Lily and the Octopus Read Online Free PDF Page A

knowing, and I hate it. This is a waste of our time. I know it. He knows it.
He’s not saying it (or anything, really), so I’m babbling to fill the silence. But seriously, I’m coming off like an idiot. And a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Not even the fun
kind who believes in little green men—the other kind, the kind who writes manifestos and Priority Mails them with explosive devices. I wouldn’t date me and neither should he.
    We had decent email chemistry, this new guy and I. But that happens sometimes in online dating. A few zippy emails, some decent back-and-forth, and then in person? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. I should
be better at detecting when that’s going to happen by now, but I’m not. It’s still a roll of the dice. That’s why I don’t get excited anymore by a few zippy emails and
some decent back-and-forth. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have any real desire to see that person naked. Something like profuse sweating doesn’t usually show up in
pictures—especially if the pictures are of them being active. You think, oh, he’s sweating because he’s hiking Runyon Canyon, or tossing a Frisbee at the beach. You don’t
imagine them sweating like this sitting at a table reading a menu of salads.
    “Are you addicted to anything?” I realize I’d better bring him into the conversation before I launch into my monologue about Robitussin.
    “Sex.”
    I have no idea if this is a joke or not. If it is, it’s kind of funny. If it’s not, I might get raped. I play it off like it’s a joke and move on.
    “What do you do?”
    “I’m a flight attendant, but I’m quitting that to become a professional dog walker.”
    Fucking L.A.
Professional
dog walker. Is that a thing? Are most dog walkers maintaining their amateur status to compete in the Dog Walking Olympics? I guess that’s what I am. An
amateur dog walker. It’s where I should be now. Enjoying a walk with Lily in the early evening. The gloom has parted just enough by five o’clock that there’s some soft light
streaming through that would make a walk with her seem nice. It could be the only sunlight we see for days. Suddenly I want to be here even less.
    “That sounds like a . . .”—how do I phrase this politely?—“lateral move.”
    “It’s kind of a step up, actually.”
    “That makes me feel bad for flight attendants.” I cringe, imagining him handing me a ginger ale with his sweaty mitts.
    “Well, here it’s a step up. In L.A., people will pay anything for their dogs. Do you have any pets?”
    “No.” I try to remember my dating profile (how much is on there about Lily?) and weigh the chances that he actually
read
my profile and would remember it well enough to know
that I’m lying, or if he just flipped through my photos to find the one shirtless one. I shouldn’t have written that thing a bottle deep in one of New Zealand’s finer white wines
and I certainly shouldn’t have posted a shirtless photo. That was the wine’s fault.
    “Me, neither. I want to, though. Have a pet.”
    This (aside from the maybe sex joke) is the most interesting thing about him. I don’t even know what he means by a pet—dog, cat, reptile, bird, one of those chirping key chains that
Japanese children used to carry, hamster, fish, rock—but he wants one.
    I try to think of how to tactfully cut this short. If it’s not going anywhere (there’s so little connection here there’s not even interest in sex), there should be a socially
acceptable way to just get up and walk out. I mean, if there’s nothing obviously wrong with the other person—they are “as advertised,” but you’re just not, for
whatever reason, feeling it—there should be a way to get up and leave. If there
is
something obviously wrong with them, you can say so right up front. Maybe not in those exact words,
but you can say something like, “I’m sorry, I don’t think this is going to be a match.” Once I got a particularly creepy vibe from a guy