Happily Never After

by Lynn Painter

“I hate rom-coms.” “For real?” he asked with raised eyebrows. “They’re just so unrealistic, as if written by morons who’ve been injected with lovesick hopefulness and had delusions of romance shot up their asses.” Am I slurring? “They’re actually part of the problem, if you ask me.”

“There are seven point eight billion people in the world,” I said, shaking my head at the absurdity. “How can you ever be sure you’ve found the one ‘true love’ of your life when you haven’t even met one percent of the people on the earth? You could have the exact same relationship with millions of them as you do with your significant other, simply because of compatibility.”

“But I do think love is a gamble and most people walk away from the table with less than they brought.”

For some reason it was just easy to be myself around him and not get caught up in my own head.

but I rather enjoyed figuring her out. She was like a stubborn puzzle who didn’t want to be solved, which made me want to toss all the pieces into the air. And then solve it anyway, just to piss her off.

“So I’m sure it sounds like a lie,” she said, nearly glowing with contentment, “but I am genuinely—truly—so damn happy to be single. The freedom to do whatever I want, to go wherever I want, to do things only for what I get out of them—I’m obsessed with it. I’m not sure I’ll ever be willing to lose this kind of independence again.”

“What was with that?” she asked, leaning against the side of my truck. “One second we were taking a selfie and the next . . . boom, chemistry.”

She genuinely didn’t believe in love. A lot of people said things like that, either to be funny or because they were jaded, but Sophie Steinbeck thought love was no different than Santa Claus. Sophie truly believed that the concept of romantic love was a brain trick.

I was a cynic who had no interest in trying to find The One, but Sophie wasn’t a cynic at all.

Why can’t I not care about all the little things that pop up on a daily basis and remind me of what I thought we’d be?”

Yes, she was gorgeous and funny and absolutely worthy of feelings.

She turned around and looked up at me, and suddenly I thought, What a good fucking morning. Because there I was, on a warm summery morning, surrounded by the slowly awakening city, and her pretty face was smiling up at me. Good fucking morning to me.

Historically, I wasn’t a snuggler. In my opinion, an adult couple needed a king-size bed so they could each sleep without having to touch the other. Sex was sex, and sleep was sleep—the two didn’t need to intersect.

But now you consume me, Soph, every single part of me, and I like it.