I wouldn’t let my sister near any of the men I was in with, not with fucking riot gear on. Especially not Mateo. Besides that point, he’d been shacked up with Tally for almost a year now, and apart from the paranormal sex dungeon they seemed to be sleeping in, she was a good girl. I was happy for them.
My mother dating, on the other hand, made my skin itch. I knew the possibility was always there; my dad had been gone for over twenty years. There was no reason she shouldn’t, but the idea of someone slipping into my well-earned shoes and assuming caretaker over my mother without even meeting me first didn’t sit right.
“She said she’s dating someone?”
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch.” Mateo chuckled, standing from the bubbling water and sloshing it over the edge. He dried off, grabbing another beer from the fridge before sitting down next to me. “Forget your mom, man. You can call her yourself, don’t kill the messenger. I want to know about you.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re going to be disappointed.”
“Don’t tell me that,” Mateo complained. “Not one fuck? The whole week?”
“You say that like I can just go around collecting women to have sex with like fruit in the produce section.”
“I set up the apps on your phone specifically designed for finding people to fuck. It’s like fishing in a man-made pond. You’re gonna fucking catch something. Close your eyes and cast a line, Pike. Jesus Christ.”
I did cast a line. I spent basically all of my free time in Colorado, actually, scrolling through the thousands of pictures of women on those apps. My problem had never been finding a person, it’d been finding the right one, at the right time. I did the dance when I was in my twenties. Fuck, the first half a decade I was in the Army it was a revolving door. You get orders, you deploy, you make your fucking bed with the sheets so tight to the mattress you can bounce a quarter off of it, and then you get a girl naked in them. Rinse, repeat.
Then my buddies started getting married to the women they were sleeping with, and it felt like I was all of a sudden playing the game wrong. I wanted what they were having. Those sappy fucking military homecomings where wives came whipping down the airport terminal and jumping into their husband’s arms. Showing up unexpectedly at a Little League game in my camo. A newborn baby meeting Dad for the first time.
I jumped into the first relationship to present itself, and seven years was a lot of time to spend with someone for it not to work out.
“Don’t make me say it, Pike,” Mateo mumbled.
“It’s not about her.”
“It’s been three years, and Vanessa is a fucking bitch for what she did. I’m sorry, but that’s the only way to say it. You gotta shove it to the side, get back on the field. It’s time.”
At first it was about Vanessa, but then it became a total disconnect with dating. The pool for women my age was thin. They were either married with kids, or divorced…with kids. All the rest were twenty-somethings, and all social interaction started and ended online. I’d had the same conversation so many times the answers all started to blur.
Until Ophelia.
“I did meet one girl,” I said, nonchalantly.
“See, you’re holding out on me!” Mateo shoved my shoulder. “What was that like? It’s been a while. Did you at least give her more than a two-minute ride?”
“I didn’t have sex with her, Cap.”
But man did I think about it.
“What do you mean? You took her out?”
“I met her on the flight here, actually. We sat next to each other on the plane.”
“So she lives here?”
“No, Colorado.” I finished my beer, and the second I discarded it, I pulled my hat off and ran my fingers through my hair. “She’s an elementary school teacher. Her parents are divorced, and she feels detached from the family. Absolute knockout. Smart, funny, confident, she’s got a little feist in there if you push the right buttons. A ten. More than a ten.”
“All right, I’m gonna stop you right there.”
I glanced over at Mateo who was watching me with a crease in his brow.
“I love you, man, I really do. But you’re supposed to be on a rebound tour, not learning the family dog’s name. You have to stick your feet in first, Pike. Don’t get attached. Especially not to a girl who lives in fucking Colorado.”
“I’m not getting attached.” My chest panged. Ophelia was a hundred percent the kind of woman I would want to pursue—not just have a one-night stand with. It wasn’t my fault she was also the first woman since Vanessa that I actually liked enough to explore something physical.
“I just don’t want to see you how you were when it went to shit with the ex again,” Mateo said. “You’re a hopeless romantic. You’ll go on a few dates with this girl, sleep with her, fall head over heels, and she doesn’t even live here, Frankie. You’re setting yourself up for failure. You might not like my advice, but I say nip it in the bud before that happens.”
I clicked my tongue against my bottom teeth. The last thing I wanted to do was stop something good before it started. When I left the airport, I’d already decided to reach out to Ophelia sooner than later. My finger hovered over the message button on her dating profile the entire Uber ride back to Pompano. I had to mentally castrate myself not to seem like such an eager teenager.
She’d be around the area at least through Christmas. But now with Mateo breathing down my neck about it, I was taking all the plausible disasters into consideration.
Ophelia wasn’t the kind of girl you rebounded with. She was the kind you took out to the pier after dinner and kissed in the mid-day monsoon instead of running from it for cover. Cap may have been right that I got attached too easily, but even more than that, trying to justify seeing her any way as a rebound felt borderline disrespectful.
“Don’t look so deflated.” Mateo mussed my hair like a brother would. “We’re meeting Tally out at Jugg tonight. We’ll find you something to play with the old-fashioned way.”
A lone drop of rain fell at our feet, followed by another, and several more after that. My roommate stood from his chair and collected the empty bottle out of my hand, walking toward the sliding door inside. “Grab a shower, wash your balls, and…find a Sharpie.”
“A Sharpie?” I squinted.
“Don’t worry about it. Have I ever steered you wrong?”
“I stopped counting.”
The door closed behind him as a humored, “Yeah, yeah” snuck through the crack.
I scratched at the day-old stubble shadowing the underside of my jaw and stared out at the yard as the sprinkler system kicked on ironically in the onset of a storm.
I’d be better off leaving the girl on the plane. She was visiting friends anyway; it’s not like she’d leave them to spend time with a stranger. The entire scenario screamed Dateline. It was unfortunate, I hated it—but it was what it was.
A crack of lightning turned the gray sky white as I stood for the door, my clothes covered in a thin sheet of rain. I pulled my phone from my pocket and opened Ophelia’s profile again, swiping through the pictures one after the other. My thumb hovered over the message for a second too long before I sighed, and then deactivated my account altogether.