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well . . . ” She trails off, biting a lip, before she half-turns to show me her back. The dress she’s wearing, an adorable lacy number, is only zipped about halfway up.
    “I’m the least flexible person on the planet, I swear to god,” she says over her shoulder.
    I laugh. “I know the feeling, don’t worry,” I reassure her as I zip her dress the rest of the way. “There you go.”
    “Oh my god, you’re a lifesaver, thank you so much.” She catches my eye and smirks. “Guys just never know what we go through for them, you know?”
    I snort. “You’re telling me.”
    Her gaze darts past me at the room behind me. “Uh oh. You in date prep mode too?”
    I kick the door open wider. “You have no idea. I don’t even have any eye makeup left that’s not a total disaster, let alone an outfit to wear tonight.”
    “You need some help?” she asks, already crossing the threshold. “I’m Lacey, by the way.”
    “Sloan.”
    “That is an awesome name,” she tells me as she surveys the wreckage that is my normally tidy studio. “Okay, what date number?”
    “First,” I reply, feeling a flush rise to my cheeks. “It’s, uh . . . it’s been a while since I’ve gone out.”
    I’m not sure she hears me, because Lacey has already jumped into motion, pulling a shirt from one corner of the bed and a pair of tight black jeans from the chair, then brushing past me to root through the closet. Before I know it, she’s got no less than three actually cute and viable outfit options laid out on the bed, and we’re comparing the various looks against my (admittedly lacking) accessory collection.
    “Okay, I’m voting for the black jeans, the ruched gray shirt, cause ruching is a girl’s best friend, and the triangle earrings because they make the whole outfit kind of punk. Oh, and the leather-sleeved blazer—that is killer , can I borrow it sometime?”
    Next thing I know, we’re both crowded into her bathroom, and she’s doing the best cat-eye liner on me that I’ve ever seen, before picking out the shade of red lipstick that she swears will make him stare at my lips all night long.
    “So how come you haven’t gone out with anyone in a while?” she asks as she passes me a simple gold drop-necklace she’s insisted I borrow.
    I shrug, double-checking my teeth in the mirror to be sure I haven’t smeared red all over the front. “I dunno. A combination of things I guess? No one’s really caught my eye, but also I’ve been kind of distracted with work, and saving up to pay off my student loans.”
    Her expression turns knowing when she catches my eye in the mirror again. “Girl, you cannot wait to be debt-free to start living. No one in our generation would ever get married, let alone reproduce.”
    I stifle a laugh. “Well, it’s hard to think about anything like dating or committing or whatever while still being so . . . you know. In debt. Unsure about the future. I don’t know.”
    “Well what would you want to do, if you could do anything?”
    Open my own restaurant , I think immediately. Which is stupid. Insane. If I learned anything in the business management classes I took in college, restaurants fail at least seventy-five percent of the time. And if I’ve learned anything more working at Morton’s for the last few years, it’s that restaurant owners—or at least our owner—seem chronically depressed. Like, I would not be surprised if he slit his wrists in a bathtub one day level depressed.
    Granted, a struggling diner in the middle of a slowly dying city (or quickly dying, depending on who you ask and where the most recent hurricane broke ground) isn’t the restaurant of my dreams. But still. The life dream I entered school thinking about—owning my own business one day, making people happy, concocting delicious menu plans with the chef partner I was sure I’d find in college—that seems a lot more pie-in-the-sky (no pun intended) now that I’ve experienced the daily