The Profile

“If the next one says soulmate, I’m hanging up,” Dee said.

I had the phone on speaker between my hip and a throw pillow, boots still on, one heel hooked over the arm of the couch. The tea on the table had a skin on it. I swiped anyway.

“Couple in their thirties,” I said. “She likes brunch. He likes trucks. Together they like long walks and being the exception.”

“That’s not a person. That’s a menu.”

I read her another. Beach photo, sunglasses, a line about keeping things discreet that tried to sound like a secret and landed like a form. Dee made a noise I usually heard when she burned rice.

“I’m only on here so you can suffer with me,” I said.

“You’ve said that four Saturdays.”

“And yet.”

I swiped past a pair who wanted someone low-drama and also extremely available, and a pair whose whole pitch was a dog in a bandana. Then the photo changed. No sunglasses. A woman with a radio headset shoved up into her hair, laughing at something off to the side, and a man beside her looking at her like the joke was still going. Their names sat under the picture. Tess. Omar.

I read it out because Dee was waiting, and then I slowed down.

“We argue about the Sunday crossword like it’s a sport,” I said. “She wins on the long ones. I win when the clue is mean. If you hate crosswords, say so early. We will still like you. We will also still race.”

Dee didn’t answer.

I kept going, quieter. They’d written the rest the same way. No beach. No discreet. A note that Tess talked too much on first meetings and Omar would look like he wasn’t in it until he was. A line that said if either of them was bored, the whole thing stopped, because bored was how people got cruel.

“Dee.”

“Message them.”

“You were supposed to mock it.”

“I would if it was mockable. Send the thing before you talk yourself into a dog in a bandana.”

I typed with my thumb, the way I cut a line on a board when I already knew where it went. No hello-how-are-you. I told them I’d lost three Sundays in a row to the long ones and that I was mean about clues when I lost. I said I was free for coffee if they were, and that I had questions. I hit send before Dee could add a joke to it.

The phone made its small noise. Dee let out a breath.

“If they’re weird, you call me from the parking lot,” she said.

“If they’re weird, I’m already in the parking lot.”

The market was loud in the way Saturday always was, crates knocking, somebody shouting about peaches. I found them at the coffee cart by the spice stall, two paper cups already in Tess’s hands and a third waiting. She was taller than the photo had made her, and she started talking before I was all the way under the awning.

“June. Hi. We got here early because Omar thinks late is a moral failure, and I think early is how you end up holding three coffees and looking eager, which is what I’m doing. Yours is the one with the cardamom unless you hate cardamom, in which case it’s mine and I’ll drink both and pretend that was the plan.”

“Cardamom’s fine,” I said. “I’m June. You already know that.”

Omar had a paper bag tucked under his arm and a look like he was counting the people in line so he wouldn’t have to start. He nodded. That was the whole greeting. Tess shoved a cup at me and then seemed to realize she’d shoved it, and her ears went a little red.

We took the end of a picnic table under a tent where the canvas snapped when the wind came through. Tess had brought almond cake from the baker two stalls down, cut into three with a plastic knife that kept bending. She talked through the first half of it. Traffic on the bridge. A caller who’d argued with her about a lane closure that she could see from the helicopter window. The way Omar tuned a piano last week and the owner kept offering him tea he didn’t want until he drank it to make the visit end.

Omar ate his cake and watched the tent rope. He hadn’t said a full sentence. I was starting to think the profile had been generous about him when Tess said, too bright, “We should tell you how we do this before I talk us into a hole.”

“Please,” I said.

She put her cup down. “All three of us, or we don’t. If I want it and he doesn’t, it stops. If he wants it and I don’t, it stops. If you want one of us and not the other, it stops. Either of us can call it off. So can you. And you set the pace. We don’t guess at it and then get mad that we guessed wrong.”

I looked at Omar. He was turning his cup a quarter inch at a time on the wood.

“You agree with all of that,” I said.

He glanced at Tess to check she was still where he’d left her. Then he looked at me.

