On the Rocks (30 page)

“Thanks. You must love being out here during the week when the town isn’t being overloaded with people.”

“Yeah, it’s been nice. You weekend people cramp my style.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. We aren’t all that bad, though, you know.”

“Hmm. Sorry, I have no evidence to support that statement.”

“Well, if you’re up for it, why don’t you meet up with us next weekend when I’m back? I’m meeting a few friends tonight, who I actually just saw come in, so I should go join them.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, preparing myself for a brush-off.

“But I’m serious,” he said. “Let’s meet up next weekend if you’re around. Can I get your number?”

I was shocked. Was my aunt Patrice right? Had I been flashing some kind of
DO NOT DISTURB
sign this whole time like some bitter woman bat signal?

“Sure,” I said. I was about to give him my number when I had a thought. “I should probably mention that I’m not on Facebook. That’s been an issue for me in the past.”

“That’s fine. I never check it anyway,” he said.

Marry me.

He removed his phone from his back pocket and programmed my number into it. I hadn’t been this hopeful about anything in a very long time, and for once, I didn’t have to worry about Facebook sabotaging me. He squeezed my shoulder briefly as he said good-bye. “Nice to meet you, Abby. I’ll be in touch with you sometime this week.”

“Sounds good. Talk to you later. It was nice to meet you.”

I was giddy, and I couldn’t wait to tell Bobby about my progress. At least I now recognized when I was being hit on.

“There are some cute guys over there,” Lara said, surprised, as she strained her neck to see through the crowd. “Does Grace work with cute guys?”

I looked over at the table, but it was dark and half of the group had their backs to us, so the only thing I could tell from where we were standing was which ones were going to bald prematurely. By my count, at least three.

Lara was contorting her upper body so badly I was afraid she’d throw her back out. “You should hang out with her work crew. Lawyers are smart,” she reminded me. She tapped her index finger on the side of her temple to illustrate, just in case I didn’t know what smart meant. “Smart means successful. Successful is good.”

“Smart could also mean they’re huge nerds,” I said. “You could spend the rest of your life watching your husband play Dungeons and Dragons on your computer. Is that the kind of life you want? I sure don’t.” I could handle a lot of things, but a man who played computer games to have a good time was completely unacceptable.

The bartender reappeared, holding a bottle of champagne. He popped the cork, spilling a stream of fizzy bubbles on the floor, and set flutes on the bar in front of us. “This is for you guys. Compliments of the gentleman in the orange shirt at the back table over there.” He pointed to the table where Grace was gabbing with her fellow lawyers. The bar was dark and deciphering a shirt color was nearly impossible, so I was having a hard time figuring out which one of the crew had sent over the bottle of champagne. Not that I cared. I’d take a free bottle of champagne from Lucifer if he offered it to me.

“Oh, there’s the guy,” Lara said as I strained to follow her gaze. The champagne sender had originally had his back to us, but now he stood facing us, wearing a very orange polo shirt and khaki shorts. He smiled slightly and waved. “He’s cute, actually, isn’t he?” Lara asked.

I felt the color drain from my face and heat prickled the nape of my neck. I swallowed hard and grasped the bar, hoping a firm grip would keep me upright. Apparently, my first instinct was wrong. I would not, in fact, take a free bottle of champagne from Lucifer.

I grabbed Lara’s flute out of her hand and poured our drinks down the bar sink.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Lara watched in horror as the bubbles fizzed and dissipated.

“The guy . . . that’s Ben,” I said, my voice quivering despite my best efforts to stop it.

“Is the bottle bad?” the bartender asked.

“The bottle is fine. It’s the sender who’s bad.” I grabbed a dry cocktail napkin from the stack on the bar, borrowed a pen from the bartender, and furiously scribbled a note. I asked a waitress to deliver it for me.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lara gasped. “That’s Ben? Live and in the flesh? Shouldn’t he be going through a desert on a horse with no name or something? What’s he doing back east?” she asked, but my brain was having a hard time processing her oh so many unanswerable questions.

“I don’t know. I didn’t even know he was in this time zone, but he’s been texting me a lot lately and I’ve ignored them. Maybe that’s what he wanted to tell me.”

“You’ve been ignoring him? I’m so proud of you!” she said.

