Bad at Love by Karina Halle
I know it’s not going to work. That it’s completely silly and pointless. Maybe he knows it too. I think I just want an excuse to go out, to be with him and be something different to him for once.
Careful, a small voice pops up in my head. This is all to help you with other guys, not with him. Your friend is just doing you a favor.
I take in a deep breath and steel myself.
A favor, a favor, a favor.
Actually, I’m doing him a favor, too. I think.
When I’ve finished with my makeup, blown out my frizzy hair into sleek strands, and slipped on a pair of skinny jeans and a low-cut empire waist lacy top, I’m ready.
Except when I hear the side gate open and I know it’s him, I’m reduced to a fluttery mess. I give myself the once over in the mirror, satisfied that the bronzy smoky eye makeup is making my blue eyes pop like never before. I’m even wearing heels, three-inch stilettos that make me carry my thick thighs and butt better.
The knock at my door makes me jump.
I try to walk as calmly as possible over to it, heading down the two steps that separate the bedroom area from the living room and front door.
My heel slips out from under me.
There’s a second where I’m thinking, you can regain your balance!
But then I’m tumbling to the floor.
Splat.
“Ow,” I mumble, face against the faux hardwood. I do a quick once over in my head, checking every bone and muscle for injury before I start to hoist myself up.
Thank god Laz didn’t see that.
“Marina!?” I hear from the other side of the door, panicked, and before I can tell him I’m okay, the door opens.
I really need to start locking it when I’m home.
“Jesus,” he says, crouching down beside me, hand on my back. “Are you hurt?”
“I wasn’t until you stepped in,” I mumble, giving him a sheepish look through my hair. “And it’s only my pride.”
“Here,” he says, grabbing my arms and pulling me up to my feet like I weigh nothing at all. Well, almost to my feet. One of the shoes is on the step.
“Wow,” he says as he looks me over.
“Hot mess express, right?” I say as I hobble over to the stairs and pick up my heel. On second thought, I’m putting on a pair of flats.
“Perhaps those shoes do need some more practice. But you’re just the hot part, not the mess.”
I give him a wry grin as I pull the other heel off my foot. I immediately feel grounded. Can I just go on the date in bare feet? I mean, it is LA.
“Hot?” I repeat, secretly tickled pink he said that. No, tickled red. My face is hot and flushed.
“You look…” He trails off, still looking me up and down. “Gorgeous.”
A thrill runs through me. “Really?”
He nods, eyes fixed on my breasts, then my lips. He swallows. “Yes. Do you always look like this on your dates?”
“Actually, no.”
A look of surprise comes over his eyes. “So, you did this just for me?”
Oh fuck. I did do this just for him.
“No,” I lie. “I did it for Carl McNaughty.”
He grins his movie-star handsome smile and it hits my heart like an arrow. “Well, you’re in luck baby, because Carl McNaughty is here.”
I cross my arms playfully. “I don’t know, you still look an awful lot like Lazarus Scott, Insta Poet.”
Okay, he is a little more dressed up than usual. Slim black pants instead of jeans. Charcoal grey dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the collar undone. The leather jacket and boots stay the same. His hair is artfully messy, the kind of hair you want to run your hands through. His brows are dark and low, elegantly arched which always makes him seem moodier than he actually is. He’s taken his eyebrow ring out.
I point to it. “Your ring.”
“Carl McNaughty wouldn’t wear it on a first date. He’d say it’s too nineties.”
I bite back a smile. “Is this how you are on all first dates or is it just for me?”
He smirks and offers me his arm. “Come on, let’s get this show on the road.”
I stare at his arm. “You know, it’s the first date and a guy wouldn’t be offering his arm like this to a stranger.”
He gives me a dead stare.
“How about you go outside and start over again?” I say, pushing him toward the door.
“Promise me you won’t fall?”
“Shut up.”
He goes outside and I shut the door on him and wait.
He doesn’t knock.
“Laz?”
No answer.
“Carl?”
No answer.
Finally, I pull the door back open.
It’s empty.
Please don’t tell me he’s going to jump out at me because I can’t handle jumpy scares like that.
But then he comes sauntering around the corner from the direction of the pool.
He does this double eyebrow waggle combined with a head nod. “You’re Marina, aren’t you?”
Oh my god. Are we role-playing already?
“Uh. Yeah. That’s me. And you must be Carl.” I pause. “Wait a minute, why do you get to be Carl and I have to be myself? I was supposed to have my own name, wasn’t I?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Laz says smoothly, looking over my shoulder and into the studio. “Nice place. Can I come in?”
I give him an odd look. Is this how he is on a first date? He’s awfully pushy.
“No,” I tell him. “Let’s just get going.” I quickly reach back in and grab my purse before locking the door behind me. “Where are we going anyway?”
“You said on your Tinder profile that you love to laugh and you have secret aspirations to be a stand-up comic, so I thought The Comedy Store would be a great start.”
My Tinder profile doesn’t say that. But I’m also relieved, because that means he hasn’t found my actual profile, lest that come under judgement too. I may be using a photo from five years ago when I was twenty pounds lighter.