“She left out the part where I lose the crossword on purpose if the clue is about traffic,” he said. “She gets unbearable when she wins for real.”

I laughed with coffee still in my mouth. It went up my nose, hot and stupid, and I had to turn my head and cough into my sleeve while Tess made a delighted sound and thumped the table.

“There he is,” she said. “I told you. He saves it.”

“You did tell me,” I said, when I could talk. My nose burned. I didn’t mind. “I’m keeping the cake. That was a good line.”

Omar’s mouth moved, almost a smile. “The cake was her idea too.”

We stayed until the coffee was gone and the wind had worked one corner of the tent loose. Tess kept filling the quiet and then catching herself, and every time she caught herself she looked at Omar, and every time he was already looking back. It was a habit. I watched it the way I watch a joint before I trust it: not the finish, the fit.

When we stood, Tess gathered the cups and missed the bin on the first throw. Omar got the one that rolled. I wiped almond sugar off my thumb and decided I wasn’t done asking things.

The path back to the parking lot ran along the chain fence, market noise thinning out behind us. Tess walked on my left and talked less. Omar was on my right, hands in his jacket, close enough that our sleeves touched when the path narrowed.

“I came with a question,” I said.

Tess nodded like she’d been waiting for it. “Ask.”

“Whose idea was the profile. And is one of you just going along so the other one gets to.”

She didn’t dress it up. “Mine. I wrote most of it. He edited the part where I made us sound like a pamphlet. He’s not going along. I checked. More than once. He checks me too, which is fair, because I get loud when I want something and loud can look like a plan other people are trapped in.”

We passed a truck with its hatch up, someone loading crates of greens. I kept my eyes on the gravel.

“Omar,” I said.

He took a second. When he spoke, it was quiet enough that I had to lean to hear it over a car door.

“I wanted to meet you before she finished reading your message out loud,” he said. “She thinks I do this to keep her company. I don’t. I like the way you wrote about losing. I wanted to see if you were like that in a room.”

Tess had gone still beside me. She didn’t jump in. That, more than the sentence, made me believe him.

I looked at her, then at him. Different wants, both of them pointed at me, and neither one borrowed. Tess was heat and noise and the nerve of having said it first. Omar was the line you didn’t see until it was already true. I liked both. I had liked both since the coffee went up my nose, and I was only now admitting the size of it.

“All right,” I said. “Then I’m not going along either.”

Tess let out a breath that shook at the end. Omar’s shoulder brushed mine and stayed.

Their car was a dark hatchback at the far end of the lot, a pine needle stuck under one wiper. The market had gone soft behind us. Tess stopped with her keys in her hand and didn’t unlock anything. She turned to me, and the talking she’d been doing all morning finally ran out.

I put my hand on her wrist, the one with the keys, and felt her go still in a different way. She leaned in at the same time I did. The kiss was brief and sure, her mouth warm from coffee, one of her hands coming up to my jaw like she’d thought about where to put it and then stopped thinking. I kissed her back. Her hair smelled like the spice stall. When I drew away, her eyes were bright and a little wrecked, and she was smiling with her mouth closed, as if she didn’t trust it open.

Omar stood at the front of the car, pink all the way to his ears. He wasn’t looking away. He had one hand on the hood and the other loose at his side, and when I met his eyes he didn’t perform calm. He just waited, flushed and obvious.

I stepped in and took that loose hand. His fingers closed around mine, careful, then firmer when I didn’t let go. I kissed him with my other hand at the side of his neck, under his ear where the color was worst. He made a small sound and kissed me back, slower than Tess, no less certain. His thumb moved once over my knuckles. That was all. It was enough to know he wasn’t there for the view.

I stepped back so I could see both of them. Tess had her fingers against her own mouth. Omar was still pink, and he was looking at Tess the way he had at the table, checking, and she nodded at him without making a show of it. Then they both looked at me.

“Saturday,” I said. “Your place. I’ll bring dessert.”

Tess laughed once, too loud for the lot, and said, “Oh, thank God.”

Omar laughed too, short and surprised, like it had gotten out before he could decide whether to.