Double-booked

A Romance in Three Parts

Last week, I released A Haunting Before I Do—a supernatural thriller that plunges you into a bachelorette night where ghosts are real, vampires are your best friends, and magic comes with a serious learning curve. It’s dark, intricate, and demands emotional investment. It’s heavy.

So this week, I wanted to offer you something different.

This is “Double-booked”—a standalone short story about a woman named Diane who accidentally falls into genuine friendship with two dating app matches instead of choosing between them. It’s funny without being silly. It’s the literary equivalent of a palate cleanser: light, refreshing, and surprisingly satisfying.

No ghosts. No blood magic. No life-altering secrets revealed on wedding nights. Just three women, a vindictive cat, some bourbon, Thai food, and the kind of human connection that sneaks up on you when you’re too busy running from your loneliness to notice it arriving.

If you’ve just finished A Haunting Before I Do and feel emotionally wrung out (fair), read this. If you just want a short story that feels like a warm hug from someone who gets it, read this.

Sometimes the most magical moments are the ordinary ones.

Double-booked: A Romance in Three Parts

The cat had pissed in both yellow tennis shoes by the time Diane got home, which felt like commentary.

“Jesus, Hollandaise.” She stood in the doorway of her bedroom, still in her work clothes, staring at the soggy Nikes that had cost her a hundred and twenty dollars. The cat—orange, fat, utterly remorseless—sat on her dresser cleaning his paws.

Her phone buzzed. Running 10 late, that ok?

Vanessa. The Hinge date. Diane had been looking forward to this with the kind of desperate optimism that characterized her early forties: aware of how pathetic it was, unable to stop herself anyway.

No problem, she typed back, then looked at the shoes again.

The shoes had been Claire’s idea. Claire, her ex-wife of two years now, who’d texted last week: Saw these and thought of you. Just casual cruelty disguised as thoughtfulness. Diane had worn them exactly once—to a work happy hour where a 28-year-old named Brett had asked if she was “doing the divorced woman reinvention thing.”

She’d worn them tonight because she’d wanted to feel different. Instead she felt exactly like herself: a woman whose cat pissed in her shoes on purpose.

The doorbell rang at 7:40.

Vanessa was taller than her photos suggested, which was fine. Better than fine. She had silver threading through her dark hair and smiled like someone who’d already decided this would be worth her time.

“You look—” Vanessa paused in the doorway, “—like you’ve had a day.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Your shirt’s buttoned wrong.”

Diane looked down. Fuck. She’d changed tops three times and apparently botched the landing.

“Come in,” she said, already rebuttoning. “Fair warning: my cat’s an asshole.”

“I like assholes.” Vanessa stepped inside, taking in the space—the half-unpacked boxes still stacked in the corner from the move, the Rothko print that Claire had let her keep, the cat now perched on the back of the couch like a judgmental gargoyle. “How long have you been here?”

“Fourteen months. I’m a slow unpacker.”

“Or you’re not sure you’re staying.”

Diane stopped rebuttoning. That was too perceptive for seven minutes in. “You want wine?”

“I brought bourbon.”

Of course she did.

They were halfway through their first pour when the doorbell rang again.

Diane’s stomach dropped. “Oh no.”

“Oh no?”

“I…” Diane set down her glass. “I have another date. In ten minutes. I thought we’d be done by then—not done badly, just done—and I could—”

“You scheduled them back to back?” Vanessa’s eyebrow arched, but she didn’t look angry. She looked amused, which was somehow worse.

“I have commitment issues and poor organizational skills.”

The doorbell rang again.

“Are you going to get that?”

Diane opened the door to find Miranda, the Bumble match, holding takeout and looking annoyed. “You said seven-thirty.”

“I said eight.”

“You definitely said seven-thirty.”

Diane pulled out her phone, checked the message thread. “Shit. I said seven-thirty.”

Miranda looked past her, saw Vanessa on the couch with bourbon. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

“I can explain—”

“Don’t.” Miranda shoved the takeout bag into Diane’s hands. “I’m too old for this shit. We’re all too old for this shit.”

She wasn’t wrong.

Vanessa appeared beside Diane, glass in hand. “What kind of takeout?”

Miranda blinked. “What?”

“In the bag. What’d you bring?”

“Thai. Why?”

“Because—” Vanessa looked at Diane, then back at Miranda, “—she’s clearly a disaster, we’re both dressed up with nowhere to go, and that smells like drunken noodles. So we can either leave her here alone with her vindictive cat, or we can stay and make this weird.”

Miranda stared at her. “You want to have dinner together? All three of us?”

“I want to eat expensive Thai food and see how this plays out.” Vanessa turned to Diane. “You game?”

Diane felt the entire evening tilting sideways into something unrecognizable. “My cat pissed in my shoes.”

“The yellow ones by the door?” Miranda asked.

“You saw them?”

“Hard to miss. Also, they’re ugly.”

“My ex-wife bought them.”

“That explains it,” Vanessa said, heading to the kitchen for plates. “Ex-wives have terrible taste.”

“Mine bought me a juicer,” Miranda said, following her. “A juicer. Like I was going to become a different person.”

They were talking like they’d known each other for years. Diane stood in her own hallway, holding drunken noodles, watching two women she’d expected to audition for her life just… bypass her entirely.

Hollandaise appeared at her feet, meowing.

“This is your fault,” she told him.

By 9 PM they were drunk. By 10, Miranda was on the floor playing with Hollandaise using a shoelace from the ruined Nikes while Vanessa and Diane split the last of the bourbon on the couch.

“I’m not looking for anything serious,” Miranda said from the floor. “I should probably say that.”

“I’m not looking for anything at all,” Vanessa added. “I came tonight because my therapist said I should ‘put myself out there.’ I’m starting to think she meant something different.”

“I’m just lonely,” Diane said, because the bourbon made her honest. “I keep thinking if I schedule enough dates, eventually I’ll feel less alone. But it doesn’t work like that.”

Silence. Hollandaise pounced on the shoelace.

“We could be friends,” Miranda said finally. “Is that weird? To say that on a failed date?”

“I could use friends,” Vanessa admitted.

Diane looked at them both—these two women who’d shown up for one thing and stayed for something else entirely. “I’m throwing out the shoes.”

“Good,” they said in unison.

“And I’m deleting the apps.”

“Probably smart,” Vanessa said.

“For a while,” Miranda amended. “Don’t go full hermit.”

“No promises.”

They left together around midnight, exchanging numbers, making plans for next week—coffee, not a date, just coffee. Diane watched them go, then turned to find Hollandaise sitting in the kitchen sink.

“You’re still an asshole,” she told him.

He purred.

She threw away the shoes, poured herself water, and went to bed feeling something she hadn’t felt in months: like maybe this was enough. This strange, sideways evening. These two women who might actually call. This life that refused to be scheduled or controlled.

The cat jumped onto her bed, settled against her hip.

“Yeah,” she said into the dark. “You can stay.”

What about you?

Have you ever accidentally stumbled into a friendship that became more meaningful than any relationship you were actually trying to build? Or are you more like Diane—scheduling your way through loneliness in hopes that eventually one date will stick?

Drop a comment below. I’d love to know what made you pick up this story, and whether Hollandaise (the cat) reminded you of any vindictive felines in your own life.