The Theory of Opposites Read Free Page B

right now, and I know that you want some us-time…”
    “Don’t you want some us-time? I thought you liked our weekend routine.”
    “That came out wrong. You know what I mean.”
    I’m not actually sure I do know what you mean, I think. Grape! That might possibly be the dumbest name for a club in the history of ever!
    “Anyway, I’ll make it up to you, okay? I’ll plan something lavish and romantic and sexy, and you won’t be able to keep your hands off me.” He smiles, and I smile back, mostly because I want to believe him. It was just one receipt, one small thing, one tiny fabrication as to his whereabouts. Grape! It was probably nothing. (My dad would remind me here that nothing is ever nothing. Everything is something, and all roads lead to here, blah, blah, blah.) I pretend not to remember that Shawn hasn’t planned anything romantic or sexy in at least a year (I blame the Microsoft job — hey, Bill Gates, how do you make your wife happy?) and, frankly, not too often before that either. Which is just as well because I’m not overly comfortable with grand displays of affection. We like Chinese food. We like Dare You! . We like our couch on Thursday nights. I wouldn’t mind making out for free egg rolls, but Shawn doesn’t have to whisk me off to Bali (or whatever) to prove his devotion. Though not hanging out at nightclubs and lying about it would probably be a good start.
    He reaches over and squeezes my calf, and then Slack Jones pops up on the screen to introduce tonight’s first task, which involves couples being lowered into a pit of vipers. If they manage to hold themselves perfectly still, the viper will leave them be. If they don’t, well…there’s a medical tent on the premises. (And it’s true that last year one contestant did die when he lost his wrestling match with a grizzly bear, but the network was very adamant — and thus avoided litigation — that the contestant had signed away any medical liability.)
    “Haven’t they done this one before?” Shawn asks. He has stuffed the rest of the egg roll in his mouth, his cheeks bursting as he speaks. He grins unapologetically. He did this once on our second date — his chipmunk impression — and it made me laugh so hard that wine dribbled down my chin. Izzy is right: Shawn is the coding-world anomaly: his green eyes and his chestnut stubble and his jaw that rivals Slack Jones’s make him too handsome to loiter behind a screen all day.
    “That was with rattlesnakes,” I answer, absorbing the cut of his jaw and the clarity of his eyes. He was handsomer than I was pretty. I never totally understood why he chose me, other than that was simply what was meant to be. Vanessa told me that I needed to see a therapist for my self-esteem, but I was content just to be. Just to know that he had, in fact, chosen me, and that’s what the universe intended. She even texted me the contact info of her favorite shrink, but it lingered in my inbox for two weeks before my phone automatically deleted it.
    I suck up a lo mein noodle, and before I can even think to stop because just two minutes earlier, I swore that it didn’t matter, I say: “How was the pick-up game last night?”
    “Good,” he says, his eyes back on the TV. “Shit, that woman in the red is totally going to lose it.”
    “Who won?”
    “What do you mean? The show just started.”
    “No, who won the game? The pick-up game.”
    “Oh.” He flickers back to me for a moment, and then back to the show where indeed, the woman in red is trembling with such fortitude that production may need to call a seismologist. “We didn’t really keep score. Just shot around. You know. A few guys were sick, so we mostly just blew off steam.”
    “Hmmm.”
    I want to say more, I want to catch him in the net of knowledge with which I’m armed. I want to flaunt the receipt in front of him and shout — a-ha! But…I don’t. Because that will open up so much, and sometimes, no matter what my dad