“Thanks. I apparently picked a great time to get over him. Those were messages I maybe should’ve answered.”

“Of all the bars in all the world, he had to walk into yours,” Lara mused.

“Yeah, well, this is some seriously fucked-up version of
Casablanca.
Leave it to me to corrupt a classic.”

“I can’t believe he has the balls to send you a bottle of champagne as, what, a peace offering? What does he want from you?” Lara was angry, and she wasn’t alone.

Grace returned to the bar after saying hello to the rest of the legal eagles and wrapped her arm around my waist. “Abby, you need to get out of here. Now.” She turned around and scanned the group again, her eyes almost bulging out of their sockets. She slammed her fist on the bar. “I don’t want to have to tell you this, but . . .”

“I saw him,” I said, trying hard to keep my eyes from gravitating back to where he was standing. “I don’t know what to do! I’ll look pathetic if I leave. I don’t want him to think I’m still so hung up on him that I can’t even be in the same room as him. I want him to think I’ve moved on.”

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Grace screamed. “You’re doing so well, and I told him that if he thought he was going to win you back he could forget it. I told him you were single and loving it and you’d rather be alone forever than spend one more night with him.”

“Please tell me you’re kidding!” I wailed. It’s amazing how the good intentions of friends can sometimes make you want to kill them. “I want him to think that I’m seeing someone. I want him to think that I’m dating half of Newport. I don’t want him to know I’m alone!” I hissed, mortified as we all turned and watched the waitress hand Ben the napkin note.

“No offense, Abby, but that’s ridiculous. He knows you’re not seeing anyone. You’ve been talking to him! I’ve seen his name in your phone.”

“You’ve checked my phone? What are you, a jealous boyfriend?” I asked.

“No, a concerned friend, and phone-checking is completely within my rights. I also saw that lately you’ve been ignoring him. Good girl.”

I made a mental note to add a password, and possibly a padlock, to my iPhone.

“I didn’t know he was coming home, but since I also didn’t know that he didn’t want to marry me, that’s not all that surprising. It’s probably on his Facebook page.”

The three of us watched as Ben read the note and laughed. Apparently, he thought it was a joke. Apparently, he thought I was a joke. And that was more than I could stand for one evening.

“He’s not cute at all now that I get a better look at him,” Lara scoffed in a failed attempt to make me feel better.

“What did you write on that napkin?” Grace asked.

“I told him I would sooner drink from a toilet than from that bottle. Not my best work, but I had no time to prepare.”

“Abby, I don’t think he took the hint,” Lara said as she nodded in his direction. “He’s coming over here.”

It’s funny. I’d been thinking about what I would say to him if I ever had the chance to speak to him in person instead of hiding behind my computer screen. For some reason, I was much braver in the scenarios where I was envisioning seeing him than I was now that the opportunity was actually real. Instead of having any of the dozen conversations I had rehearsed in my head, I decided to take a slightly different route.

I turned and ran for the exit like the bar was on fire.

Chapter 19

Cupid Clearly Hates Me

I
WOVE MY WAY
back through the crowd and exited onto the pier by the street. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why some girls had it so easy and the good Lord chose to make my path so fucking hard. I mean, I had finally felt better. I had felt confident. I had felt empowered, and yes, I had felt skinny. And then, He decided to send Ben down on me like a thunderbolt just to remind me that my road to happiness was currently closed for construction. And he decided to do it on the one night when I didn’t even bother to blow-dry my hair.

“Abby, wait,” Ben called from behind me. Maybe I needed a refresher course at jilted fiancée obedience school, but I was pretty sure telling me to “wait” wasn’t going to do jack shit. Not anymore at least.

“Leave me alone, Ben,” I said, quickly spinning around to see how much distance there was between the two of us. Funny, not too long ago I felt like two time zones was way too much. Now he was closing in on me from a half-block away. I thought I caught someone else coming out of the bar when I turned around. I hoped it was Grace, getting ready to crack a bottle over his head like she promised she’d do if she ever saw him again.

“I tried to tell you I was coming to see you. I didn’t want to sneak up on you like this, but you didn’t give me a choice,” he yelled. “I sent you texts telling you I needed to talk to you, but you never answered and you haven’t logged on.”

“You should have taken the hint. We don’t need to talk. It’s way too late for that,” I said, walking as fast as was humanly possible in platform wedges and jeans that were dangerously close to ripping.

