Match Made in Quarantine

41. After Quarantine

It was six months after quarantine, and things were not back to normal.

The number of infected was low -- as low as could be without a functional vaccine. They'd managed to find a suitable treatment that worked on most but not all. Life had resumed, carefully and with cautious hope for the future.

Going back to the old normal, as much as everyone liked to cling to that thought, just wasn't possible after a pandemic of this size. People still looked at you funny if you sneezed in front of them -- even though that had never even been an official symptom of the diseases. Moststill wore masks to stores and kept their distance. The bars weren't nearly as crowded as they used to be. The economy was still struggling to recover worldwide -- a few countries in Europe might end up forced into bankruptcy. Things were hard, they were slowly getting better -- but life would never go back to how it was before. The good thing about humanity though, was that we adapt, we recover, and we survive.

This was the new normal, and I was okay with that.

********

"Oh, God, I'm already sweating!" My palms and my armpits were visibly perspirating, and had my fingers not been firmly entwined with Maddox's, I would be aggressively pulling on my hair.

Good thing I wore black.

"Relax," he whispered into my ear in a soothing voice, bumping his shoulder against mine. "It will be fine, you really don't have to be so nervous."

We sat together on the back seat of an Uber, the plastic wall that had been installed in most cars in the post-pandemic world shielded the mask-equipped driver from us. I'd worn a black dress with small black heels, and a necklace I had started playing with until Maddox captured my empty hand.

"Easy for you to say," I muttered through clenched teeth, the pressure on my heart not lessening even one bit.

"Hey, I was nervous too when I went to meet your parents, you know." He raised one eyebrow, and the memory of his bouncing leg and sweaty brow flashed through my mind. I smiled, feeling a bit comforted by the fact that he understood how nerve wracking this was, but not very. "In the end, they liked me didn't they?"

That was an understatement. They had loved him.

I had never seen Maddox turn up his charm factor by a thousand, and oh boy, was it a powerful weapon. Even my dad, who had always been overprotective with his little girls, had seemed completely entranced with him. He answered every question they threw at him with a huge grin, and a confident, calm tone that seemed strange coming out of someone who was twenty three. After the initial interrogation had satisfied my overbearing parents, they decided that embarrassing me completely was next on the agenda. Out came the photo albums, and old videos that my dad had unfortunately managed to transfer into his cellphone. As if that wasn't enough, my sister had been standing a distance away and it took me a bit to realize that she had her phone pointed directly at Maddox. When I called her out on it, she squealed and then ran away, speaking to someone on the other line, "OMG, did you see him? Yeah see, I told you he looked like a celebrity! I know, I can't believe he--"

I'd prayed Maddox had not heard that embarrassing conversation but by the way his mouth quirked up, I knew that he had heard every single word. I was also pretty sure that, after we'd left, my mother had started calling up her friends to tell them all about how good looking her future son-in-law was.

That part of the memory physically hurt and I wished I could erase the very moment of them meeting out of history.

"Yeah, they loved you." I tried not to roll my eyes when I said that.