“I know we’ve been focused on the campaign this week, and it’s fine if you don’t want to talk about it, but...is Lex okay? I could hear her voice through the phone at the bar and she seemed pretty upset.”
When I’d arrived home from Olive & Izzie’s last weekend, I’d found Alexis sitting in the middle of my couch, red-faced and sobbing, wrapped in a thick comforter from my guest room, with a bottle of rosé, a tub of chocolate ice cream and a mountain of tissues strewn around her. The cats were clear across the room, watching her gravely from their hiding spots.
Lex had cried on my shoulder, unloading the whole sordid story: how they’d been watching a movie on the couch when out of the blue, in a fit of guilt, Chris confessed to sleeping with a fellow accountant at work. A woman Lex had always been nice to, on the few occasions they’d met at events. It had taken hours of talking before I managed to tuck her into the guest bed. She’d planted herself right back on the couch in her comforter with tissues and wine every day this week, watching old Meg Ryan rom-coms with my mom on FaceTime and hiccuping the whole way through.
“She’s morphed into a sad little Jabba the Hutt on my couch. She just sits there in her blanket and I bring her chocolate and rosé and she pats my face. I’m honestly surprised my mom hasn’t made an emergency visit.”
Ben winced. “Poor Lex.”
I’d forgotten how much they always got along. Right off the bat, too, like they’d been friends all their lives. Ben was a year older than me, and I was four years older than Lex, so she’d always looked at him like an older brother.
“It sounds like him dumping her came out of nowhere.” He shook his head and folded up the table. “That’s the thing I hate most. How even when you date someone for a long time, they can still turn out to be a stranger. I hope Lex finds someone she can trust completely.”
My face flushed hot. It was important tometo keep parts of myself to myself with anyone I dated. I guess you could say that kept me a stranger to everyone. Figures the thing Ben hated most was my MO.
I cleared my throat. “Well, now, in addition to the campaign, I have a side project where I’m plotting to murder her ex-boyfriend.”
A woman who’d been passing by the booth, eyeing Ben’s very real biceps working under his costume ones, paused to give me a startled look.
I smiled. “Hi, there.”
Ben ripped up the cardboard box that had once held the pamphlets and was now gloriously empty. “Is your friend Kyle helping you plot?”
I finished folding the table skirt and tucked it into the plastic container that held our campaign supplies. “Nope.”
“Are you guys serious?”
I shot him an incredulous look. “Are you asking if Kyle’s my boyfriend?”
“What? Am I not supposed to? Sorry, I didn’t realize I’d stumbled onto your one and only boundary.”
“Kyle isn’t my boyfriend, Ben. He’s my walking sex toy.”
A mother tugging a small boy dressed as R2-D2 gasped and earmuffed him. I was on a solid child-corruption streak lately.
Ben raised both eyebrows.
“And before you say anything, Kyle would be elated to know I called him that. He knows I don’t do boyfriends. Or monogamy.”
“Since when?”
Since you.All of a sudden, I needed to find something to look at that wasn’t Ben. The R2-D2 kid was now screaming bloody murder over his mother’s shoulder, so that was an option. The grime on the linoleum floor—anything would do.
I shrugged and kept my gaze on my tote bag. “A few years now. Why bother getting serious with someone when over half of marriages end in divorce and way more than half of relationships go down in flames? The definition ofinsanityis trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
“That’s why you learn from the disasters and evolve. You try different things in the next relationship.”
I couldn’t resist; I looked up, catching his eyes. Which—even in the blue of his face, stood out. “Does that mean you’re going to give it a shot with that hot Smurf who slipped you her number?”
Ben shook his head, bending to pick up the plastic supply container. “I’m very happy with my girlfriend.”
Girlfriend?The record needle screeched to a halt. “Saywhat?”
Apparently, the filter that normally at least half-heartedly tried to keep my thoughts separated from my mouth had packed up and run off.
Ben kicked a red-booted leg in the direction of the folded-up table. “You got that?”
I bent and picked it up. “I repeat, saywhat?”
