It’s decently busy, but there are a few open tables toward the back by the kitchen. I stop the worker as she’s about to set the menus down. “Can we be seated at one of those?” I nod toward the more secluded tables.
The hostess lazily glances over at them before shrugging. “Fine.” She doesn’t even give me a second look or seem to recognize me. Aspen shoots me an amused smile over her shoulder, like she clocked the same thing, and we get seated in the back.
“How much did that bruise your ego?” she asks. “That girl didn’t even look twice at you.”
I lean back in the padded chair and quickly scan the place before settling my attention back on Penny. “Not even a little bit. Trust me, it’s nice to fly under the radar like this.”
“I forget you’re famous sometimes,” Aspen says.
“I don’t.”
She rolls her eyes and opens the menu. I do the same, and by the time our waiter comes over to the table, we’re both ready to place our order.
Once our drinks are brought out, Diet Coke for me and Fanta for her, she leans her freckled arms on the table and gives me her full attention.
“Don’t you have better things to do than taking your old foster sister to dinner and driving her home?”
No. “Yes.”
“So then what were you actually doing at On Tap tonight?”
It’s the second time she’s asked me, and I still don’t have an answer for her. Or myself. Because I don’t know what Iwas doing there. One minute, I was sitting on my couch, trying to find something in the endless sea of content to watch, unfulfilled and uninterested in everything I came across. And the next, I was in my car pulling up outside of Aspen’s bar, not even knowing if she was working but knowing I had to find out.
“A drink sounded good.” I settle on that sad excuse that neither of us believe.
“Bullshit,” she says, and after years of very few challenging me, it feels kinda fun. Walker was the last one to push back on me, and I haven’t spoken to him since he came barging into the studio a few months ago when I was working on Nikolai’s solo album with him and punched him in the jaw for sleeping with his sister. We didn’t speak much, as he finally had issues with someone other than me, but regardless, it feels good for Aspen not to just let things slide. Even if I don’t want to be honest with her. Or myself. “You came to see me again.”
Not a question.
I take a sip of the crisp soda and refuse to break her stare because if I do, it confirms what I don’t want to. That yes, I wanted to see her again. Needed to, even though I don’t know why. “I like the atmosphere there.”
She chews on her straw. “Again, bullshit. Is it so hard to admit that you came there wanting to see me? That you took a detour for dinner tonight because, I don’t know, you didn’t want to be alone?”
“Well it’s not like you had other plans tonight either,” I shoot back.
“Because I was supposed to beworking,” she drags out the last word. “What if I wanted to just go home and have a night to myself?”
“You can do that once we’re done eating.”
“Fine, but you know you’re paying for this right? And not because I’m trying to mooch off of you and all your fortune”—she waves her fingers in the air—“but because I didn’t ask to go out to eat. I have groceries at home.” The high pitch of her voice tells me otherwise, but I don’t call her out on it. We both have known what it’s like to go to bed hungry.
I cross my arms and lean back. “I didn’t figure you’d be paying for our dinner, Penny.”
She shifts in the orange padded chair. “Thank you. For dinner,” she adds.
I can’t resist it. “Thanking me for dinner but not for getting that asshole off of you or for the ride?”
Her nostrils flare but before she has a chance to say anything, we’re interrupted.
The waiter sets down our food and we both are quiet as we dig in. The grilled chicken has a nice char to it, and I finish half my salad before Penny’s cut her steak strips into smaller bites.
Yep, she ordered the most expensive thing on the small menu.
After a few beats of silence, with her attention still firmly on the food in front of us, she says, “Are you always trying to pick a fight? Christ, it must’ve been exhausting being a band with you.”
Her words nick me in a way they haven’t in a long time. But it’s easy to keep my face neutral. A learned skill from years of sitting in interviews. “It’s just in my nature to challenge people.”
“You mean to piss people off?”
