Funny Feelings (21)

I tell her about our lunch. About the touches. About how tightly wound I’ve become and how I don’t see how to navigate my way through this without things getting carried away.

“Okay. Don’t take this as me being dismissive, but, when’s the last time you got some?”

“Myself and I had a beautiful time together just this morning, thank you.” An elderly man frowns at me in the produce aisle before I turn away.

“Even though it’s often more productive, that’s still not the same, friend. It’s not the same as the weight of a man or his attention. That push and pull in tension. It’s not the same as the heated glances and sweet compliments, the small gestures of affection and long kisses.”

I look down at the Brawny man on the paper towels in my hand and sigh mournfully. “Yeah…” I place Brawny in the kid’s seat facing me. “Jesus, Miss, I’m lusting after cartoon men. I’m a wreck.” Also, it’s not just lust that I feel for Meyer. It’s so much more overwhelming than that.

Unfazed, she asks, “What’s the worst that could happen, Fee?”

“I tell him that I love him more than a friend, that he’s everything to me, I make him wildly uncomfortable, and it ruins our friendship as well as our working relationship. I lose him and Hazel.”

“Damn. Okay. Well, honey, I don’t think that will happen. Meyer’s hard to read, so I can’t say that I think he feels the same way with any kind of confidence, and I’m not some fake friend who would say that to you without knowing. But, there’s a chance that that’s the case, babe. You just have to decide what you can handle. I also think if he doesn’t feel the same, that yes, it might change your relationship, but he’d never cut you out of Hazel’s life.”

“So, go to the movie?”

“Sure. Go to the movie. Make him fall in love with you while you’re at it.”

“No pressure, huh?”





Meyer’s never been one to compliment my appearance, aside from the odd detached remark here and there. The one thing he has acknowledged before, with a gruff compliment that seemed to surprise even him at the time, are my little red boots.

So, I wear them. They’re more of a red-brown, and are these little patent heeled things, with a squared off toe and a crocodile pattern. They were the first frivolous thing I ever bought for myself when I booked a show that sold actual tickets.

I put on a dress and a leather jacket, and I do everything else in my routine as if it was a normal date. I remove every hair from my body below the neck, slather myself in a variety of creams until I could be used to refract light, and take care with my makeup. And, just like a date with any other man, I act spastic from the moment Meyer shows up on my doorstep.

“Hello, sir,” I say when I open the door. I polish off the weird greeting with a little half butler bow.

“Uh—hey? You having that mental breakdown you promised me you wouldn’t have?”

He’s in his normal attire. A gray henley and dark jeans, with some brown variation of sneakers. I’m suddenly overcome with the realization that I don’t know what his feet look like. What if he has hairy hobbit feet? Or even a millimeter too-long toenail? I know he’s been barefoot around me before because we’ve all been to the beach and swimming plenty of times. Maybe that’s a good sign that there’s nothing overly strange about them since I can’t bring them to mind? But I’ve never seen the man wear a flip flop. Is Meyer a flip flop man? Why does that idea of that kind of gross me out? Am I discovering a shallow prejudice of mine? An anti-foot fetish, if you will?

“Jones. Blink, please. You have crazy eyes.”

“Sorry!” I look up to find him suppressing a smile.

“You about done?”

“With what?”

“Your one allowed freak out for the night,” he shakes his head at me.

I sigh. This is Meyer. At the end of the day, I love him. And I’m a self-indulgent woman that wants to let myself enjoy this, consequences be damned.

I am also the type of woman who buys bags of Mini Cadbury Eggs at Easter time and tells myself I’ll ration them throughout the year, though, so perhaps I should be a bit more wary of the consequences of my indulgence.

Nah, fuck it.

“You look nice,” I say, and the smile that touches my lips is genuine. The returning curve in his soothes my frazzled nerves.

“You look beautiful. I’ve always liked those boots.”

“Thank you,” I reply before I turn around and lock up. “I—um, I knew that you did.”

His jaw rolls once before he nods over his shoulder to the car.“You ready?”

“Yep.”



I smile stupidly when he slides into the car after me, as I inhale his familiar scent. It’s pleasant and comforting, clean and seductive. It’s petrichor and his fancy sandalwood soap that I know he loves, because he has the same in a hand soap version in all of the bathrooms at his house. It’s him.

When we pull away from the curb we fall into our typical easy small talk. Everything continues along merrily, with him making me laugh and me making him smirk and shake his head, until we get to the amphitheater.

“If this were a real date, would you let me pick which food truck to order from?” I ask. It’s fancy food truck night at the outdoor theater and I’m already cycling through analysis-paralysis on what to order.