Milked

Skylar | first arrangement.

Phil Lancaster had arranged for our first date to be at an expensive Italian fusion restaurant in Scottsdale.

Getting ready, I felt so weird. I never went on dates. Dates meant catching feelings, and catching feelings meant commitment.

Dates were what girls like Meg did, and they were also the reason girls like Meg didn't get dates. Any guy could probably tell after a minute of conversation with Meg that she would catch feelings the moment he told her his cell number, so no guy ever gave Meg his cell number. I suspected that, under the harsh judgement I got from Meg, she was really jealous of all the attention I got from guys. And the reason I got that attention in the first place was because I loathed commitment and all the feelings that paired so well with it. My noncommittal attitudes probably had a scent, one that attracted a fair amount of male prospects. And Meg's desperation for a committed relationship, for "the one," for love (gag) and wedding bells (double gag) and ugly white dresses (triple gag); well, it had a scent too, and that scent kept all her male prospects at bay.

Maybe the reason Meg had signed up for Make Arrangements was because she yearned for male attention. Then, she'd gotten me to sign up, because deep down she knew it was a bad decision and it always felt better to make bad decisions with other people. And now, our shared bad decision would lead me to a restaurant to meet an old guy who I hoped would give me some money in return for "companionship," a word that still needed to be defined in this strange context.

When I got to the restaurant, Phil wasn't there, but he'd made us a reservation, and a waiter showed me to our table. Meg had picked out a black dress for me to wear, and as I sat at the table waiting for him, I flipped her off inside my mind. Because I didn't wear dresses. I wasn't going to start wearing dresses. This entire situation now felt more than weird: it felt disgusting, like prostitution, and Meg had been the pimp of it all. Only she was completely naïve, thinking the two of us were doing something other than being paid to entertain old men with our young bodies.

Trying to look at the menu to distract myself, I became even more distraught. This was one of the most pretentious restaurants I had ever been to. Nowhere on the menu were normal things like spaghetti and raviolis and pizza. Instead there were things like "organic sweet potato gnocci tossed in a roasted red pepper basil pesto" or "kale ricotta tortellini in a garlic oil white wine sauce."

The waiter came over once, and I told him I was waiting for someone.

Phil finally arrived five minutes later, but it felt like twenty. I was glad to see he wasn't pretentious like this restaurant. He looked like he had just parked his Harley out back, with his long and graying dull brown hair flowing and knotted, his skin textured and darkened by sun damage, and his outfit not what you would consider clean cut or dress code for a place like this: faded jeans, an unremarkable black shirt, and a worn black leather vest (it looked like real leather, but I didn't really know how to tell). His beer belly was impressive, like he'd been working on it since college. In fact, he stood out like a goth kid at a frat party, which actually made me feel a tiny bit better.

I stood up, holding out my hand. "Hi, Phil."

"Hello, Skylar," he said in a gruff voice, shaking it with calloused fingers. "How are you?"

"I'm fine," I said, which wasn't entirely true, because I still couldn't shake off that feeling that this scenario counted as prostitution.

"Did you order anything to drink?" he asked, sitting down.

"I was waiting for you to order something." I sat down with him, failing to mention I had some anxiety about the success of my fake ID in a place like this.

"People normally drink wine at these places, don't they?" He held up the wine list and started scanning through it.

I scanned through mine, too, and felt like I was reading a foreign language. "I think so." Then I noticed they had four kinds of beer and said, "But why do what everyone else does?"