“Tyler called.” I lowered down into the seat beside her. “He’s running late.”
Her face scrunched. “Is Tyler the nose picker?”
“He had an itch.” Or at least that’s what I was telling myself. It was better than admitting I’d caught him digging for gold.
“Call me crazy, but I think picking your nose on a first date is a red flag.”
“It was our second date.”
“Yeah, that’s the key piece of information in that scenario,” Molly stated flatly.
Molly had not been a fan of any of the guys I’d dated recently. To be fair, I hadn’t either, but I was doing my best to keep an open mind. I wanted to find love. I wanted the sort of love that I’d just spent an hour and a half watching people talk about in the documentary we were gathered to watch, called, What is Love? I wanted the sort of love that I’d just witnessed when Jackson had got down on one knee.
So, for the last couple of months, I’d been putting myself out there. Did I want to date a bunch of nose pickers? No. But I’d always been of the mindset that if I didn’t like something in my life, I changed it. I had my mom to thank for that outlook.
Maggie Calhoun had always been a fan of positive thinking and motivational sayings. Decades before Etsy or Pinterest, every morning she would write down a new Morning Motivation on a chalkboard she’d gotten from a yard sale and hung up by the front door, so we’d see it before we headed out into the world. And even before the book The Secret had come out, she raised us to believe that if you wanted something, you had to envision it and basically think it into being.
“You know, this is strike two,” my sister said matter-of-factly.
“What?” I asked, not sure what she was referring to.
Molly continued looking down at her phone but lifted up her pointer finger. “Strike one, he picked his nose.” Her middle finger popped up making a V. “Strike two, he’s late.”
“He had a meeting that ran long.”
“On a Saturday?”
“He’s in real estate.” I could feel that my eyes were still misty, so I dug into my purse for a tissue but came up empty. Normally I was stocked, but an ungodly hay fever season had drained my supply. I hadn’t expected the movie to make me so emotional but hearing all of those people talk about the great loves of their lives had hit home to me. “Do you have a tissue?”
Molly finally glanced up from her phone, when she did her brow furrowed. “Are you crying?”
“Yes.” I sniffed. “I’m not a robot. Unlike you I have feelings.”
“I have feelings. At the moment, I’m feeling hungry. Wasn’t there supposed to be food served here?” She glanced around, still not answering whether she had a tissue or not.
“Food? That’s what you’re thinking about.”
“What are you thinking about?” She appeared just as confused as I was.
“Are you serious?” I splayed out my arms. “Look around you.”
In the past couple of years, it seemed like everyone we knew was falling in love and getting married. Case in point, our brother Bentley who had been a very confirmed bachelor was marrying one of my best friend’s Maisy Turner. Maisy’s little sister Delilah had married Sawyer Briggs. And Sawyer’s brother Jackson, who just got engaged was just the latest Briggs to be hit by cupid’s arrow. Out of the nine Briggs siblings, only two were still single.
“What?” My sister stared blankly at the sea of couples in front of us.
“Everyone is finding their lobster.” Normally my Friends reference caused my sister to roll her eyes. She hadn’t been a fan of the show, but since we’d shared a room growing up, she’d been forced to watch it.
But this time she smiled. “See, you’re thinking about food, too.”
“How are we twins?”
“I ask myself the same thing all the time,” Molly monotoned.
Molly and I might look identical with our long blonde hair, hazel eyes, and eyebrows that made my mother’s Greek heritage proud, but that is where our similarities ended. Our personalities could not be more dissimilar. It was as if we’d shared all of our physical genetics but split up the rest of the genes.
I followed in my mother’s footsteps and believed in positive thinking, dream boards, and actively pursuing your heart’s desires. My sister felt like everything that was meant to be, would be. She didn’t put any effort into making things happen, and to my eternal frustration, it seemed to be working for her. She’d gotten hired directly after college at her dream job. She’d fallen into a steal of a real estate deal and bought her first house at the age of twenty-two. And she never sat at home alone on Friday nights unless she wanted to. Not that she ever dated anyone for very long.
I’d been the one to receive the romance gene. Molly had never been a fan of love or any of its byproducts. Whenever I got a crush or had my heart broken, she’d look at me with a mixture of confusion and pity.
It didn’t help that our oldest brother Brady was a womanizing pig. But at least our other brother Bentley had managed to shed his man-whore reputation. He was madly in love with his childhood nemesis, who happened to be one of my best friends. The two were walking down the aisle in just a couple of months.
I thought their story was romantic, Molly didn’t care. It wasn’t that she was unfeeling. My sister was actually extremely sentimental, just not when it came to people. She treasured memories and mementos and had two storage units full to prove it. I, on the other hand, could care less about things. All of my emotional currency was spent on people.
One person, in particular, had cost me the most. Holden Reed. But it made sense that unrequited love would be expensive. He was the reason that the film had hit me so hard. I had the sort of love that was talked about, it just hadn’t been returned.
“Do you really want to find your lobster?” The pitying look was back on my sister’s face.
“I just want…” Something different. For the past year, I’d felt like I just kept repeating the same day over and over. I saw the same clients, I hosted the same events, I texted the same people. If variety was the spice of life, I’d been living a flavorless existence. All my life I’d wanted to be a mom and have a family, so I’d tried to jumpstart that process by dating. Unfortunately, every man I met paled in comparison to the one man I knew I’d never have. “I don’t know what I want,” I admitted.
“Maybe figure that out before you drag someone else into your mid-life crisis.”
She had a point. And I was actually working on that. My mom always said that life doesn’t have a remote control, if you want to change the channel you have to get up and do it yourself. And since love wasn’t something I could control, I’d decided to add a little excitement into my routine by stepping out of my comfort zone.
“I think I’m going to try naked yoga,” I whispered.
I’d been toying with the idea for a few months and saying it out loud felt dangerous. That was how boring my life was. Just telling my sister that I was going to do it gave me a thrill.
“Eww!” she exclaimed, sounding like Jimmy Fallon. “With the old people?”
“Shh!” I hated that that was how she referred to the restorative yoga class I taught, even though most, or I guess, all, of my students were seniors. “No!”