. Mary, I hope you shook it off immediately.”

Mary avoided Fin’s light gaze, knowing that her intuitive friend was going to see both what she did say and what she didn’t. “It got me down for a few days. But I’m back in the swing of things. Anyways, he came to the shop to apologize, and I think he really meant it.”

“Oh. That’s who that guy was?” Kylie asked, looking up from her phone. “The mean-looking one with Estrella?”

“Yup.”

“What iswrongwith men these days?” Tyler groused. “If they aren’t hitting on women in the subways, they’re telling them they look old in fancy restaurants. Would it kill my species to have a little commondecency?”

Fin and Mary exchanged wry eye contact. Dating a woman as beautiful as Fin had opened up Tyler’s eyes to some of the cruder ways that men treated women. Especially in a city as anonymous as New York. But Mary suspected that most of his incredulous griping had to do with the fact that Kylie had apparently announced a few days ago that she was going to homecoming with a date. A male date. Tyler had yet to recover.

“You’re a prince among men, my love,” Fin said drily, kissing her boyfriend on the cheek.

“Ty,” Kylie said, rolling to one side, “you’re telling me that you never, not even once, hit on a woman on the train?”

Tyler responded, and Mary let the noise of the bickering siblings fade fuzzily into the background. She picked up her phone and reread the text that she’d gotten a few minutes ago from John.

She pursed her lips. The part about his belief system and innocent until proven guilty, she actually liked. But it was the last line that really irked her.Date him if you want but just remember that I voted to veto.

What a grouch. The surliness rose off each word like curlicues of smoke. She frowned at his text.

Your warning is duly noted, counselor. Consider your duties in this matter to be fulfilled.

She sent off the text with a twisting flourish of her pink-polished finger. There. That would show him that she could be just as snappish as he could be.

But...

The truth was that shecouldn’tbe that snappish. Not with any level of comfort. She flipped her phone over so that she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. Mary smoothed her hair down and grimaced when she found one of her thumbnails between her teeth. No, no, no. She’d just gotten a manicure. She wasn’t going to give in to that old habit.

Ugh. She picked up her phone and glared at the lack of a response from him. But what had she been expecting? Him to immediately respond to a rude text from her? Just because he was naturally rude didn’t mean that he was any good at receiving rudeness from others.

Mary set the phone down again, let a few more minutes pass and then finally gave in to temptation. She opened up their thread, carefully selected a sunshine emoji and sent it off, instantly feeling a little better.

CHAPTER FIVE

“MARY, IHATEevery single one of your employees besides Kylie,” Fin groaned as she leaned dramatically against the checkout counter at Fresh.

“I have to say that right now I agree,” Mary replied. Her part-time employee Sandra was currently a no-show for her shift, and Mary was stuck behind the register for the third Friday night in a row.

“Need tacos! Was promised tacos!” a voice, comically weak, called from the floor at Mary’s feet, hidden from view behind the register. It was Via, Fin’s best friend and one of Mary’s favorite people on earth. Mary had invited Fin and Via over to her apartment for a girls’ night complete with at-home pedicures, the aforementioned tacos and—the silver bullet—the promise that she’d let them help set up her new dating profile on an app mostly featuring older men.

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