Page 95 of After the Kiss (Sex, Love & Stiletto 1)

I move back over to the ad.

He must have dozens of replies.

My Wednesdays are long; they start an hour early for a meeting with my staff in Teen Collections and end an hour late to accommodate a tutoring program. What if right in the middle of that long Wednesday I sat with this man in the park, kissing and touching him like a living fantasy?

If I didn’t like it, if I didn’t like him, if he turned out to be crazy, or awful, or a bad kisser, or a creep, I would just miss a single Wednesday and he would be gone. Part as strangers. Celebration Park is bustling at lunch hour with downtown traffic, particularly during this mild, dry fall. We wouldn’t really be alone.

I flip back over to his picture. I wish he were looking into the camera so I could see his eyes. Was he uncomfortable with the person he was grinning at, was that why he held himself so close? Or was it this meeting he was at? Why kissing? Maybe he was with someone and that part of his relationship had fallen away—I have a friend who complains that her husband never really makes out with her anymore and she misses it.

I don’t realize I’ve clicked the email link until the box pops up. MetroLink assigns each post an anonymous email address that forwards to the poster’s actual email, but posters can see the sender’s real email address. I hesitate. My address is [email protected] It’s clichéd, in addition to being immature, but setting up another account is not conducive to the impulsive nature of this email.

The idea that his in-box is likely clotted with replies actually helps. What’s one more he won’t answer? As I start typing the subject line, I suddenly realize I could always just sort of stalk Celebration Park some Wednesday until I saw him in person, get a better sense of the man who wants to spend a lunch hour every week kissing a stranger.

Of course, maybe it isn’t just Wednesdays. I have the sudden fanciful notion that maybe on Mondays he meets a stranger to just chat. Tuesdays, he meets another for handholding, then Wednesday he meets one for kissing, and so on, until Saturday. Saturdays he meets a woman for fucking only, completing the entire mating dance with six different women with an excruciatingly prolonged bout of foreplay. Sundays, of course, are his day of rest.

I can’t stop giggling, and try sounding out a dirty version of the “Monday’s Child” poem, until I realize that Wednesday’s child is “full of woe.”

I finish the email, only trembling a little.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Wednesdays Only

I’m certain you’ve filled the position, but it’s late (or very early) and I’m intrigued despite the judgment I should possess staring into the second half of my third decade. My IM handle is “lieberries” on villagemail.

When I send it, my breath comes out in a whoosh and my heart is pounding in my ears. I don’t really expect him to answer, but I open my villagemail account anyway and turn my laptop’s volume up so I can hear the IM chime. I can’t quite work out why I answered him.

Sure, he’s pretty, and maybe I’ve gotten a little comfortable with things, or maybe the insomnia is getting the better of me. It’s been a long day that has stumbled into a sad and quiet morning. I can’t stop thinking about stupid things. My dad’s arm around my mom’s shoulders while she takes pictures of the Alaskan coast. Will and Shelley kissing in their tiny urban goat shed, their homemade cheese in their old beer fridge. I look at my thumb, where the sliver has made it red and swollen.

I pull my T-shirt over my bare legs. Sit up straight and try to think straighter. Practically speaking, meeting a MetroLink stranger for anything, but especially kissing, is not entirely safe. I touch my throat, where a blast of heat burns in the hollow.

Is it really something bad to have a life that’s safe? To wear skirts at a sensible length, to let a friend walk you home from the bar, to meet a man for coffee in a busy diner days before you’re alone with him on your stoop?

I look at his picture, how his cuffs bunch at his forearms.

While I value my contentment, I do apparently have a little fight left—for adventure, for capital “R” romance, for the certain cures that Shelley teased me about—somewhere deep in my lizard brain. At least the part that, say, motivates happy sea turtles to leave their familiar waters and heave themselves up on the scary beach and lay eggs. Not that my eggs have anything to do with this.

I resolve to at least lean back against the pillows and rest before I have to get ready for work, but as soon as I set the laptop on the nightstand, my IM calls out.

In the quiet room, my gasp sounds totally Victorian.

When I spin the screen toward me, the IM box is as real as can be, and the handle is no one I recognize.

GearTattoo: I haven’t filled the position. Still interested?

I kind of laugh/choke. I toggle back to his picture.

lieberries: I’m not sure. You’ve done this before?

GearTattoo: Yes.

Oh God.

lieberries: A lot?

GearTattoo: Three other people. Is that a lot?