“I know that, but I had to at least try. I thought maybe it could be kind of romantic—you know, my coming to find you.”

“Romantic? Are you kidding me? How is ambushing your ex-fiancée in a bar romantic? You know, I realized you had a severely fucked-up way of communicating with me when you broke up with me on Facebook, but this is a stretch even for you.”

“Maybe that wasn’t the best idea in retrospect,” he admitted sheepishly.

“Considering this isn’t a bad romantic comedy, yeah, I’d say that’s a safe bet.”

First the ring in the soufflé, now this. Maybe he was a closet Jennifer Aniston freak.

He had annoyingly long legs and caught up to me much faster than I expected him to. The streets were crowded with laughing, drunk groups of friends all out on the town for a night of harmless fun, and then there was me: a walking, talking dating apocalypse.

“I understand that you’re mad,” he said, rationally, as if he was trying to calm me down because he was an hour late for a dinner reservation instead of a year late for our wedding.

“Mad? What gave you that idea? How’d you even know where to find me? What, did you hire someone to follow me around or something, you sick fuck?”

“It wasn’t exactly difficult. I just checked Grace’s Facebook page. She’s constantly posting where she’s going. It’s probably so that that guy Johnny what’s-his-name knows where she is at all times. Are they still together?” he asked, as if it was perfectly normal for him to be making small talk.

I was going to kill Grace. Somehow she had failed to realize that alerting everyone to what she was up to on Facebook also told everyone what I was up to. And now she had enabled Ben to find me by simply reading a wall post. Facebook must be a nightmare for the marshals in witness protection.

“Get away from me, Ben, before I scream that you’re trying to attack me and have every good guy in a ten-block radius pummel you to bits.”

“I deserve that,” he said, although I don’t think he meant it.

“You deserve to have your balls put through a meat grinder,” I said, and I definitely meant it.

“That seems extreme,” he replied as he reflexively put his hand over his crotch to make sure they were still there. I was wondering that myself, since all evidence pointed to him not having any whatsoever.

“Oh, you think so? What do you think is an appropriate response to you asking me to marry you and then ditching me with no warning and no explanation?”

“Can you please let me explain?” he begged.

That actually made me laugh. “There is no possible viable explanation for what you did, and even if there was, it’s too late. Why do you want to explain now? Is this some sort of twelve-step process for assholes where you have to try to make peace with those you have wronged? Am I step ten or something? Right before you see the light and become a born-again evangelical and start traveling the desert in search of the meaning of life? Because I’m all for that as long as that means you’ll be denied access to Wi-Fi.”

He reached out and touched my shoulder, and while part of me shuddered with disgust, I was ashamed to admit that part of me shuddered from something else—that physical reaction that can only be induced by someone who you loved so thoroughly, for so long, and who for whatever reason would always be able to get under your skin and stay there.

Which I guess makes him sort of like a rash or something.

“I’m not saying it’s one you want to hear, but I know I owe you one.”

“You owe me a refund on the save-the-dates is what you owe me.”

He motioned to a small iron bench just behind a nearby streetlight. This was not how I had played this out in my head. This was not how this conversation was supposed to go down. I was supposed to scream, yell, hurl insults I had been working on for the last nine months, and walk away with my head held high, making him wish he had never let me go. I was not supposed to be sitting next to him on a park bench illuminated by moonlight. All we needed was for someone to start spontaneously playing a violin and this horror show would be complete. Cupid clearly hates me.

He rubbed the stubble on his face, his five o’clock shadow as familiar to me as the sound of his voice or the look he would give me when he was bored at a dinner party. I sat in the corner of the bench, my hands clenched together in my lap. I had dated actively for almost two months now, and who had I met? A cheap, pink-pants-wearing pyromaniac masquerading as a walking prehistoric Wooly Mammoth, a guy who liked to go to Renaissance faires and do jousting competitions for kicks, a guy with alleged sun blisters but probably mouth herpes, a drug dealer with gold teeth, a geriatric mailman, a hair highlighter, and Bobby. And I’d rather have been with any one of them than sitting on this bench with Ben. Why couldn’t I be here with Tom Marsh? Why’d he have to wait so damn long to get up the nerve to talk to me?