Forget You Know Me by Jessica Strawser

Author:Jessica Strawser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

18

Liza was going on a hiatus from her hiatus.

In other words, a date.

Her problem with men had never been getting them to ask her out. It took exactly one day on the job to run into Henry, to whom she delivered a courtesy side of French fries just on the right side of crisp, and exactly one minute after that for him to invite her to dinner someplace “even fancier.” She’d been waiting for it, even fishing for it, but still she hesitated as if teetering on some point of no return. The airport was small enough that this could be akin to dating a coworker. Although the risk, she supposed, was his; should things go south, he’d just have to find someplace less convenient to eat.

“Do seven things have to go wrong for you to have a disastrous date?” she’d teased. “I’m a little rusty, so if the bar is much lower, I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge.”

He’d answered with a look of exaggerated nervousness that made her laugh.

More often, her dates were near-certain one-offs, easy come and easy go and might as well have fun along the way. She’d thought of it as a good thing when her attitude toward them changed some months ago, when she’d stopped so readily settling for so little—only now she’d swung too far the other way, to a place where every decision seemed too big. Earlier today, she’d been tripped up at the grocery store when Steph asked her to run in for a premade salad on her way home. There were, Liza counted, forty-two different kinds of prewashed, bagged salad. Forty-two! And that was not counting a middle row where the inventory had been replaced by recall notices warning of a listeria outbreak. Had all the rest of these brands really avoided the same crop of romaine, or radish, or whatever the culprit? What if contamination in the others just hadn’t been discovered yet? What if she picked the wrong one and Steph—being pregnant and susceptible—was affected worst of all? She’d stood frozen, while other shoppers reached around her and mumbled their excuse mes without a second thought beyond the sale price. Ultimately she went home empty-handed, pretending to have forgotten to stop. Let Luke choose on his way home instead. His odds would be the same, but at least she wouldn’t be the one responsible if not in their favor.

Thus, on the specifics of the date, she voiced no opinion. Let Henry pick; it would tell her something anyway about who he was and, perhaps, what his expectations were. She was so eager, in fact, to defer that she thought fleetingly of how nice it would be for this relationship to take hold just now, and of how disastrous, for the flip sides of all the same reasons.

Liza had restocked only on lounge clothes and androgynous restaurant manager wear, so Steph let her raid her closet for the occasion.

“It’s the least I can do!” her sister-in-law gushed, breezing through the guest room door with a selection of hangered dresses over her arm.

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