“Sounds great,” I tell him. Actually, it does sound like a lot of fun. Laz and I usually do the same old things out here, and in the Valley, we don’t venture over the hills as much as we should. So even if this whole experiment doesn’t go anywhere, and I still think it won’t, this is pushing us out of our comfort zones a bit. I guess even friendships can use a little spice every now and then.
Speaking of spice, Laz even smells different. Like cinnamon and something woodsy. It reminds me of fall in Ramona, when the weather finally cools down enough for me and my mother to slip on the sweaters and go apple picking.
I shake that memory out of my head and concentrate on Laz.
“You smell delicious,” I tell him.
He glances at me over his shoulder as we round the pool and head down the side of Barbara’s house. “Thank you. I never did get a hint of what you smell like.”
Suddenly he stops walking and I collide into his back. He turns around and leans in for a moment.
“Are you smelling me?” I ask, meeting his eyes, just inches from mine.
“Yes,” he says. “Is that weird?”
“Kind of,” I tell him. And I thought I was going to be the weird one here.
He nods and keeps walking, opening the gate and stepping through. I glance up at the window of the house briefly to see Barbara peering at me through the blinds. She doesn’t bother to hide, she just shakes her bony finger at me and I know she’s warning me to be careful. I may have mentioned my date to her the other night while we were watching Rebecca, and she may have told me it was all a horrible idea.
“So, what do I smell like anyway?” I ask him.
“Honey,” he says.
I roll my eyes. “Occupational hazard, I suppose.”
He shrugs. “I’ve always loved it.”
“Wait a minute,” I tell him as we approach his car. “You’re not supposed to know what I
He opens the door for me. “It says so on your Tinder profile.”
“I wouldn’t put that on my Tinder profile.”
“Yes, it’s right below the part where you talk about your inspirations of being a comic,” he says, his eyes begging me to play along.
This is dumb, I want to say but I bite my tongue for once and take in a deep breath, trying to get in the game.
“Oh that’s right,” I say and then thank him as I get in the passenger seat and he shuts the door after me, like the perfect gentleman he usually is with me.
Laz is a pretty clean guy, but even so, I can tell he tidied up in his car. It smells like his spicy scent. I have to wonder if Laz has always smelled so good and this is the first time I’m really noticing it.
“Nice car,” I comment. “I didn’t know you were a car guy.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about Carl McNaughty,” he says, starting the engine.
“Are you Irish? McNaughty sounds Irish.”
“Yeah, completely,” he says, faking an extremely believable Irish accent. “I come from a long line of McNaughtys just outside of Cork.”
I lean my head back against the seat. “I’d love to go to Ireland one day,” I say dreamily.
“Why don’t you?” he asks with such concern that I’m not sure if it’s Laz asking or Carl.
I shrug. “I don’t have the money really. Or the time. Every extra buck I get I’m putting it into my business. I don’t take days off. And that’s okay, because I’m young, ish, and I know that this is the time I need to burn the midnight oil. This is the time to work my ass off, to try and establish myself. Work hard while I can because who knows what the future brings.”
A beat passes in the air as we cruise down the street and turn onto Coldwater Canyon. “I feel the same way,” he says. “What’s worse is that no one takes what I do seriously, so when I’m working all the time, they just don’t see it as work.”
“And you think people take me seriously when I tell them I’m a beekeeper? Especially a full-time one?”
We’re both in the same boat when it comes to that one. The poet and the beekeeper.
“Be honest, Marina, is this what you’d talk about on a first date?” he asks after a few beats, studying my face before turning his attention back to the road.
I have to think on that. Though I don’t mention my job on my online profiles, it does come up during the first date. Naturally, I mean, “what do you do?” is a classic conversation starter. But I never go into the specifics of the job when it comes to anything remotely emotional or personal. I try and keep the conversation as shallow as possible, though I always try to educate them while I can. I like facts and will share them as often as I can. Who doesn’t like to learn?
“Did you know,” I say, twisting in my seat to face Laz, “that every bee in the hive has its own role and that role is entirely dependent on the age of the bee?”
“You’re starting to sound like Scooby.”
“I don’t know who this Scooby is but for example, when they are first born, they clean and polish the cells, starting with their own cell they just crawled out of. A few weeks go by and they move on from cleaning duties to feeding the brood, caring for the queen. They remove debris, handle incoming nectar, build beeswax combs, guard the entrance, and air-condition and ventilate the hive.” I pause to check if he’s listening. He is. “They don’t leave the hive until their final phase of life. They only have a few weeks after that, either acting as guards or scouts or collecting nectar, before they die.”
“So then the bees that you see flying around, pollinating flowers…”
“They’ve earned it. They’ve worked their little bee bottoms off their whole lives to have that privilege of smelling the flowers.”
He bursts out laughing.
“What?” I ask.
“You are so fucking cute, you know that? Little bee bottoms? I swear to god, I don’t know what to do with you.”
