“Oh, please, Viktor, you know I can’t leave you for even a day.” He starts to preen, but she finishes with, “You don’t behave for any of the other staff.” Viktor smirks, and I suspect that’s the absolute truth. Arielle’s willing to play along with Viktor, though, and teases, “What could you do for us? Seriously.”
“You know, I wasn’t always the epitome of a silver fox you see seated before you today,” Viktor says, leaning back in his chair to puff out his bony chest. His flannel plaid shirt still hangs loosely on his thin frame. “Back in my prime in the eighties, I’d have been able to leave you both more than satisfied on my waterbed! It was all about the motion of the ocean.” He mimes a wave with his gnarled hand.
Arielle taps me on the shoulder to make sure I’m paying attention as she delivers her big blow. “Wow, Viktor!” she says with fake wide, innocent eyes, “I didn’t know they had water beds back in the eighteen eighties!”
“Ooh, elder abuse!” Viktor rasps, clutching a hand to his chest and grinning. “See what I have to put up with, Riley? Oliver Twist had it better than I do! Oh, the humanity!”
“I’m sure you give as good as you get, Viktor,” I tell him, and Viktor grins. “Maybe give more than you get, too.”
“Get me a couple of Viagra, and I’ll definitely give it,” Viktor says before narrowing his eyes at Arielle. “This girl won’t let me have any . . . stupid doctor’s orders.”
“Viktor, you try sneaking Viagra in here again and I really will tape your mittens on!” Arielle says with just enough seriousness to let Viktor know she isn’t quite joking. “You know what it’ll do to your heart, and though I’ll deny having said it, I happen to like having you around here!”
“Ah, you’re no fun,” Viktor says, but he’s smiling at the compliment. Getting back to the game, he picks up one of his checkers and hops three of my pieces. “And that, I believe, is how it’s done. King me, Riley.”
I look at the board, and I’m pretty sure that in all that discussion, he slid a piece on me. Still, I king his piece, losing a few minutes later when he traps my last piece with a nifty little snare maneuver. “Sharp as ever,” I tell him, offering a good sportsmanlike handshake. “Rematch next week, Viktor?”
“Ah, giving me a reason to live another week, I see,” Viktor says dramatically, standing up and reaching for his walker. “And what a reason too. See you next week, Sunshine.”
Viktor turns and slowly makes his way toward the outdoor patio and the warm sunshine there while Arielle and I watch him go, chuckling. “Can you believe him?” I ask when he’s out of earshot. “Old enough to be our grandfather, and he’s still trying to hit on us!”
“Men,” Arielle says sagely. “Once puberty kicks in, they’ve got two things on their minds. Food and sex. Both of which you could use some more of. Speaking of, have you checked the app today? Your hook get any fishies?”
She gets up as she asks, putting her finger in her cheek and pulling herself toward the kitchen. I grin and follow her.
“Maybe . . .” I tease out.
“Oh, this I’ve got to hear. But we work while we talk around here, so help me with this rice pudding. I’ll scoop, you top with raisins. Five each. So help me, if you put too many or too few, there will be rioting in the dining room and I’ll have to tranq them.” She’s kidding. I think.
We wash up, put on gloves, and Arielle grabs an ice cream scoop. Plopping a serving of white mush from the big, steaming pot on the stove into a dish, she sets it in front of me and I carefully place five raisins on top.
“Talk and work. Tell me about your DMs,” Arielle demands, never missing a beat with her scooping.
“I had a lot of messages, actually, but the one we looked at last night—the ninety-six percent match that I messaged?” I’m explaining like Arielle forgot overnight despite her near-perfect memory and her nodding like a bobblehead. “He messaged me back.”
“Yeah!” she yells. “That’s good, right? I mean he’s not creepy or anything?” The worry on her face tells me that she really is concerned about that.
“If you thought there might be creeps on there, why did you tell me to do it?” I sputter.
She shrugs. “There are creeps everywhere, Riley. What are you gonna do? Never date because the dude from the produce section might be a serial cheater? Because he might also be a loyal, faithful, monogamous guy who wants to treat you like a queen. Same with the guy from an app. Possibly awful, potentially amazing.”
“Fine,” I agree, knowing she’s right.
“So, which is he? Mark, right?”
“Yeah, Mark. I think he might be amazing. Or at least he seemed like it for the three hours we talked this morning.”
I drop that tidbit, knowing that like a grenade, it’ll detonate in three, two, one . . .
“What?!” Arielle screeches, stopping her multi-tasking to stare at me. “Lead with that next time, bitch. Start with ‘hello, Arielle’ and then follow up with ‘I talked to a man online for three hours and might finally get laid’ next.”
“Arielle! It wasn’t like that,” I argue. “We weren’t sexting. It’s not Tinder, that’s the point! We talked about. . . stuff.”
“What sort of stuff? Give me the play by play so I can make sure you’re not getting catfished.” Arielle’s insistence is written clear as day in the set of her lips and the focus in her eyes. She might’ve gone back to scooping rice pudding, but her full attention is on me, and she’ll go Mama Bear in a heartbeat if she thinks her cub—that’d be me—needs protecting.
Slowly, it all pours out.
I tell her about Mark’s first brush-off, and she scoffs, singing an off-skew version of Ariana Grande’s song, “No, thank you. Next.” The song is complete with a stop-right-there palm, a turned away face, and an aggrieved huff.
“It was okay. He immediately messaged me again, apologizing and asking for a second chance. And when we really started talking, it was like we had this connection.” My explanation seems to soften her by degrees, especially the part where he apologized.
Arielle hums along as I tell her about the rest of our conversation, asking questions here and there.
“He really didn’t ask you for a picture or even what you look like?”
“Nope. I kinda wanted to ask him, but since he didn’t and it’s kind of the point of the app, it just didn’t seem right.” I shrug, though now that Arielle’s brought it up again, I’m massively curious about what Mark looks like. “Do you think I should ask him tonight? But if I ask him, he’s going to ask me, and it’s not like I can send him a picture. It’s too risky. He might know I’m Riley Sunshine.” I talk myself into and out of that idea in a mere split second.
“I think you’re right,” Arielle says. “Talk to him again and see where it leads. Maybe nowhere, and then it won’t matter. And if the next few conversations go well, you can meet in person and explain the fake name and fame.”
Fake name. I’d kinda forgotten that part. Mark started short-handing Rachel for the letter ‘R’, and I’d read it as Riley automatically. There will definitely be some things to discuss if we do meet up, but not yet.