Sarah's determination

We spent the rest of the night watching Netflix and eating takeout, and if she was distant, it was only in the way people get when they’re slowly recalibrating their entire worldview. I told myself that, eventually, she would wake up and realize I was the guy who stuck around, who didn’t cry over bad dates or need to be walked through his own life.

But the next morning, Sarah was already plotting again. She turned to me and said, “We need to get him laid,” she said.

I nearly choked on my coffee. “Excuse me?”

She set the phone on the counter. “I mean it. If he doesn’t, he’s just going to keep self-destructing on dates.”

I watched her, waiting for the punchline. When it didn’t come, I said, “In case you haven’t forgot he has been laid more than me, I seem to be just fine not seeming **** on date. It not him getting laid, IT’S HIM. He a fucking nuclear bomb.”

She shook her head, hair flicking in a way I used to find cute. “You don’t understand guys like Wiley. He puts too much pressure on himself to get a woman in bed.”

Realizing I wasn’t going to win I said, “Fine hiring him a prostitute or something, but I don’t want anything to do with it.”

Sarah whimpers. “It needs to be someone who’s gentle, someone who isn’t going to make him feel ashamed.”

I shrugged and walked away, because after the week of dealing with my ass of a supervisor I didn’t want to deal with Wiley any longer than I had to.

That afternoon, she went over potential candidates, while I just did my best to ignore her. Sarah took each one seriously, analyzing their personalities and sexual histories with the intensity of a forensic profiler. Midweek, she’d whittled her list down to three people—two distant acquaintances and a woman from her yoga class who she claimed was “very open-minded.” She sent polite, noncommittal feelers out to both of them, and by dinner, had already heard back from two: both said, in so many words, “Absolutely not.”

That evening, Sarah got quiet. I could tell it was eating at her, the way a scandalous rumor eats at a high school guidance counselor. She started baking again—in our relationship, the more elaborate the baked goods, the bigger the emotional catastrophe. By bedtime, we had a full tray of cinnamon rolls and a sourdough starter burbling on the counter.

Eventually, I sat down next to her and asked, “Why do you care so much?”

She looked at me, really looked at me, and for the first time in a while I could see the kid I’d met in high school: equal parts heartbroken and ferociously optimistic. “Because no one ever cared about him, Liam,” she said. “Not really. All he’s ever wanted is to feel like a normal person, and now he’s in his twenties and he’s never a real relationship.”

“That on him”

She grunted “LIAM!” We didn’t talk about it after that.

The Friday morning, Sarah was even more frantic. She called me at work, then texted three times before noon. At lunch I picked up and heard her voice trembling. “Liam, we have a problem.”

“What now?”

“Wiley’s date is tomorrow, and I still haven’t found anyone.”

“So, don’t. It’s hardly the end of the world.”

She went silent for a moment, then whispered, “His date is not going to go well if I don’t. That will kill him. I just… I need this to work, okay?”

I rolled my eyes, but I didn’t say no. I never did.

At home, Sarah was a pacing machine. She wore a path into the living room carpet, hands bawled into fists, eyes darting to the phone every five seconds. At one point she called her mother—her mother! —to ask if she knew any “nice girls in need of a good-hearted project.” I pretended not to overhear, but the humiliation radiated through the door like a microwave.

That night, I made dinner, poured Sarah a glass of wine, and did my best to distract her. We talked about everything but Wiley, but it was like trying to dance around a sinkhole. Every five minutes, Sarah would sigh and mutter something about “wasted opportunities” or “how hard can it possibly be?”

Finally, I set down my book and tried to break her out of it. “Look, Sarah, if this whole thing falls apart for Wiley it’s not the end of the world. He’s survived worse. Remember the debate team ‘hot take’ incident? The time he got pantsed in front of our whole school? He’ll bounce back.”

Finally, I suggested, “Why don’t just let it go. If it doesn’t go well, that on him”

She stopped mid-bite. Her shoulders were up around her ears, jaw clenched. She gripped the edge of the table like she was bracing for turbulence. “You don’t get it, Liam. That’s not how his brain works. If his date doesn’t go well, he will be crushed, and there will be no bouncing back.”

I made a dismissive noise, some low, ugly snort I immediately regretted. She spun to face me, eyes wide and shining with focus and some other emotion I didn’t recognize. “You wouldn’t understand.”

She pasted back and forth for another hour. Until I spoke up “If you keep walking in the same spot, we are going to have to buy a new floor.”

Sarah stops “He’s going to be here in ten minutes,” she said, more to herself than to me. “And I still don’t have anyone. I’ve messaged every living human being on earth. I’ve even tried Facebook people I haven’t spoken to since freshman year.” She let out a wild, frayed laugh.

I thought about making a joke, about how at least Wiley could build a spreadsheet about his failures, but her mood made it clear that would earn me a decade in some icy relational exile. So I just closed my book, clapped my hands, and said, “Sorry, you did your best. Maybe he’ll have a nice time just eating food alone for once.”

Sarah twisted around, her whole face scrunched into a pinched, **** whimper. “I haven’t tried everything,” she hissed.

