We Can't Keep Meeting Like This

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

It’s not even a smile—it doesn’t touch his eyes. It’s smile-adjacent. It shares a zip code with a smile, maybe goes to the same school and shops at the same neighborhood grocery store, but it is decidedly not a smile.

he was posting about it, interspersed with couple photos that were so clearly staged but inspired comments like wow otp and omg you two are the CUTEST. Meanwhile, I did… things I definitely wasn’t posting about on Instagram.

I look him right in the eye and summon all my saltiness. “Yeah, sorry, been busy.”

Sir, I am awed by your flexibility.

It’s just my fucking name. It shouldn’t make me react like this.

The van used to have the vanity license plate MTRMNY, for matrimony, until I pointed out to my mom that it looked like we were hard-core Mitt Romney supporters. She ripped it off with the kind of superhuman strength usually reserved for a parent whose kid is pinned underneath a car. But the name stuck, and we still call it the MTRMNY-mobile.

“No idea. All my dating took place in a car or on a couch without anyone’s parents home.” Julia snorts. “So classy. That’s my favorite thing about you. How classy you are.”

Whoever I was in a past life really fucked things up for me.

My legs tangle in the skirt of the dress, and for a moment my life flashes before my eyes. I’ve had a good run, I suppose. There are worse ways to go than death by embarrassment at age eighteen.

“Not sure if I mentioned that.” He definitely did not. My lizard brain would remember.

I’m trying to remember the last time I saw him in short sleeves, which makes me think back to walking in on him changing, which then makes me unable to think about anything else. Cool cool cool. Love those intrusive thoughts.

“The tower,” he says thoughtfully. “Right, how could I forget? The first time I met you, you said, ‘I’m Quinn and I live in a castle.’ ”

“Thank you,” I say. “I honestly thought you were casting a spell on me, so that’s great to know.”

“I play at weddings. Most couples aren’t requesting death metal.”

His mouth is warm, and he tastes like frosting and spearmint gum and all of our past summers.

I want to bottle up that sound. Make it my ringtone. Learn it on the harp.

Julia announces she has to go to the bathroom. “Quinn’s coming with me,” she says. “Sorry, she’s not potty trained yet,” I tell Tarek and Noelle

“Jesus. How old are you again?” “Thirty-seven. I have great skin.” “I like you,” she says. “You’re going to be there, right?”

“O-kaaay,” she says in this high-pitched, very amused-sounding voice, and I fight the urge to hurl myself out of the car Lady Bird style.