Dating Without Novocaine by Lisa Cach

Author:Lisa Cach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Dress Ink
Published: 2002-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

Pink Panties

“I can never decide,” I said.

“Neither can I,” Louise said, hunkered down beside me in front of the dessert cabinet at Papa Haydn’s, the restaurant in NW Portland that was the mothership for dessert lovers.

Cakes and tortes and layered meringues seven-, eight-, nine-inches high sat behind glass, their names either written in chocolate on the edge of the plate or in gold pen on cards tucked into an edge. There were low, dense, chocolatey things, fruit tarts, gelato, even a baked Alaska.

“I have to go look at the menu again,” I said, and we went back to our table to read the details of what we’d been looking at.

It was Friday afternoon, and Louise had called in sick to work this morning, taking a mental health day. Her employer was the only one I knew of that actually let people do that, but I suppose, being a crisis center, they needed their employees to be fully functioning.

And Louise was not functioning. There was a shopping bag of excruciatingly expensive lingerie sitting beneath our table, waiting to be returned to a boutique down the street. It had turned out that she was not going to have a reason to wear it.

We placed our orders, and settled down to that business of women: talk.

“Last night we went out to dinner again,” Louise said. She had shadows under her eyes. They did not go well with freckles.

“What was this, the third time?”

Her eyes shifted away, and she fiddled with the pot of tea the waitress had brought her. “Fourth time, and we went to see a movie Monday.” She looked at me. “I was afraid to tell you. I thought you’d scold me.”

“Who am I to scold? As if I’ve done anything wise recently.”

“Pete still hasn’t called?”

“No. Not that I expected him to.”

“But still. I mean, he seemed like he liked you, didn’t he?”

“I thought so. Apparently only enough to try to sleep with me, though,” I said.

“Men. I just don’t understand them.”

“You have a master’s in psychology.”

“Lot of good it’s done me.”

“So what happened? You went out to dinner last night with Derek and…?”

“And I was getting impatient. I’ve been thinking about him all the time, I can’t concentrate on my work, I’m daydreaming about our future together, about kissing him, wondering what it would be like to have sex with him… But I didn’t know what he was thinking, what he was feeling, if anything. I mean, he’d been going out with me, yeah, but he hadn’t made any definite moves. He’d say things that I thought meant he was interested, but then nothing would happen.”

“Mixed signals.”

“Exactly.”

The waitress appeared with our desserts: Louise had some sort of eight-layer chocolate cake with a gold-flecked coffee bean stuck atop a swirl of dense chocolate frosting, and I had panna cotta, an Italian custard with raspberries and sauce.

“So I decided to try to be subtle,” Louise said, after she’d taken a couple bites and we’d exchanged samples. “We were sitting at the restaurant, waiting for our food, and I told him about these dreams I’d had.

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