“Is this a dare?” My eyebrows hit my forehead.
Donna gives me an innocent look. “I raised two boys. You don’t want to play this game with me. I will go there. In a heartbeat.”
“If you wear your onesie to Westfield, coffee’s on me,” I say.
“If you wear your onesie to Westfield, shopping’s on me,” she retorts. After a pause, she adds, “Three-hundred-dollar limit, though. The place is expensive.”
We shake on it. We both change into our onesies.
I race her to the car.
I win.
One shopping trip and a makeover later, Pippa is sitting in front of me at the restaurant. It is surreal. She is even more stunning than I remembered. She is wearing a sage summer dress. Her hair cascades all the way down her ass. She doesn’t have an engagement ring, but she does have a genuine Gucci bag, which was a lifelong ambition of hers.
“You look flawless,” I choke out.
“You look like a stranger, you asshole.” She squeezes my hand and orders us two cocktails. I’m guessing she is taking the BART and doesn’t have to drive. I Ubered it here, but I think I’m going to walk home. It doesn’t seem like she has plans for stopping at two or three drinks, and a girl has to save some money. Getting on the subway is not an option.
Pippa tells me that she is a web designer for a secondhand designer apparel site, which explains the Gucci bag. She lives with her boyfriend, Quinn, in Haight-Ashbury. When I congratulate her, she tells me that previously, she’s also lived with Bryan, Jason, and Dan, so maybe I shouldn’t be too excited.
“Is it not serious, then?” I ask, amused.
“It’s as serious as it can be this time of the year. I believe I have . . . twelve, maybe fifteen soulmates. So far I’ve only met seven, though.” Pippa giggles. “I knew Quinn was one of them when I brought him here and we both ordered the shellfish tower and champagne. I looked at him and thought: This man cannot sustain this lifestyle without getting rich. I’d better stick around.”
“Is he?” I laugh. “Rich, I mean.”
“He’s on his way there.” She sounds sure.
“What does he do?”
The food arrives. Pippa digs into her organic fried chicken, and I take a tentative bite of my burger. “He owns a nightclub in the Tenderloin.”
“Aren’t you worried? He is constantly around semidrunk, beautiful women.”
She waves a hand at me. “I know he’d never cheat on me. I trust him with our relationship. Hell, I even trust him with my Netflix password!”
Shaking my head, I say, “You can never know these things. Trust me, I speak from experience.”
She gives me a pitying look. “I’m sorry you’ve experienced infidelity, Ever, but that only means you didn’t know the person you were with. If you do—if you truly see past the onion layers, if you touch the core—you always know. Don’t tell me it’s not the truth. Because you and I both know that when you left Spain, and that Joe guy stayed there, you didn’t for one second think he’d cheat on you.”
I’m pathetically close to breaking down and crying. She’s hit a chord, and now my freshest, rawest wound is wide open and bleeding.
She is right. Maybe the problem was that I never truly peeled all the layers of Dom’s onion. Because I did know Joe would never do this to me. I only assumed Dom wouldn’t. Dom was always a bit of a mystery to me—What’d he see in me? What made us work?—while with Joe, it just felt right.
“Maybe you’re right,” I mumble.
“There’s no maybe about it. I’m always right.”
I reach for a french fry. Pippa grabs my hand and tugs it. “Hold up. You’re engaged? Bitch, details. All of them. Right now!”
Maybe Renn doesn’t tell her everything in their talks.
I tell her about Dom. How we met. How he died. How it was yet again my fault. About the stupid tampons. About the guilt that doesn’t let go. And everything in between. About Joe, and how we are each other’s muses, but we’re not in touch, because we can’t trust ourselves to keep our pants on when we’re together, and also because I low-key don’t want him to die, and everyone I love dies. Pippa’s face changes expressions about twenty times a minute when I relay my last five months to her.
Once she is all caught up, she signals the waiter to get us more cocktails and some shots for good measure. “All of this happened and you didn’t pick up the phone to consult your main squeeze? What the heck did I ever do to you?”