Page 81 of Problematic Summer Romance

Conor:Isn’t it the second in a short time?

Maya:The third. The dentist wants me to start using an electric toothbrush, but I’d rather die.

Conor:Why?

Maya:What if the head falls off and I carve a hole in my cheek with the little iron thing underneath.

Conor:That is a very rational fear.

Maya:What if it explodes in my mouth.

Conor:At least you’d be done with the cavities.

That night, he sends me soup, and three different types of electric toothbrushes.

Two years, four months earlier

Austin, Texas

The plan is genius, and absolutely unhinged. So much so, only Jade could have come up with it.

“I didn’t, though,” she tells me. “It’s called emotional fluffing. It’s a thing.”

The problem is: I haven’t had sex in nearly a year, and I miss it.

The problem is, also: I haven’t wanted to have sex with someone who isn’t Conor since the day I met him again in Scotland.

“Here’s what we’re doing,” Jade says with a straight face. “You set up a hookup with some Tinder guy who looks like he might be decent in the sack. Half an hour before—wait, how long do your calls with Conor last these days?”

I lower my eyes.

“Okay,two hoursbefore, you call him. You talk to him. You get horny from talking about…What do thirty-six-year-olds talk about? The fall of the Berlin Wall? Goldman Sachs? Then you go over to the Tinder guy’s place, and bam.”

“Bam, indeed.”

The plan isabsolutegenius. And if it ends up not working out, because I call Conor right when we said I would, because we end up fighting about the best way to restructure academic publishing, because he makes me laugh with a story from his rowing days, because I forget to check the time until approximately forty minutes after I was supposed to meet Tinder guy, because I absolutely do not want to have sex with someone who isn’t this man…

Well. That’smyfault.

Two years, one month earlier

Austin, Texas

“I always regret it, afterward,” I tell him the night of my fight with Jade.

He takes a deep breath. “I know.”

“I really didn’t want to. I just…I get so angry, and it’s like I stop thinking clearly, and my brain zeroes in on the meanest thing I can say. And the worst part is, my therapist has given me all these breathing techniques, all these ways to de-escalate, but sometimes I get so mad that my brain short-circuits and I legitimatelyforgetto use them?” I rub my eyes. “I have to be a bad person, right? Good people don’t lash out like I do.”

“If you were, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, Maya.” He’s in Canada, but he feels soclose. “I think it’s normal, wanting to hurt someone who hurt you. You’re working on it, and Jade knows you. You said you already made up, right?”

“Right.” I hug my knees to my chest. “What if I do it to you, one day? Will you hate me?”

Soft laughter. “I don’t think that’s possible, Trouble.”

Two years earlier

Austin, Texas

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