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The first and last Valentine’s day Linda Park had been involved with had been ten years ago.
It consisted of her feeling far more grown up than she was; and going to a boy named Ja’s house. He was cute and tall and smart; all of the things Linda thought she wanted. Mama had introduced him to her, jabbering excitedly about how he could speak 'Hangugeo, Linda!'
She’d shown up, wearing a red ruffled dress and a leather jacket, her hair in a knot that hid the green disaster that was her attempt to bleach it.
They’d eaten pasta and it had been nice. Later in his bedroom, he’d kissed her and when his fingers had skated up her ribcage she’d finally felt a flutter. The night had suddenly felt worthwhile and she’d wanted to scream ‘This is it! I’m in love!’
She wasn’t though.
The fluttering dissipated seemingly ushered in by his physicality more than the situation. Their foray into physicality was over abruptly, for he was a teenage boy and she was curious about things that a nice girl wasn’t supposed to be curious about.
She had left at ten thirty, confused about belonging and sure this wasn’t what she wanted. She fielded his phone calls for a week and wrote a pop-punk song in a thrumming beat about touching.
All she could say to those who asked why they weren’t together was that she ‘hadn’t felt a spark’. That was as much of a lie as her three minutes of being ‘in love’ in his bedroom had been. Linda hadn’t felt commitment, romance or any of those things, but she sure as hell had felt a ‘spark’. She had felt ‘the spark’ the tingling in her skin and the warming her lips, but she hadn’t felt… connection.
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After that boys and dating seemed to be full of constraints and schedules. She didn’t want to date in the way people had to; she didn’t want to date the people suitable for her race, gender or personality. She wanted excitement and fun and to spark the world until it lit up.
She naively voiced these opinions at school. To her 'friends' it made her a heartbreaker (to her face) and a slut (behind her back).
To the male population at her school it made her ‘that super-hot Chinese girl’ until they realised that she wasn’t a stereotype (of a race that she didn’t even belong to) and that this wasn’t an act. After that it made her ‘wild’, ‘crazy’ and ‘scary’, and she loved the last part.
As a result of the hysteria that accompanied her deciding to do what she wanted to do, Linda started avoiding Valentine’s Day. She tried to avoid relationships too but they were… messier. She hadn’t realised that she was avoiding Valentine’s Day until she was twenty two, and breaking up with Chester. It was February 9th and he’d stood stock still and shocked before running upstairs to retrieve tickets and screaming about how ‘hard it is to get reservations in January!’. Linda had still broken up with him though, because she had ‘reservations’ of her own about men attempting to guilt and cage her.
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In college she’d wondered if her feelings about women had anything to do with the hollowness in her relationships with men. For a while she’d entertained the idea of picking up a faceless long haired girl and grabbing her hand and painting the town red. She dated around a lot, and whilst she was able to have a long-term girlfriend in Sara, and loved her more than she’d ever loved Chester or Ja, she wasn’t in love with Sara. It had been the hardest thing she’d ever had to do to break her best friend’s heart and to be unable to look into Sara’s face as an eclipse fell over her sun-like radiance.
She had decided to swear off romance, and commitment the moment she saw Sara’s face, crumpled with her hair stuck to her lip-gloss and her fingers worrying her coiled hair.
At twenty-four years old, Linda was ready to be open and completely and utterly in control of who she got into relationships and why she did.
She was ready for something as she sat in the seedy little bar, nursing a drink and listening to musical notes fly and crash on the stage. And when she got a look at the brown haired, green eyed boy on the stage, she knew she was ready for anything.
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‘Anything’ turned out to be Barry Allen.
This was unfortunate in a plethora of ways.
Linda had approached him because he was hot. He had a sweet, shuffling, shuddering vulnerability. He was ephebic and boyish without being filled with the macho bravado that made her balk. His broad frame and lumbering gait paired with his fluid spine made him look like a wooden artists’ model. For once, Linda wasn’t being ‘asked out’ or ‘pursued’ in the way she’d always been. She had decided that she was interested and she had made a move.
They went out on a date and she wore a flower in her hair. He was continually interesting at their dinner together and Linda liked him very much. He was adorable, sweet and non-threatening and in many ways it was less a date and more a two-person social gathering.
Later, on his couch they had kissed and in his bedroom they’d… touched. It was heated and good and tentative and somehow platonic even though that was entirely contradictory. They giggled through most of it, and Linda kept making sex puns. Barry was tentative and happiest when he was pleasuring her (‘is this okay, Linda?’) and when she pleasured him they cuddled and held each other. There was no intense eye contact or quick thrusting and that was the best part of it. It was soft and warm and that was nice.
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‘Um, Linda. Not that…not that, that wasn’t... you know....’ Barry had started as they sat on his couch, fully dressed; he’d offered her orange juice and they both sipped as he talked. ‘…You know, it was wow… but I uh… I don’t really do things like that so often’ he’d said with his head bowed but somehow unapologetic. It clicked for Linda at that moment, this wasn’t Barry telling her he was embarrassed by his inexperience, it was him wanting to be accepted in his inexperience.
Linda had punched him on the arm and patted him on the back. ‘You literally will never have to worry about that with me, Barry.’ She’d said as she’d gotten up, ‘I’ll see you later hot shot.’
