“Why?” I pat Ozzie’s back to help settle him. “Did the island move?”
“You’re funny.” Aidan chuckles as he shifts the van into drive. “It’s just holiday traffic. I hope that doesn’t throw too big of a wrench in your plans for the evening.”
The real wrench in my plans is over six feet tall, with enough smolder to fill an entire Beverly Jenkins novel.
“That’s no problem for me,” Smith says. “It’ll give us some time to catch up.”
“Didn’t we just do that?” I chuckle nervously. “You live in Phoenix. I live in San Francisco. No babies. I feel caught up.”
Smith looks at me sideways, like he can’t tell whether I’m joking.
“You two know each other?” Aidan asks. “Makes sense since the two of you are going to the same street. Pretty ritzy street at that. Did you guys grow up together or something?”
Great. Now the driver has questions. This rideshare is turning into The View very quickly.
“We were in rival gangs,” I deadpan. “My family colors were plaid. His were floral. Twice a year we’d street fight with pool noodles, and the winner got to smash the loser’s china piece by piece like they do in those mafia movies; except in the movies, they smash fingers instead of china. It was all very hard core.”
“Uh.” Aidan slow blinks at me in the rearview mirror. I’m not totally sure, but it kind of looks like he’s signaling SOS in Morse code. “That’s interesting.”
“We’re divorced,” Smith says.
My breath catches in my chest. He said it so easily. Like it was no different than telling someone his eye color or his voting party.
Smith catches on to the fact that my eyeballs are now dangling outside my head. “You all right?”
“Are you going to tell him my bra size next? Maybe my social security number?” I lower my voice. “He’s our driver, not Anderson Cooper.”
“A divorce is public knowledge. You can google it.” Smith shrugs. “What’s the big deal?”
“It’s not a big deal,” I say defensively.
“Are you sure? Because your face is saying otherwise. You’ve got that little worry divot you always get when you’re upset.” He touches the spot in between his eyebrows where he thinks I have a worry divot, but I have a receipt for $500 worth of Botox that says otherwise. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t,” I fire back.
“Good. I’m glad to hear it. I’d hate for us to have to settle this in the streets. I forgot my floral shirt and pool noodle.”
I let the subject drop and focus my gaze out the window to catch my breath. I’ve been back in San Diego for an hour, and it already feels like a lifetime. I take my phone from my purse and summon the Smut Coven.
Penny: Houston, we have a problem.
Chelsey: Oh my god, did your dad say no already?
Jackie: Did you show him the Google Slides presentation I made for you?
Penny: Relax. I haven’t talked to my dad yet.
Penny: I’m in my rideshare right now.
Penny: Sitting next to my ex-husband.
The van jerks to a halt, causing my seat belt to strangle me.
“Sorry about that,” Aidan says over his shoulder. “You know what they say, nobody knows how to drive in the rain. Self included. So how long have you two been divorced?”
My entire body tenses at the word. I glare at him in the rearview mirror. “Aidan, your rating goes down half a star every time the word divorce is mentioned in here.”
It’s not that I’m embarrassed about being divorced. It’s something that happened to me, like chicken pox when I was five and overplucked eyebrows when I was fifteen. It was unpleasant, but it didn’t kill me, and most of the time, I don’t even think about it happening at all. Divorce and my marriage are neatly tucked away in little boxes of emotion in the Old Penny filing system of my brain. I like keeping them there under lock and key. Smith bringing up our divorce screws up the whole system, which is the last thing I need before going home for the first time in a decade.
“What about marriage? I, myself, am recently engaged to my longtime girlfriend, Viktoria. We’re meeting for the first time this Christmas. She lives in the Czech Republic, or at least I think that’s where she’s at. Her English isn’t exactly great.”
There’s an entire 90 Day Fiancé episode’s worth of material I’d like to unpack with Aidan, and under normal circumstances, I would. But right now, I don’t have the mental bandwidth to juggle his mail-order bride and my ex-husband.