Of course he is. I thought he’d looked familiar. I did go to a few appointments. But I would have thought of him as Dr. Whatever-His-Last-Name-Is, not Karim, which explains why I couldn’t place him.
“He lives close by?”
“Stouffville.”
By Toronto standards, he’s practically next door.
On the field, Karter may have grown, but he clearly hasn’t gotten those extra inches of arms and legs under control. He flails about like a robot with bolts coming loose at every joint. It’s hilarious, but the big smile on his face says he’s having the time of his life.
“So what does... I’m sorry, what was his name again?”
“Who?” I say, dragging my attention away from where Karter trips over his own feet as he tries to kick the ball to his brother.
“Your... friend. At the restaurant.”
“Brady.”
“Yes, Brady.” Dominic turns his head toward me. “What does he do?”
“He’s an entrepreneur. Runs his own IT consultancy.”
“And how did you meet?” For the first time, I hear something under Dominic’s voice. It’s smooth, but not like silk on skin. More like the way a shark moves through the water. Purposefully. Like he has nothing to think about but his next meal and how to catch it.
“I... We hired him at the festival.” That sounds better than “he works for me,” doesn’t it?
“You meanyouhired him?”
I stiffen. “Why do you say that?”
He looks over the wires of his sunglass frames at me. “Because you’ve never let someone else hire someone at that place. You’re too much of a control freak to let anyone else make a decision.”
“I—” I’m trying. But I never did when Dominic and I were still married, and that’s the lens he’s looking at all this through.
“So you hired him,” he says slowly, the venom growing in his voice. “And now you’re fucking him.”
“Technically, he’s fucking me.” Wrong move. I know it as soon as the words are out of my mouth. Because Dominic has made some kind of snap judgment and I have confirmed all his assumptions.
“How old is he?” Dominic says.
“What does it matter?” I say, fingers clenching the canvas and metal in the arms of the folding chair.
“You look pretty funny together, you know that, right? Like you’re taking your son out for dinner.”
“That’s uncalled for,” I say, trying to hold onto my temper.
“Or else you’re going through some kind of midlife crisis. Looking for someone younger to help you recover your lost youth? Can you even keep up without medication? It’s pathetic, Nash, really.”
“Hey,” I say, louder than I mean to. A few heads turn our way. We’re sitting a bit removed from the rest of the families here for practice, and now I understand why Dominic set up his chair the way he did. I try to cover with a cheer and a round of loud claps. On the field, nothing particularly special has happened, so I get a few more weird looks.
“What is your problem?” I say in a hoarse whisper. I’m angry, but a deeply insecure voice at the back of my brain wonders if he’s right. What did the host at the restaurant see as he sat us at our table? What about the other people around us? Brady was the one who asked to go out, but why would someone like him, with his whole life ahead of him, want to be with me, someone who has already screwed up his pretty badly?
Dominic scoots his chair closer to mine. “What’s my problem? Really? You have the gall to ask me that?”
“Yes, because I don’t understand. You met someone; I met someone. We’re taking it slow. The boys don’t even know he exists. What’s the big deal?”
“I met someone appropriate. You met—” He flicks a dismissive wrist. “A frat boy.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, D. Who cares how old he is?”
