For the Love of Friends(51)
“Right?” He smiled back. “Plus she’s a lot younger than us. She wouldn’t have even gotten a Silence of the Lambs joke.”
“How much younger?”
“Twenty-six.”
I pulled an olive out of my martini and threw it at him. “That’s almost my baby sister’s age, you perv.”
“And your sister is getting married. It’s not that young.”
“Too young for us.”
“I agree. That’s why I’m not in her basement hole.”
“You need to get off Tinder. It’s one thing if you’re using it to get laid, it’s another if you think you’re going to find a soul mate on there.”
“I know.” He paused. “Are you using it to get laid?”
I mimed vomiting. “Uh, no. And I deleted the app before I even left the restaurant tonight.”
“I never even got to swipe on you.”
“Right, I assume?”
“Of course.”
We both sipped our drinks, comfortable in the silence. “Mexico would have been fun though,” he mused.
“Even getting my grandma down there?”
“Sure. Old ladies love me.”
“She’s a flirt too. You’d have your hands full.”
“See? Who needs Tinder?”
I covered my face, laughing. “That’s an over-sixty-year spread. Get some standards already.”
“Hey, the last time I went to Cancun was my honeymoon. I’ll take what I can get.”
That sobered me up quickly. “I always forget you were actually married. You’re like an adult adult.”
He shrugged. “Not really. It was a stupid thing to do.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
He took another drink, thinking. “I guess I thought it was what I was supposed to do. I was getting close to thirty and she really wanted to get married and I kind of just thought that’s what people did.”
“Did you love her?”
“I thought so. At first at least. But by the end, I didn’t even recognize myself anymore. I was angry all the time, and she found a way to ruin anything that made me happy.”
“She sounds like a blast.”
“Yeah.”
“What actually happened though?” He looked down. I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
He exhaled loudly. “No, I think I want to.” He paused again, then continued, all the while peeling the label off his beer bottle and shredding it into a tiny pile on the table. “She really wanted us to have a baby. And I mean, yeah, I want kids. But we were fighting all the time and I wasn’t ready, so I suggested we try going to couples therapy. She didn’t want to, but she eventually agreed. So we go like six times and we get into a fight in the therapist’s office about the whole kids thing, and she yells at me that it doesn’t matter anyway because she stopped taking the pill a year ago and if she wasn’t pregnant yet, it clearly wasn’t going to happen anyway.”
My eyes widened, but he still wasn’t looking at me.
“And I just—I couldn’t trust her after that. She had been lying to me for a year. And if she had gotten pregnant—I mean—that’s forever. It’s not like the little kind of lie, like when she knocked the mirror off her car and claimed she didn’t know how it happened. This was—it was too big. I couldn’t go back from that.”
He finally looked up at me, but I didn’t know what to say. Tricking someone into creating a new life was a whole other level of betrayal.
He brushed the pieces of his beer label into a napkin and balled it up. “So anyway. New subject?”
“Sure.” He looked uncomfortable at having shared that much, so I reached around for something else to talk about. Anything. “Okay, new subject. Um, oh, okay, I’ve got one! That horrible bridesmaid in Caryn’s wedding? She used the wrong ‘your’ in an email today!”
He smiled weakly. “What a moron.”
“Right? Like how are you going to ream me out and not even use proper grammar? I will destroy you in a reply to that.” His grin finally looked more genuine. “I need to figure out something appropriately passive-aggressive to troll her with. Maybe a mug that says ‘Grammar: the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.’ I saw that online somewhere. I could send it to her.”
“I thought you were overextended on your wedding budget?”
“There’s always money to passive-aggressively mock someone horrible. Duh.” I paused. “I’ve also heard really good things about glitter bombs.”
“What’s a glitter bomb?”
“You anonymously mail someone an envelope full of glitter. It gets everywhere. And it’s cheap, so you can do it yourself. Glitter costs almost nothing.”
Alex shook his head. “Remind me never to cross you.”
You don’t know the half of it, I thought gleefully, already planning how to mock Caroline’s idiocy in the blog. But Alex was reaching into his pocket and pulling out his phone, the screen glowing.
“Hang on, it’s my sister,” he said, answering it. “Sam? What’s up?” He held his hand over his free ear. It wasn’t loud in the restaurant, but it wasn’t super quiet either. “Wait, slow down, I can’t understand you.” He listened. “Oh God. Okay, which one? I’ll be right there. I’m coming right now. I love you too.”