“I was like this.” She demonstrates by smacking the air in front of her as hard as one can possibly smack air. She shrugs a shoulder, saying with humor, “That’ll teach the store to put a wall in the way when I’m trying to stare shamelessly at all the dogs walking by.”
“Walls should be removed when cute pooches stroll the streets,” I say, a little deadpan, and she laughs too. She doesn’t take herself too seriously, facile with a dry sense of humor, my favorite kind.
But it’s January’s favorite kind too.
January’s quite good at dishing out the dry, the droll, and the deadpan.
She’s good at dishing out vegetables too, and that’s not something I thought I would enjoy, but I definitely like them coming from her.
She’s also great at serving up honesty and openheartedness. Our conversations have been the kind that can spill endlessly into the night.
“Some are definitely hard to resist,” Missy says, and I blink, reorienting myself to the moment.
Hard to resist?
Like my neighbor?
Wait. No. That’s wrong.
We’re talking about dogs that are hard to resist staring at, not neighbors who are hard to resist talking to, thinking about, and wanting to kiss.
Wanting to kiss all over. Wanting to taste, to savor, to please.
Taking a drink of my tea, I zero in on the woman in front of me. The woman who is taking the time out of her day to go on a date with me. The woman who popped over from Duck Falls to have a meal. I want to be respectful of her and keep my mind and heart open to all of the possibilities.
Since the possibilities won’t happen with the woman commandeering my thoughts.
“Tell me what you like about Duck Falls, Missy,” I say to the redhead.
She talks about all the little things, like the glitter on the sidewalks and the ducks in their pink wading ponds, then the sheer number of women-owned businesses. “We like to joke that somehow Athena is responsible for the town. No one can really figure out why there are so many more women here than men. It doesn’t actually make any sense.”
“Magic?” I suggest playfully. “Also, I’m absolutely not complaining that there are more women here than men.”
Missy flashes me a bright smile. “I bet that doesn’t bother you in the least.”
This is the moment when a date should tip over into flirting. Into banter. Into talk about being good in bed or banging in the kitchen, like January and I teased each other about at the IKEA café.
Yet I can’t seem to sit on that end of the seesaw with Missy. Don’t want to tilt it in the direction of innuendo.
Because I don’t actually want to have that banter with anybody other than my neighbor, and that is getting to be a problem.
I’m three dates into my quest, and already my stupid heart craves exactly what it can’t have.
“I just love Duck Falls,” Missy continues, wrapping her hands around her iced vanilla latte. “I love all of the ducks, the people, and the train tracks, and I love the women-owned businesses, like the yarn shop and the bookstore and the hair salon and the carpenter.”
I sit up straighter, keying in on that, like a dog cocking his head when his person opens a bag of kibble. “Carpenter?” I ask, doing my best to seem casually interested.
Not deeply, intensely, ridiculously interested.
“You know! Your next-door neighbor. January. She’s the best. She actually started our board game and beverage nights.”
I try to suppress a grin that threatens to take over my whole face. Now this date is getting interesting. This date is going where I want. Perhaps Missy is my dating insider, about to serve up details on the woman next door. Details I want to gobble up. “What’s board game and beverages?” I ask, as if I’m only mildly intrigued by that tidbit, when I am fascinated with every morsel.
“It’s a really cool club for the female business owners of the town. We all try to get together once a month, and we play board games and have beverages. The whole group of us—me as the lingerie shop owner, and then Alva, who owns the hair salon, and Nina with the boba tea shop. And the best part is we make up crazy rules on the fly. Like, a couple of weeks ago, we were all playing Monopoly, and January had this funny idea,” Missy says, and I’m on the edge of my seat, elbows on the table, eyes wide open, ears pricked. I’m listening to every word because I want to soak in everything there is to know about my next-door neighbor.
“Alva was being a total stickler, so we thought it would be so much more fun if we randomly banded together and bought groups of properties and charged her higher rent when she landed on them,” Missy says, grinning the whole time.
