Ben mussed Alexis’s hair. “You’re so grown-up!”
“When did you move back to Austin?” Alexis shot me a dirty look. “Lee didn’t say a word.”
I rolled my eyes. “Sorry I didn’t mention Ben’s stalking me.”
He threw his hands up. “I swear, coming here wasn’t my idea. It was—”
A beautiful blonde woman materialized by Ben’s side. She wore an expensive red sheath dress and dripped with David Yurman, the exact set I could remember coveting in college. Shelookedlike a lobbyist. In fact, I tried very, very hard not to think about the fact that she looked exactly like the kind of woman a GOP scientist might build in a laboratory.
“Hi,” said the woman brightly, extending her arm. “I’m Sarah.”
Of course she was. She had a blinding smile that matched Ben’s.
“Alexis.” Lex pumped Sarah’s hand enthusiastically. She loved making new friends.
When Sarah held her hand out to me, I observed it was quite soft. Her nails were also the exact red shade of her dress, a form of girl magic that had always confounded me.
Ben nodded toward me. “That’s Stoner. Lee Stone.”
Sarah’s eyes lit up. “The stuffed-animal girl!”
“Uh,” I sputtered, “I wouldn’t call methat—”
“We couldn’t get a table, so we were just leaving,” Alexis interrupted. “Don’t want to hold you up. It was so nice to run into you.”
“Oh, but you have to stay!” Sarah insisted. She looked between Ben, Alexis and me. “Ben said the stuffed-animal girl was an old friend.”
When the hell did I get so horribly rebranded?
“Our other friends had to cancel at the last minute. We have two empty seats at our table. Please.” Sarah made little prayer hands. “Join us.”
How could you say no to that display without looking like a terrible person? I suddenly understood why Sarah worked at a top lobbying firm.
Ben met my eyes, and I could see my own thoughts—Please, God, no—mirrored in them. He started to say, “I don’t think—”
But Alexis had already jumped in, playing the world’s worst wing-woman. “We’d love to. Lee was so sad to leave. Right, Lee?”
Curse my well-known love of fancy dinners. And my extremely believable performance of casual indifference after I’d broken up with Ben. I’d clearly convinced Alexis he meant nothing to me.
Which is also what I’d told Ben himself, just days ago at the Renaissance Festival. And it was obviously true. So I couldn’t go around refusing a perfectly civil dinner invitation from his girlfriend, could I? That would mean I cared.
I pasted a smile on my face. “Yay. Look at us. A little foursome.”
Christ.
I would be on my best behavior. I would be on my best behavior. My best, best, best...
I used two hands to upend the wine bottle and shake the last drips out, catching the waiter’s eye and waving. “Hello, yes, can we please have another?”
Alexis widened her eyes but wisely did not comment on the fact that this was the table’s third bottle of wine. I was going to sink a week’s paycheck into this tab, but I had no regrets. This was survival.
“I’ll actually have a Jameson, neat,” Ben said. “Thank you very much.” He’d been a waiter in undergrad, and now he always smiled a little too long and bright at restaurant staff to convey solidarity.
Sarah turned to us. Her lips and teeth were stained purple with wine, like a vampire’s—but dammit, it was endearing. “He always switches to whiskey when he wants to make it a wild night. Of course, wild for us nowadays means a late dinner.”
I was not going to say a single word about how many whiskey-soaked nights Ben and I had shared, wild from start to finish. Because I was on my best behavior.
Instead, I guzzled wine.
