She waved me off. “Please, Hayes, I’m an open book. I literally shared my last microneedling appointment on a Facebook Live.”

“That’s a face thing?” I asked as she reached forward to clink her glass against mine.

She nodded. “Anyway, I broke up with him when I realized that I liked the idea of us way more than the actual us. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said, taking a sip of wine. Her words hit me unexpectedly, almost like she was looking inside my brain and could see what I was thinking—that this was exactly how I felt about the two of us.

“We looked great together. We did all the right things. But, god, when we were alone, we had nothing to talk about. It never felt easy. And I was bored. I hate being bored.”

She looked directly at me, and in a panic, I blurted out, “We’re going to be growing lettuce at our new office.” Which was the completely wrong thing to say in the moment. But I needed to get out from under the feeling that was brewing in me.

I’d been so hung up on this idea of being “incompatible” in relationships that I never took a second to think about what it really meant to connect with someone. I wanted it to be easy, like Serena has said. But more than anything, I didn’t want to be bored. I craved the excitement, the passion, and all the highs, of course. Yet I wanted to be with someone for the deep, dark lows and the hard stuff too. I was looking for a roller coaster, a relationship that left me wanting more, always ready to go again. But could I handle that? And could I even be that for someone else? I wasn’t sure, and I took a giant sip of wine, focusing on Serena’s story about her latest training run, and pushing aside questions I’d rather not think about.

An hour later, satiated and slightly buzzed, Serena and I stood next to each other at the sink. I rinsed; she loaded the dishwasher. I clicked the faucet off as we finished, and Serena put a dishwashing pod in and shut the door, actually hitting it closed with her hip—like some sort of starlet in a movie—before pressing a couple of buttons and setting the machine whirring. She casually draped a hand on my neck, nails scratching gently where hair met skin. “So,” she said, her voice lower than I’d ever heard it, her face tantalizingly close to mine, “what should we do now?”

*  *  *

“Wait, you had a nice dinner, which she made. And you started making out in the kitchen. And then because it was going well, you panicked and left?”

Perrine said the words through a mouthful of lettuce.