I’m beaming inside from that. “I guess it’s just a good metaphor. For life. You know, people see these bees flying around and assume that’s just what they do. People don’t realize all the jobs they’ve had, where they started from and the relentless work they’ve had to put in to get to that stage.”
He nods, rubbing his lips together. “You’re right. I didn’t realize.”
“No one does. They’re always so surprised when I tell them. But like I said, it applies to people too. Maybe people look at, say, you and assume that you’re just coasting along, they don’t know the struggle or what you’ve gone through in the past to get there. They look at this car and they don’t know it was a gift from Daryl.”
“It was never a gift,” he says sharply. “It was a set car and he got it for me to win favors with my mother, to pretend he was a good guy. It didn’t work. That’s why I had to buy it from him. It ate at my soul to drive it around otherwise.”
His jaw is tense. Whether the date is fake or not, this is the kind of topic we talk about when we’re drunk or tired at two a.m., not before a fun evening.
I switch the subject. “Did you know that there’s a queen, the drones and the workers. The drones are the males, who make up a very small percentage of the hive and they have zero purpose except to mate with the queen. They do shit all and when they’re done, the workers, the females, will literally drag them out of the hive and kick them out if they don’t leave voluntarily. They kick them out to die.”
“Is this a metaphor too?”
“Sometimes…”
“Is this what you’d actually talk about on a first date?”
“Yeah. Why?”
He raises his brows, gives his head a shake as he glances at me. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” I repeat, feeling defensive. “So? It’s interesting.”
“It’s not romantic in the slightest.”
“Romantic?”
“Marina, we’re on a date. A date means you’re interested in someone romantically, hopefully sexually.”
“I can’t talk about the bees? Just the birds and the bees?”
“Cute. But I’m serious. This kind of stuff, as interesting as it is…I don’t know.”
“Well what else am I going to talk about?”
“If you don’t know, then this is your problem. Damn it, Marina, I think I’ve figured you out already and we’ve barely been on the date.”
I cross my arms and huff, “Well gee, we might as well turn this car around and go home because you’ve just solved all my problems.”
He sighs. “Come on.”
“I’m just being myself.”
“It’s a game. The dating world is a game. You can’t show all your cards on the first date.”
“Guys should know who I am and what they’re getting into. If they can’t be supportive of my bees…”
“You’re scaring a lot of them off, okay? I’m sorry that men can be easily scared like that but it’s a fact. We’re the lesser species. If you throw something quirky and scientific their way, that might make you seem like you’re a lot of work. And yes you should be yourself but on a first date, talk about other things.”
“Shallow, boring things?”
“You’re being so stubborn right now.”
“And you think you’re some sort of expert on dating.”
“You know I’m not.”
I give him a steady look.
“I’m not,” he repeats. “But I am a man and you agreed to hear me out. And yes, you’re definitely hot enough for guys to overlook your crazy bee thing and other quirks, but being hot only gets you so far and if the guy doesn’t think he has a chance in hell of getting laid, then he’s going to bail.”
Everything he’s saying is absolutely infuriating, I’m practically grinding my teeth together, my fingers are digging into the seatbelt. “You’re a pig.”
“You know that’s not bloody true,” he says, voice hard. “But I’m a man and I know how we all think.”
“The second time we met, the first time that we really hung out, I told you about what I did and we talked about all sorts of weird and random stuff.”
“I know we did. But I had a girlfriend at the time and it was obvious we were just going to be friends. With friends you can just say weird shit like that.”
“Why can’t you in relationships?”
“You can…” He exhales loudly, his hands gripping the wheel. Seems like I’m infuriating him too. “Look, I get what I’m saying bothers you. I get it. It’s harsh but it’s the truth and you deserve to know the truth. No one said it would be easy or fun but we both decided to figure out what we were doing wrong with love and this is part of it. The finding of the faults, if you will.”
“Oh I can’t wait to tear you a new one,” I say in a low voice. I’m practically simmering in my seat.
“I’m sure I have lots to look forward to. I’m just doing you a favor. You want to know why guys bail, one of the reasons probably has to do with the fact that you come across as a bit of a…weirdo.”
I’ve learned to try and not take weirdo as an insult. We both call each other weirdos all the time. “But how will I find my flower?” I ask quietly.
“Find your what?” he asks. “Okay, now you’re purposely being weird aren’t you?”
“Find my flower,” I say again, louder. “If I’m not myself, how will I find that person who gets me? How will I find the one I’m supposed to be with, or if you don’t believe in fate, how do I find the person who’s the right match? You put out what you want to receive. I want someone who won’t be blindsided when they get to know me…or my past.”
He falls silent. We’re driving over the hill now, the lights of the city spreading as far as the eye can see as dusk approaches, turning the smog a purple grey.
“I don’t know,” he says. “All I know is that maybe this is one reason why things don’t progress. Perhaps if you were sleeping with them…”
“Oh and now it’s because I’m not putting out?”
“If you hook a guy physically, he’ll be more willing to overlook some things, that’s all. If the sex is good, a guy will put up with almost anything.”