A chill worked its way down my spine. “What do you mean you haven’t tried everything?

Sarah crossed the room in a series of twitchy, sparking steps, her every movement carrying the static tension of a television tuned to dead air. She sat beside me, not close but not quite distant either, and let all her bones settle in a diagonal, as if the weight of what she was about to say had collapsed her own internal scaffolding. Her hands—usually strong, usually surgical—were clumsy now, a knot untying and retying itself without purpose, until finally she just pressed them between her knees and held them there like she was afraid they might do something catastrophic if let loose.

She didn’t look at me. Her gaze was nailed straight ahead, at the old poster above the TV, the one she’d always insisted was “ironic” but secretly loved. And then, because apparently the universe runs on the principle that everything must get worse before it gets better, she said, “I mean, I could do it,” so low and flat I almost missed it. The words hung in the air like a chemical leak: invisible, but unmistakably poisonous.

I blinked, slow and cartoon-like, expecting the next beat to be a joke, a punchline, something to snap the tension. But Sarah didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile. The only sign she was still alive was the way her jaw flexed, like she was fighting to keep the rest of her skeleton from mutinying.

In the gap that followed, I tried to reverse-engineer her sentence, to make it into something that fit the rules of our reality. But all I came up with was the same phrase, over and over, as if my brain was stuck in an infinite loop. “You’re not serious,” I said, finally, in a voice that sounded like it belonged to someone else—a man who’d just been told his girlfriend was volunteering to sleep with her friend out of, what, mercy?

Sarah nodded, slow and deliberate, and for the first time that night looked me square in the eye. All the jitter in her system seemed to focus into that one moment of contact. “If no one else will, I’ll do it,” she repeated, this time with a strange, almost priestly calm, as if she’d rehearsed it for a confessional.

I **** a breath. “I thought you considered him a brother,” I said, my voice little more than a scrape. “You told me the first time was a mistake. You said thinking about it made you want to puke. And now you’re suggesting you just—do it again?”

The room was absolutely still. I could hear the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the leaky faucet dripping at its slow, arrhythmic pace. It felt like the world was holding its breath with me.

She shook her head, not to deny it, but to clear some invisible obstruction. “I do consider him a brother, and it does make me sick. But I just have to for him.”

“Sarah,” I managed at last, “that’s insane. You can’t just—how is that even—what are you talking about?” My hands fumbled for something to do, settling on gripping the couch so hard the pseudo-suede squeaked.

Sarah looked up again, her pupils blown wide, her face washed clean of all the usual comedy. “He won’t let himself live unless someone throws him into the deep end,” she said, and the bleakness in her voice made my stomach go cold. “And evidently, no one else will.”

She looked up, her face even and solemn, and said, “He won’t let himself live unless someone throws him into the deep end. And evidently, no one else will.” The words landed with all the bleak certainty of a **** sentence.

I had a whole library of arguments ready—about boundaries, about self-respect, about not being an emotional paramedic for every wounded soul in the city—but she cut through them with a single, gentle monotone: “Liam.” My name was a scalpel. “I’m sorry, I really am. You have to know I don’t want to do this anymore than you want me too, and if there was any other way to help him out, I would jump on it, but I am out of time.” She said it like a nurse announcing a terminal prognosis: factual, unflinching, already bracing for the next stage.

For a moment, I tried to imagine what it would look like—the night, the logistics, the emotional fallout. I pictured Sarah’s face the day after, the subtle change in her laugh lines, the way she’d carry herself as if her bones were made of dried reeds. I tried to imagine how I would feel, and the only word that came was “small.” Smaller than I’d ever felt in my life.

She must have seen it on me, because she reached out and put her hand over mine—a mercy gesture, but not a comforting one. Her hand was cold and dry and trembling. “I need you to not make this harder than it already is,” she said, and that was when I realized: she wasn’t asking for permission. She was already halfway gone.

Before I could respond, we both heard it at the same time—the sound of keys fumbling in the lock, then a muttered “fuck, shit, why do I always do this,” followed by the unmistakable shamble of someone failing at both grace and stealth. For a brief, almost comical second, Sarah’s eyes widened in a panic, and she bolted upright, smoothing her blouse and swiping away the wet shine beneath her lashes.

She checked herself in the blank screen of her phone, pinched color into her cheeks, and walked to the front hall with the strained composure of a stage actor who knows the critics are waiting in the front row. At the threshold, she stopped and drew a long, trembling breath.

I sat rigid on the sofa, every muscle in my body rebelling against the physics of the moment. I could hear the squeak of Wiley’s thrift-store loafers, the wet slap of his umbrella as he shook it out on the porch. He was early, of course. He would be.

Sarah let a count of five pass, then opened the door with a smile that could have won an Oscar for best supporting actress in a tragedy no one wanted to buy tickets for.

Wiley stumbled in. He looked even worse than I remembered: greasy hair pasted flat with rainwater, a dress shirt buttoned one off so the collar sat at a nasty diagonal, and the same thrift-store messenger bag he’d used since high school. He reeked of damp wool, sadness, and the faintest trace of cinnamon roll.