"Come on, G. Live a little. Use your words. Form an opinion that isn't 'they're fine, I guess.'"
I followed her discreet glance or what passed for discreet with Apple, which meant staring openly while pretending to adjust her sunglasses. The table she indicated was occupied by three young men, their postures carefully arranged to suggest a casual profundity they undoubtedly lacked. They were handsome, in a clean, uncomplicated way—all strong jawlines and artfully dishevelled hair and the kind of effortless confidence that came from never having been truly tested by life.
To Apple, they were potential. Possibilities. The raw material from which romance.com meet-cutes were manufactured.
To me, they were children.
They were practically infants, their souls still gleaming and new, untouched by the patina of centuries. Their lives were brief, bright flickers—candles that would burn for a few decades and then gutter out, leaving behind nothing but memories that would fade with the next generation. I had watched candles burn longer. I had watched empires rise and fall in the time it took these boys to decide on their majors.
I offered a noncommittal grunt. "They're... alright."
Apple rolled her eyes so hard I briefly feared they might achieve escape velocity and orbit her head forever. "For heaven's sake, G, we are in our prime. Would it kill you to lighten up and have a little fun? University isn't forever, you know. And one of these days," she sang, leaning closer with the conspiratorial air of someone about to impart great wisdom, "one of these very guys could be a potential husband."
A husband.
The word felt like a stone in my shoe—an ill-fitting, modern concept for a problem as ancient as the stars themselves. I had worn many labels across the centuries: daughter, lover, wife, widow, mistress, mystery. Husband was simply another word for temporary, and I had learned the hard way that temporary was the only kind of love I was allowed to keep.
"You know I'm not interested in all this, App. Besides, I have a paper on pre-Axial Age mythology due tomorrow. So please—"
My sentence was severed mid-word by an approaching presence. One of the boys from the other table, emboldened by his friends' encouragement or perhaps his own misplaced confidence, had materialized at our table like a cologne-scented ghost.
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He was maybe twenty-two, with carefully tousled chestnut hair that probably took twenty minutes to achieve and blue eyes that held more confidence than depth. The kind of handsome that came from good genetics and a gym membership—broad shoulders visible beneath his fitted henley, skinny jeans artfully distressed, a lightweight jacket pushed up at the sleeves in what he clearly believed was a casually sophisticated pose.
He slid into the empty chair without invitation, draping one arm over the back in what he clearly believed was a Casanova-worthy pose. A cloud of expensive cologne followed him—the kind that came in a sleek bottle and promised to make its wearer irresistible. To someone else, maybe it would have worked.
"Yo! What's up?" He layered the words with what he clearly believed was continental charm, though the effect was undercut slightly by the fact that he'd pronounced it "yoo" like an owl with questions.
I felt the familiar cold slide of revulsion in my throat—not at him, not really, but at the performance of it all. The sheer, exhausting artifice of modern courtship, stripped of ritual and meaning, reduced to pick up lines and posturing. He wasn't a person approaching another person; he was a collection of behaviours he'd absorbed from media, deployed in the hope that one of them might work.
My silence was a wall he couldn't see but should have felt.
"Hi there," Apple interjected, her smile simultaneously saccharine and sharp enough to draw blood. "But this seat is technically taken. By, you know, real people who say, 'Hi, is this seat taken?' Not facsimiles." Her smile didn't waver, but the warning in it was crystalline. "So if you could just—" She made a shooing motion with her fingers, flicking him away like some kind of bug.
The boy's smirk dissolved into a flush of humiliation that crept up his neck and stained his cheeks an unfortunate shade of magenta. He muttered something that might have been an apology—or might have been a curse, it was hard to tell through the mortification—and retreated to the safety of his snickering friends.
"Why? Why? does this world have so many fakes?" Apple sighed dramatically, the theatricality returning to her voice now that the threat had been neutralized. "Is basic social interaction really that difficult? A simple 'excuse me'? A 'may I join you'? Is that too much to ask from the allegedly educated youth of today?"
"And here you are," I laughed—a dry, hollow sound that earned me a sharp look, "asking me to consider one of them as a future life partner. Truly, App, your standards are a mystery to me."
"Well," she squeaked, deflating slightly as she always did when logic was deployed against her romantic ambitions, "you have to admit, the odds are in your favour. It's a numbers game! You reject ninety-nine frogs, and the hundredth is a prince. That's just math."
"That's not math. That's a fairy tale with extremely optimistic statistics."
"Same thing, different font."
