My mother set us up.
He’s cute, she said.
You’ll love him.
I knew instantly I would not. It was the little things that bothered me.
The way spittle collected on the edges of your lips, without you noticing. The way your hand shook and tapped. The way you ordered a bottle of wine without asking if I liked red (I don’t).
The way you clumsily made love to me, your nose buried in my neck, breath hot and rapid. Afterward, you got up to get water. And worst, you came back to bed: with no glass for me.
Jessica Daugherty is an emerging writer with one published piece: “A Sparrow: In Pieces” in Entropy Magazine from July 2020. She has been teaching high school English since 2013, and in 2020 became an adjunct professor with the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. She lives in Madison, WI. You can find Jessica on Twitter at @ms_jess_daug.
Photo by Manu Schwendener on Unsplash.
