I see @thehotauthor’s silhouette in the door, the bright sidewalk glowing behind her, the red and green lights and the wood paneling in the bar feeling familiar but I can’t tell why, I’ve never been here before. I clock her arrival. I came to the party for L, but when I saw that she would be here, I knew I absolutely would come.  

We are finally let into the back room where the second bar is and the stage is lit up in blue, a pink neon sign behind the drum set. She’s sitting at the bar and I want to go introduce myself, I have every reason to not be scared, we have interacted before, but I don’t. Warmth is present in every limb and I am smiling with my friends and am thinking about how fun it feels to see a hot person across the room and not do anything about it. The tension. I want to stay in this moment for as long as I can. 

Every time she moves around the room, I notice. I know when she gets up from the bar, when she is standing in the middle of the room, I track her every time her location shifts. When the second musical performer is on stage and everyone is dancing up front and I’m sitting with both of my legs up on the booth bench along the wall, and she puts her bag down on my table in front of me with her back turned away. When she is this close to me, I pretend I don’t notice she’s there, but I notice the most. I’m only existing for her in that moment.

When she goes on stage and reads an essay from her phone in her hand, her silhouette no longer indiscernible, but her whole body fully lit in blue and green and lavender lights, I finally have permission to stare at every inch of her without it being weird. We all do. We all collectively have a crush, everyone in the room. 

I turn to D and say, I’m dead. He nods his head and says, Me too, baby. 

After, L reads from her book and then the first band goes on. As I’m walking to the bar, I make eye contact for the first time. I wonder if she felt my stare from across the room, because we see each other and I smile and then look away, and maybe she smiles too, and I keep walking. It happens again one more time and then she leaves.

I am left feeling both high from the eye contact and mildly low from not working up the courage to say anything to her. I could have introduced myself, I could have said, Hi, I am in a writing class you visited once, I could have said, Your reading tonight was really great, I could have said, I want you to fuck me, but maybe that last one is actually just a fantasy I’ll keep to myself. I remember how fun the long game can be, I remember that I often forget that foreplay exists, even though I’m doing it right now. I decide that it was probably good that I didn’t go up to her and say that. The mystery can continue, the crush can keep thriving from afar. Until next time. 

I wander to the front of the room with D and we watch the first band play, mesmerized. The people on stage are family, you can tell that they love one another. I admire their obvious bonds to each other; I can intuit that they are genuinely enjoying these moments performing with each other right now. There are two singers in the band, going back and forth between the lines, a bassist behind them, holding the beat down, a drummer wearing shirt that says Let Femmes Top Me. They’re all queer, maybe most of them are trans.

The singer with the curly hair has my heart already. The way he smiles, you can see it in his eyes that he’s a lover. 

I’m swaying with the music in the audience and smiling, holding my drink, trying to look hot and casual, hoping maybe we’ll make eye contact. I have a thing for eye contact. I’m staring at his face as he’s picking at his guitar and smiling with his eyes and my vision suddenly zeros in on the bandanas. 

I used to be able to admire bandanas, buy bandanas, look at bandanas without having a heart attack. I even used to be able to wear them. When I see the green and red bandanas tied around the singer’s guitar strap, my stomach drops for a moment. My brain quickly tries to remedy the situation by reminding myself that Z would never wear those colors, they were so obsessed with aesthetic and lack of color that I find it hard to believe that they would even own bandanas like that. 

I can’t unfeel the bandana feeling, the unwelcome reminder that I can no longer look at a bandana, let alone use one anymore without being thrown back into the world of hurt that blossomed from the two of us. My eyes drift back up to the singer’s smile and I quickly forget about the bandanas. Each day that passes, it gets easier to detach from the feelings Z made me feel, and I only wish it would happen faster so I can just get the fuck over it. 

At the end of the night, I grab my copy of L’s book from my backpack for her to sign it. She’s talking to the author that I think is hot; @thehotauthor is back, she didn’t actually leave. I am pleased to see this.  D and I walk over and I say, Now’s our chance. 

Before getting to L, I tap on @thehotauthor’s exposed shoulder, skin to skin contact, and she turns around to face us. D and I immediately start talking over each other at the same time.

you’re so hilarious i think you’re really funny your essay was incredible you’re so hot

She is beaming, she thanks us, she is taken aback from the hurricane of compliments we shower onto her. The only things I hear back from her is that maybe she says that I’m cute too, and I recognize you from somewhere, are you on Netflix? I laugh at this, and feel cool, that @thehotauthor I’ve been tracking all night thinks she saw me on Netflix. I’m not on Netflix, I mean maybe I am, I was on an episode of The Profit once, and back in 2011 I was on an zoomed-in audience shot on the Jerry Springer Show, but I’m not sure that either of those are streaming on there. 

You came to our writing class once, I say and she says, Oh, yeah, got it. 

In the class she visited, she gave us a prompt: for seven minutes, be in conversation with your alter ego, or your mask you show to the world. I wrote about interviewing my Unfiltered Self. I read it in class and my prompt ended up being my Unfiltered Self telling my Congenial Interviewer Self that If if there were two of me, I absolutely would have sex with myself. She probably doesn’t remember that part, but I find myself hoping she does. 

When we are done saying what we have to say, when I am done visibly flirting and pleased with the results, D and I make our way to L, who is now sitting at the bar waiting for another tropical looking drink. In front of me, L is talking about her type. 

I don’t date people who look like me, I don’t date femmes, I need someone the complete opposite, she says. 

Her type is absolutely not me. My heart breaks a little hearing this, because I have this vain idea that maybe I could be everyone’s type. It feels like deja vu, I am thrown back to several years ago where I am hanging out with my friend at the art studio, one of the managers who I only kind of had a crush on says, I’m not attracted to blondes, and I am sitting in front of them, my hair blonde as fuck. Rejected without even trying.

I laugh and hand her my book. 

I already signed this for you, didn’t I? she says, in her red satin dress. 

Not this one, other books of yours, I say. 

I give her my pen and she writes a note, followed by Happy Pride! and I go put it back in my bag at the other end of the room. 

The next morning, I devise a plan. I decide that it is more likely that @thehotauthor will see a follow notification from me on Instagram later in the day rather than first thing in the morning. Also, I do not want to come off as more desperate than I already am. As I plan this, the awareness seeps in that I can be a fucking psycho when it comes to crushes, but then I remember that it’s all a game. It’s fun for me. The rush I get from these little things are worth the potential of me being viewed as unhinged, obsessed. Because the truth is, I am, obsessive. 1:01pm, I pull out my phone at work and click on her profile in my search bar, because I have already looked it up earlier, of course. I click Follow, and then post a picture of her on my story, standing on the stage from last night. I tag her. I close my phone and don’t think about it the rest of my shift. 

When I leave work, I am walking through the Hannaford parking lot to buy a cake for my friend. I open Instagram on my phone, and at the top of my notifications, under the heading Priority, @thehotauthor is following me. I smile and blush and screenshot it immediately and text it to D. 

I’ve never been more jealous in my life, he texts back.