A good-on-paper boyfriend from a parallel universe pays Eve’s dimension a visit. He’s on-time, early even, and his charm does not appear to be store-bought. She would know— she’s shopped the aisles for long enough to know when an apple’s manufactured, GMO-injected, too-shiny, too-perfect, and too-rosy-red to be the real thing. Nothing tastes as good as it looks. When she fills her basket on Sunday evenings, only the rotten ones are leftover. But she takes 3 or 4 home with her anyway, because the bowl on her counter is empty and somewhere between 16 and 24 she embraced the notion that any would do, any was better than none at all.
Eve doesn’t get nervous for first dates anymore— she’s more nervous at therapy. She was too scared to audition for the high school play but found she could play the supporting act to any leading man just fine. She’s got it all down to a science. The Reformation top that hits her waist at its smallest but hides the tiny red blemishes that dot her shoulders and the permanently sun-damaged décolleté from spending about 50 pages too long in the sun, about 16 times too many. Wide-leg denim that stretches against the ass she found only after Prozac helped her finish her breakfast and allowed her to go back for seconds. Two spritzes of Jo Malone perfume in Sage & Blossom, from the travel size and not the full bottle, because she had a hard time believing she had really earned anything nice for herself, even though without a shred of uncertainty, it was clear that she had.
Good-on-paper boyfriend intrigues her mostly. Sure, Eve is used to waking up to the chorus of men that live in her phone. She lines them up neatly and waters them tenderly, careful not to drown them in her love or let them starch in the sun too long. But she’s also used to cleaning up after their messes and writing their to-do lists. She lets them nest in her home and thought if she stocked her fridge with vegetables and bone broth and held cold compresses to their faces, maybe, just maybe, one day, they would hold her back. She almost returned the gold bracelet that sits on her right wrist, above her lucky hair tie, the one with the small diamond she paid for all on her own, because an ex-boyfriend told her it was too expensive for a girl her age to own. Too gaudy. It wasn’t his money and yet, she twists the stone with guilt, wondering if she deserved anything nice at all.
Many dates have been forgettable, and there are some that leave Eve feeling like she’s living in her own personal Groundhog’s Day. But Eve’s a seller after all, at least, that’s what the early career aptitude test she took her junior year told her. And so when she found that all it took to close a deal was to bat her eyelashes, thickened to a dark black nothing like the wispy blonde they were after a long shower, to laugh at all the right places and even some wrong ones, and make just one playful touch, in between drinks 1 and 2, well— then that was that. A seller she would be. But Eve was really too young to know what she was doing when it all started, when she graduated from AIM chatting her crushes and squealing at Omegle with her friends, covering their giggles with tie-dyed pillows and biting their soft pink sweatshirt sleeves. No, she didn’t quite realize what she was doing when, at 19, she downloaded Bumble in her too small twin-sized bed in her childhood bedroom and stayed up until 2:30 AM swiping long enough for her thumb to grow sore. Eve grew up devouring all things love related— her parents met in a classified advertisement in Rolling Stone magazine after all. She’d tell you so proudly, on the back of the bus ride home from camp, because she wanted love too. Sure, the one her parents showed her was far from perfect, and she spent more nights a month than she wanted to admit to anyone at school hiding in the upstairs bathroom, where she emptied and re-organized the drawers under her sink because it made her calm.
She knew love was messy. She wanted it anyway.