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That had been absolutely everything she’d ever wanted this situation to be. Just two friends who talked and made fun of each other and every so often helped relieve sexual frustration. However, like an old and unwanted friend,Valentine’s Day had chosen this precise moment to rear its ugly commercialist head.
Barry seemed to be constantly mentally posturing, unable to talk properly and constantly looking at Linda and beginning to speak before turning around and ruffling his hair. Linda bemoaned the world once more for ruining perfection with expectations.
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It all came to a head on the seventh of February, at Jitters. Barry had been fidgeting and laughing at nothing for about twenty minutes when he decided to insert, ‘Soo, Valentine’s Day is coming up isn’t it? I hadn’t noticed, haha’ into an unrelated conversation about baseball.
Linda had rolled her eyes and thrown her hair off of her shoulder, ready for a familiar routine, but determined it would turn out differently this time.
‘Yes?’
‘I...Uh... do you want to…?’ he started, looking as thrilled as she felt about the situation (not very). Linda shook her head slowly, aware that she was going to have to bite the bullet.
‘Barry, I don’t... I don’t do Valentine’s day.’ She said as softly as possible, thinking of Sara, and unhappy to have to do this once more. She braced herself for the audible sound of his heart breaking, but he only said ‘Oh, that’s cool!’ and looked down at his coffee.
Linda realised this wasn’t going to be easy, and decided to remove subtlety from the situation. Taking a deep breath she stared Barry down, ‘I don’t feel that way about you Bar...’ she started, unable to hold his gaze. ‘I really like you a lot, but I like what we’ve got going on here, I don’t love you.. I don’t think I ‘love’ anyone, like that’.
She took a deep breath and sipped her coffee anticipating the intense puppy eyes she was going to have to deal with when she looked up; when she did look up, however she was surprised.
She’d expected a plethora of emotions to be playing across Barry’s face, but relief hadn’t been one of them. He was grinning at her with his eyebrows raised and his eyes bright.
‘Thanks for sharing that with me, Linda.’ he said quietly, and then louder ‘I’m actually kind of glad, because I don’t really um…’ he paused and reconsidered carefully ‘You’re absolutely... like.. really cool and stuff but I....’
Linda couldn’t believe this was happening...it was glorious. She grinned up at the dork, feeling as relieved as he looked (completely). He was still babbling about how he hadn’t known what she’d want and whether she’d be offended or sad or angry and so he hadn’t brought it up.
‘I’m actually, I’m in love....’ he finished, blushing and shaking his head. Linda froze, coffee centimetres away from her lips and Barry laughed.
‘Not with you!’ he said grinning hard, ‘with… someone else’
Oh. Interesting.
‘Well you can’t just leave me hanging there, Barry... Who?’ said Linda, in her best reporter voice.
Barry hesitated for a few moments.
Linda hastily remembered the thick tension in her office, the sad motion of Iris’ eyes, and the fake happiness in Barry that disappeared when Iris had left.
‘Is it Iris?’ she stated bluntly, unwilling to step around the issue any longer.
Barry gaped with his mouth slightly open, ‘N..n.. How did you know?’ he demanded, ‘How does everyone know?’ he said softly, pressing his head against his clasped hands.
Linda decided it was a rhetorical question, and that informing him that he was a ‘lovelorn puppy with a petty grudge’ around Iris probably wouldn’t be the best thing for their blossoming friendship.
‘Lucky guess.’ She said instead, rolling her eyes slightly when Barry looked bewildered. What a dork.
‘So, uh… What’s your story? How long has this been going on?’
‘Um well... Um....’ Barry was sweating slightly. It was very sweet, but also slightly frustrating. Linda wanted answers; she was a reporterand wanted to get to the bottom of this case. Linda had a high opinion of Iris and if this dork could make her happy, she’d like to be the maid of honour at their wedding.
‘I met Iris when I was about ten...' Barry started after a deep breath.
Linda rolled her eyes slightly, realising that this would take a while- Barry’s eyes already had a glazed and faraway look as he described ten year old Iris' red coat- but Linda was still curious.
‘She was the prettiest, coolest, smartest person in the class and I was new and sort of dumbstruck by her....’ he chuckled slightly, shaking his head, ‘I still sort of am. I think everyone that meets her is.’
Linda urged herself to stay cool, and to not march over to Central City News and drag Iris over this very second.
‘For some reason, when I was babbling to someone about cuttlefish or something, she took pity on me and kept nodding on this school trip to the Aquarium… I’d never really had anyone my age care that much about anything I had to say, and here was Iris who had her pick of everyone and did care. So, I fell in love with her, I guess’.
Linda was beaming at him when he looked up. ‘That’s really, really freaking cute, Bar! What are you gonna do about it?’ and Barry shook his head, with bitterness setting his jaw into a tight line. He blinked away wetness that had gathered in the corners of his eyes. ‘Um, I’m not… I tried; she knows, she just… doesn’t feel the same way I guess.’
That was utterly heart-breaking and Linda couldn’t help but feel that there was a more nuanced story to be told in all of this. She set in her mind to talk to Iris, to see what she had to say about her adorkable admirer.