Free The Light of Hidden Flowers by Jennifer Handford

cup of coffee that wasn’t mine. I was elated. I had a maybe lunch date with tax attorney Lucas Anderson, and rather than feeling my usual contentedness—a zero on the number line—I suddenly felt hopeful, eager, and expectant. A good twenty-five points off the norm.
    My dating history left much to be desired. The truest relationship I’d ever had was in high school and the few years afterward with Joe. He was as good a man as my father. We were just too young. He knew before I did that being each other’s first “everything” meant that we couldn’t be each other’s last. I begged to differ. I fought him on this, like a toddler who didn’t get her way. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have other experiences, that I didn’t want to explore the world. I just wanted to do it with Joe.
    After Joe, while in college and graduate school, I gravitated toward the Mensa crowd, brainiacs like me. All-night study sessions, coauthoring journal articles with top professors, earning assistantships. Then there was Jason, my on-and-off boyfriend of three years, when I had just turned thirty. With Jason, I attempted to re-create the passion I had had with Joe so many years earlier. Jason was dark, brooding, and athletic, just like Joe. He flew his handsomeness like a cape. Sometimes I would stare at his perfectly symmetrical features and compare him to Joe, yet I knew Joe was a thousand times more beautiful because his good looks penetrated to every atom of his being, unlike Jason’s, which were skin-deep.
    Jason was one of many siblings from a large family full of traditions, Catholicism, and delicious family-style meals. There were no boundaries with Jason or his family. They touched; they hugged and kissed. They overstepped, and I loved their every trespass. I adored how his parents kissed me like they kissed their own daughters. I treasured time with his sisters, how they fooled with my hair and handed me down clothing from their closets. Try this on, his older sister Mary would say, tugging at my shirt without regard for my privacy. Being a girl who came from very little family, it was exactly what I craved.
    I tried to want Jason as much as I wanted the rest of his family, but he was the weakest link. While he had all of the physical attributes that Joe had, and while his family was everything I would want in an extended in-law family, Jason was sometimes cruel, bordering on misogynistic. He was insecure, and to build himself up, he often criticized me, his sisters, and even his mother. One night we were playing Trivial Pursuit with his family. I happened to be on a streak; I answered most of the questions. On the drive home, he looked at me with a cruel sneer. “So, what’s it like to be such a know-it-all?”
    I was stunned. “I’m hardly a know-it-all,” I said. “Just lucky tonight.”
    “Whatever,” he said. “It’s cool . . . to date a girl who’s more concerned with Trivial Pursuit than stuff like how she looks.”
    I had never been self-conscious about my looks—I was average enough, cute enough—but Jason was beautiful, and his comment was intended to make me feel ugly. It did. So much that the only rejoinder I could muster was, “Uh-huh.”

CHAPTER TWELVE
    The following week, Lucas called. In preparation for his call, I had checked him out on LinkedIn: bachelor of science in accounting from University of Maryland in College Park, master of science in taxation from American University, member of the Virginia Society of CPAs, practiced solo for five years, then partnered with the nationwide firm of Powell, Dunfee, and Hayworth, Chartered.
    He wasn’t on Facebook, though I certainly didn’t hold that against him, as clearly I wasn’t much of a Facebook participant, just a girl spying on more interesting lives than mine. I searched his name and read numerous profile pieces on him. I logged on to the Virginia Board of Accountancy and saw that he was squeaky clean—never had a complaint filed