“We can’t get drunk. Imagine the bride and her maid of honor with hangovers.” I savored my pasta. “And poor Scott! You want that to be your husband’s memory of the big day?”
“Fine, no alcohol, but you’ll be wishing you’d ordered shots of Everclear when you hear what I’m about to tell you.”
I stopped chewing and raised an eyebrow.
“Which is…?”
“Dad sat you next to Dustin at dinner.”
“What? Why? He knows we broke up. I can’t sit there with my ex-boyfriend. He shouldn’t have even invited him!”
“I said that, too. But he thinks you’re acting like a fussy baby.”
“Fussy!” I couldn’t believe it.
“Remember what Dad said though: ‘That Dustin’s a smart cookie, and he’s got a promising future at the Weston Corporation. He suits you, and he’ll know how to take care of you the right way.’”
Evidently, my father and I hadn’t dealt with the same person.
I first met Dustin at a café close to college…
“Critical theory, sounds fascinating.”
I looked up from my notes and frowned at him. “Law, how original!”
“How do you know I’m studying law?”
“Your pleated pants gave you away.”
He laughed and sat at my table, raising his hand to get the server’s attention. He had blond hair, big green eyes, and a pleasant smile. “My name’s Dustin. Dustin Hodges.”
“Harper Weston. A pleasure,” I responded, shaking his hand.
Almost without realizing it, we started going out. I liked how I felt when I was with him. Everything was easy and natural. Comfortable. He was always so sweet. His kisses, his caresses, and the way he made love.
Until that moment, I had only really fooled around with people. And my one-night stands never turned out the way I’d hoped. With him, I thought I could break out of that pattern and open myself up to other things.
After a year, Dustin started talking about our future together. I wasn’t sure what that future meant, and I also didn’t feel we were ready for it.
“Just think it over. We sleep together almost every night. I have more clothes here than I do at home…”
“I’m only twenty-one, Dustin. I’m not ready to live together.”
“Not even to have a stable relationship,” he mumbled.
“Why can’t you just be happy with what we have?”
“Because I don’t feel like wehaveanything. Not anything solid, anyway. We’ve been going out for a year, and I don’t even know your family. I feel like you view what we have as a passing phase, and that worries me, because I do see you in my future.”
As always when I’m disappointing someone who matters to me, I gave in. “Would you feel better if I introduced you to my family?”
I took him home for Christmas, and Dustin met my father.
He went back to Toronto with a job offer that only a crazy person (or someone with principles) would turn down. That was how the distance between us started. His priorities, his dreams, his ideas all changed. Even the way he looked at me.
He pressured me for weeks to make our relationship official and move with him to Montreal. He wanted the whole shebang: rings, wedding, home, kids… I got tired of arguing, of having to defend my need for space and the life I’d chosen, and I broke up with him. Not that it did much for me. Dustin refused to accept that we were done, and he made up a different reality in which we were just taking a break before reconnecting.
Fortunately, he accepted the job at the beginning of April and left.
