Page 2 of Every Step She Takes
And there was the Zillow executive who insisted we sit on the same side of the booth, like a serial killer. At minute fifty-two, he started stroking my love handles while telling me that he loved women “with a little something to hold on to.”
But for every walking red flag, there was a decent-enough man too. I’ve been on sixteen dates since Christmas, endured nine butterfly-less first kisses, and when the timer ran out onmy obligated hour for each date, I found a polite, if abominably dishonest, reason to leave. Like I always do.
And at a certain point, when you can’t make it longer than an hour with sixteen different men, you start to wonder if maybe the problem isn’t with them at all…
But now my thirty-fifth birthday is in four days, so my sister pulled out the stops with the seventeenth man, who is currently taking another sip of beer.
Grant Foster owns a successful tech start-up, volunteers at an after-school program that teaches kids how to code, and eats dinner with his grandparents once a week. He has a border collie and an electric car; he’s financially stable; he goes to therapy andtalksopenly about going to therapy; and he’s conventionally handsome, with Chris Hemsworth’s physique, Chris Pine’s eyes, and Chris Evans’s smile. He’s the best parts of all the Chrises, and he’s the kind of man Ishouldbe attracted to, minus the current tangent into tech-mansplaining hell.
I don’t know even what my boxes are, but I know the man sitting across from me checks all of them, and I’mstillcounting down the minutes until this date is over. (Thirty-two. I check again while he’s explaining the difference between blockchains and Bitcoin mining.)
Part of me wants this date to fail. I want the clock to run out on my sister’s scheme, for another birthday to come and go without my life changing in any significant way, for my family to never again ask about why I haven’t metthe oneand finally abandon me to my self-chosen spinsterhood.
But there’s also a part of me that wants Grant to be thatone. I want this to work, because that would be so much easier than the alternative: questioning the reason why itdoesn’twork, why it never works.
“I’m boring you,” Grant says suddenly. I didn’t think he was paying any attention to me, so his abrupt recognition of myexistence causes me to spill some of my wine. He must’ve caught me checking the time again. (Twenty-nine minutes.)
“I’m sorry. I tend to get tunnel vision when I’m talking about my passions.” He bashfully glances down at the scuffed table, and I feel a surge of compassion for the guy.
“It’s okay,” I reassure him. “Just wait until I get going on the intricacies of reupholstering a chair. Besides, I totally wanted to know more about non-fungus tickets.”
“Non-fungible tokens,” he corrects.
“Tokens, yes, right. I wanted to learn about those.”
He flashes me the Chris Evans smile. “No you didn’t.”
“No, I really didn’t,” I admit, and he laughs at himself. Most menneverlaugh at themselves. Grant rolls his broad, muscular, Chris Hemsworth shoulders, and they strain against the fabric of his Henley, andmaybethis can work.
“I want to know more about you,” he says, leaning forward so he can hear me over the noise of the bar. “Tell me: Who is Sadie Wells?”
And shit. I want to go back to the lecture on fungus tokens, because I don’t have the faintest fucking idea how to answer that question.
I swallow hard and try to hide the stress hives breaking out along the backs of my hands. He’s nottryingto trigger an existential identity crisis, but I’m nothing if not an overachiever.
“Who is Sadie Wells…?” I repeat as if I’m ruminating on my answer, not inwardly wishing I had a self-destruct button. Because somewhere around date nine back in March, when a marine biologist who looked like Jonathan Bailey didn’t stir anything in me, I started to realize I don’t really know myself at all.
“Who am I?” I take a long drink of red wine to stall. It’s a Thursday night, and the bar on Queen Anne Hill is crowded with thirtysomething, working professionals. Confident, successfulpeople who probably know how to answer basic questions about themselves without breaking out in stress hives.
“Yeah,” Grant continues to prod. “I want to know therealyou.”
It’s a noble goal, to be sure, but sixteen dates in four months have taught me that evenIdon’t know who Sadie Wells is. I check the time again.Twenty-seven minutes.
“Your sister mentioned you’re a small-business owner,” he says after another stretch of awkward silence.
“Yes!” I blurt, desperate for this conversational lifeline. “I run an antiques store.”
He eyes me over his pint glass. “Aren’t you a little young to work with antiques? Isn’t that sort of…”
“For old people? Uh, yeah. Mostly.”
“So how did you end up running it?”
At least this is a question I can answer, no identity crisis required. “My great-grandparents bought a Victorian house in Queen Anne when they came here from Ireland in the twenties, and my Nan inherited it. She was obsessed with preserving the original detailing of the house and hunting down antique furniture to match its history. When my grandad died when I was six, my Nan used his life insurance payout to convert the downstairs into an antique and recycled furniture store. And then when she died, she left both the house and the store to me.”
“Fascinating,” he says, and the handsome bastard seems to genuinely mean it. “Tell me more about the store.”
I’d rather not. “Uh, it’s not… very interesting.”
