not been the wisest choice.
She’d been thinking she wanted a quiet place where she and her “platonic internet conversation partner” could talk. It was quiet here, for sure. Only as she was sitting at a small dark table set with illusionary privacy in a dark corner with soft music playing in the background did she realize how intimate, how romantic this restaurant was.
This kind of awkward misjudgment is one of the reasons why you have no social life, she told herself. She had no love life—she’d just dumped her last boyfriend two weeks earlier—and no friends who weren’t coworkers. She sighed and sipped the very good wine she’d ordered so she wouldn’t feel guilty about taking up a table a half hour before her not-date was supposed to start.
The no-friends thing probably had more to do with her job than with her famously awkward moments (like bringing a not-date to what was probably the most romantic restaurant in Spokane). If she wasn’t at work, she was asleep. Even her last boyfriend had been someone she met at work—social worker meets police officer, and hadn’t that been a train wreck.
What was she doing here? Who needs the internet to find a friend? This was really stupid no matter what the people in her favorite Facebook hangout said about the new service for people who wanted to talk about gardening with other like-minded people. Platonic Plantophiles had sounded so promising, a not-dating site. Someone to talk to who wasn’t a client and didn’t work with her—and was not interested in a romance in any sense of the word. She’d had enough of romance for a while.
In a fit of optimism, she’d inputted her information and waited.
The first reply had come from Spokane. Members of Platonic Plantophiles had been instructed to use a single name only (preferably your actual first name, but usernames were acceptable), for safety’s sake. Over half a million people lived in and around Spokane, and there were probably a dozen Phoebes. But the Phoebe she knew loved lilacs and owned a business downtown. Tami would rather stab herself with a fork than spend an hour talking to that Phoebe.
If it was that Phoebe, Tami trusted that she would never connect Tami who loved herbs with the Tami who’d headed the team that fought successfully to build a series of new homeless shelters in the downtown area—where they were the most needed. Tami hadn’t returned Phoebe’s email.
The second email she’d gotten a week later had been from Carter in Billings, Montana. Billings was more than five hundred miles away. They’d exchanged a few emails, found no real connection to make spanning the distance worthwhile, and ceased communicating.
She’d looked up profiles herself after that, determined to get the most out of the three months of service she’d paid for. She’d found there were clusters of people in Florida and Southern California. But other than Phoebe, Carter in Billings was honestly the closest person signed up at the site.
She chalked the whole mess up to experience, and put it behind her. The next day, Moreno (she assumed it was his last name), a rose lover who lived in an unspecified small town in Montana but often found himself in Spokane on business, contacted her.
She’d checked his profile, but there was very little other than what he’d told her in his initial email. There was no date of birth—“not quite as old as dirt” wasn’t much of a clue, though it left her with the impression of someone who was past middle age. His profile picture was a Black Baccara rose held between two fingers. His fingers were in shadow and told her nothing about him.
With those few hints, she made up a story about him in her own mind: an older man, Hispanic from his name, and well educated from his emails. He raised roses in the snowy mountains and needed someone to talk to. He would come, laugh about the atmosphere of the restaurant—she had told him that she could be awkward in social situations, and she could tell from the emails they had exchanged that he had a sense of humor.
She heard a sound behind her and turned to see a man murmuring to the host who had seated her. The