Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It(10)

I give Nora my honest thoughts.

“Doesn’t it feel kind of nice that a man would risk dying in his sleep to spend the night with you?” I would go through this experience ten times over if it meant I’d be having sex in my twenties, and I’d do it with a smile on my face. I’d even buy one of those breathing robots to keep in my room.

“No,” they all say in unison.

“That is actually the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” Jonathan says to Nora. Everyone chuckles in solidarity, seeming to agree with his sentiment.

“I woke him up at five a.m. to tell him I was late for Pilates,” Nora says.

“Why didn’t you tell me you started doing Pilates!”

“Because I didn’t start doing Pilates, Meg.”

“At least it makes a funny story?” Alex shrugs.

“It happens to the best of us,” Nora says as she turns to Jonathan. “Remember Angela from sophomore year?” she asks, and Jonathan groans in response.

“Was that the one you found hiding under your bed a week after you ended things with her?” Alex asks.

“No, that was Jen.”

And so begins the roundtable of dating horror stories.

I have protocols in place for when these types of conversations arise, which, considering we’re all supposed to be in our Sex and the City era, is pretty often. Usually I navigate these situations by relocating to the Pac-Man machine outside the men’s restroom. Sometimes Jonathan even brings loose cash for me just for this purpose.

But tonight is different. Tonight, I stay at the table. Tonight, I force myself to listen to everything I’m missing out on.

Alex recounts his recent hookup with the Postmates driver who delivered his chicken Caesar wrap.

Meg contemplates if she should accept her terrible boss’s offer to set her up on a blind date with his son.

Jonathan informs us that Raegan, an obsessive old flame whose number he ended up having to block, recently found his work email.

My mind starts to wander in the middle of Nora’s impassioned speech about her new idea for a dating app. Something about men needing a letter of recommendation from at least three women before being accepted.

“You okay, Pheebs?” Jonathan asks as Meg accepts a glass of red wine from Jerry.

I was thinking about the letter in my bedside drawer.

“Yes, sorry,” I tell him. “My mind’s a little all over the place.”

“What’s going on?” Alex asks, and the genuine concern in his eyes has me spilling my guts in an instant.

“I got a letter in the mail today,” I tell them with a sigh. “It was from myself; I wrote it when I was eighteen. For a school assignment.”

I cast my eyes down toward my lap, wishing my Rugrats tee had a hole I could pick at.

“How fun!” Meg exclaims, having lost her ability to read the room somewhere between the tequila and the wine.

Alex gives her leg a reassuring pat. “Well? What did it say?”

Through gritted teeth, I tell them. “?‘Lose your virginity.’ Period. ‘That’s all I ask.’ Period.”

The table falls silent, and it’s the kind of silence that I’ve become all too familiar with over the years. The kind where no one knows what to say.

“Not the periods…” Jonathan tries to lighten the mood.

I put my head in my hands, and everything comes out muffled. “It’s like I knew back then that it was never going to happen. And I keep thinking about telling eighteen-year-old Phoebe that she’s still a virgin at almost thirty. She would hate me. And I don’t blame her. I hate me, too.”

“Hey.” Jonathan pulls my arms away from my face. “She wouldn’t hate—”

“And Sandy wants me to focus on all the positives in my life and make a list of all my accomplishments, as if that would help.”

“I think that’s a great ide—” Nora starts.

“It’s an insult to the art of list making.”

“I think that when you finally relax about the whole virginity thing, that’s when it’s gonna happen,” Alex says.

Meg nods in agreement. “You know what they say…” She pauses to think. Right when I’m starting to think she doesn’t actually know what they say, she gets there. Kind of. “A watched pot never blows up.” Alex slides her wine away from her when she’s not looking.

“Meg is right,” Jonathan says. “You’re too focused on it. You have to take a step back and let it play out the way it’s supposed to.”

I let his words sink in.

“And what if it never plays out?” I ask. “I can’t take a step back and wait for something that might never happen. There must be something I can do. Ideally within the next thirty days.”

Nora laughs to herself. “How to Lose Your Virginity in Thirty Days, starring Phoebe Berman,” she says. “Now, that’s a movie I’d pay good money to watch.”

I freeze, my eyes locked on Nora while the neurons in my brain start to fire at a rapid speed. “What did you just say?” I ask her.

Nora pales. “Too soon to joke? I’m sorry, Phoebe, I—”

I cut her off. “No, Nora, you’re a genius!”

I walk over to the other side of the table and kiss her on the mouth. My face-framing strands of hair get stuck in her lip gloss.