“Can you just get the bottle of gin and pour it directly down my throat?”
He laughed. “Went that well, huh?”
“I swear my siblings only said I could bring a date to their weddings to torture me.”
“I told you I could be your date.”
“And I told you, they said actual romantic prospects only. No ‘random friends.’”
“Do they actually need to know the difference?”
“Please don’t start. As much as I’d love to have you there for moral support, I don’t want to lie to everyone at the weddings. Because every single person there would ask us when we were getting married.”
“And you’d rather bring a random guy who you’ve been on a couple dates with?”
I shook my head and took another sip of my drink. “No. If I had found someone awesome, that would have been cool. But I’m done trying. I’ll just go and be single and when anyone asks, I’m going to say I was engaged for a while, but he kept asking me when I wanted to get married, so I murdered him with a pickax.” Alex laughed again. Mental note: use that in the blog.
For a split second, I considered telling him about the blog. Actually, I had debated telling him about it many times since I started. It would be nice to be able to share the small successes when they came. But the more anonymous I kept it, the better. And I had talked about Justin—I refused to think about the implications of why I didn’t want Alex knowing about that, assuming he hadn’t already heard, but I didn’t.
“How was your date?”
He shook his head. “I cancelled it.”
“Really? Why?”
“She was too—I don’t know—I got the feeling that I checked all the boxes by being a lawyer, so she wanted to seal the deal immediately and lock me down. Possibly literally, in her basement.”
I leaned my head on my hand, scrunched up my nose, and smiled. “Probably for the best then. You don’t want to end up in a hole, putting the lotion on its skin.”
“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.”