Just Surrender... by Kathleen O'Reilly

things. Unfortunately, stupid was not one of them.
    “Let’s phone a friend.”
    “Now?” he asked, glancing at the narrow aisles, the wretched Saturday-night card shoppers, and the monkey bookends that grinned at him from their perch above the stacks.
    “Yeah. You’re going to have a real, honest conversation with another woman.” She pulled a notebook and pen out of her Save a Plant, Kill a Vegan bookbag, and started to write. “I’ll get you started on what to say, you improvise, and then we’ll do a postmortem after you’re done.”
    In Tyler’s line of work, postmortem was never a good experience. “Do we have to do that?”
    “It’s the best way to learn.”
    Well, yes, but the patient was dead, so ergo, Tyler had failed. However, Edie didn’t realize that Tyler didn’t like dwelling on his shortcomings, and she seemed to like dwelling on his shortcomings, and frankly, if they were going to talk about his shortcomings, he was glad they were confined to a simple phone conversation. “Okay,” he agreed.
    “Who am I supposed to call?”
    “Do you remember Passion from the other night?”
    “She was one of the dancers,” Tyler guessed.
    “Exactly,” she responded, beaming.
    “Why are we doing this?”
    “Practice.”
    He didn’t need practice.
    “How are you going to start?”
    “Hello?”
    “That’s good,” she told him. “And then?”
    And then things got muddier. “How are you?” he said.
    “Nah. Don’t ask how she’s doing. Then the conversation gets bogged down into the minute-by-minute minutiae of the day, and you want to avoid that. Instead, surprise her.”
    “How do I do that?”
    “Ask her something unexpected, or tell her something unexpected. Tell her that you saw a woman on the street, and she reminded you of her.”
    “I should lie?”
    “It’s not a lie,” Edie assured him. Edie, who was not party to the pigginess that inhabited the male brain.
    Med school had been so much easier.
    “I didn’t see a lot of women today,” he said.
    “Okay, let’s find something else.” Her eyes scanned the cards in front of her and then she grabbed one from the stack. “How about ‘I was thinking about you.’”
    Stubbornly Tyler shook his head, unwilling to compromise his values any further, and also because he wanted to ditch all the emotional hoodoo and discover if Edie was wearing a bra.
    It was at that moment, as Tyler was remembering the exact color of Edie’s nipples, that she handed him a piece of paper. “All right. Here’s her number. Go ahead and call and just go with what you feel.”
    Go with what you feel? Oh, God. It was hell. This was hell.
    Unfortunately, Edie looked so innocent, as if he was capable of emotional hoodoo, and he didn’t want her to think that. Or that he was an emotional coward. He could do this. He could.
    It was easy.
    Determined to overcome such shortcomings, Tyler got out his phone and dialed.
    “Hello.”
    “Tyler?”
    “Hi, Passion.”
    “Tyler, this is Austen. Your brother.”
    “I know. This is Tyler. I wanted to call and hear your voice,” he told his brother while grinning happily at Edie.
    He was a pig.
    “Why are you calling me and why are you calling me Passion? Who is Passion?”
    “It was a long day today,” Tyler started, and then noticed Edie shaking her head in warning. Minutiae. That was minutiae. God forgive him, he was a relationship failure.
    “Is there a woman there? Are you trying to shake her? Faking the call back home? I don’t even do that, Tyler. Are you drunk?”
    “I was just thinking how great you looked.”
    “Tyler, men don’t talk to people this way. Are you being mugged? Is this some freaky code that I’m supposed to understand? Let me know if I need to call 911.”
    While Austen was spiraling into a panic, Edie was scribbling in her notebook. She shot him a dark look and then showed him the page.
    You might as well tell her she’s a genetically neutered pansy.
    If a greeting card could