“Remember your hairbrush?” I asked. “How that pretty hair didn’t take away the bullies, but it made you feel like you could take them on?” She crossed her arms. “You told me that I had to find what made me brave. Well,” I said. I pointed to her and then to Marcy.
Diana gave me that exasperated look that I was now so familiar with, as if she were the exhausted mother and I were the naughty, needy child. But then I knew I had won. She only gave me that look when she was relenting, which, honestly, was rarely.
“It’s a low blow to use my own brilliant advice against me,” she said.
I shrugged. “Then quit being so smart.”
Now poolside, Marcy lowered her sunglasses. “Regular bikini. I assume this means you are fungus-free?”
I gave her a thumbs-up.
She raised her eyebrows. “Lucky Andrew.”
“Oh my gosh,” I said. “Do you think that’s why he hasn’t called me? Not the ringworm,” I amended. “Because I didn’t sleep with him?”
“No,” she said as if the idea was ridiculous. “You’ve been on one date. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have been thrilled, but I can assure you he wasn’t expecting it.”
I sighed and leaned back in my chair. “Good. I just don’t know how any of this works.”
She pulled her sunglasses up. “How it works is you do whatever makes you happy and don’t do what doesn’t.”
“Really?”
Trey, who had made it back directly after his meeting in Raleigh, was spreading his towel on the other side of me, and Diana was getting an ice water at the bar.
“It’s clear that you’re an ‘elder millennial,’?” Trey chimed in. He grinned mischievously at me, and I stuck my tongue out at him. “You do you, girl. Those are the rules now.”
“Lord,” Diana said as she walked up. “I like you, Trey, but sometimes you lay it on a little thick.”
I felt butterflies in my stomach again as I absentmindedly checked my phone for the millionth time since Andrew had pulled out of my driveway three days earlier. “That’s what I’m saying. Not lucky Andrew. No Andrew. I finally decide I like him, and he has obviously decided he doesn’t like me.”
“You can only push a man so far,” Diana said. “If they don’t think you like them, what are they supposed to do? Chase after you like a sad puppy?”
I smoothed out the wrinkles in my towel as Diana removed the T-shirt she had on over her bathing suit.
Trey was saying, “You’re the older woman. You have the upper hand. You should call him if you want to see him.”
That was technically true, I guessed, but somehow I felt like he had the upper hand, like the logical thing would be that since I was older and arguably less desirable, it was up to himto call me. Either way, I had made a big show of avoiding the tennis courts—despite the fact that Andrew spotting was 95 percent of the reason we were here.
“I think he’s playing this brilliantly, actually,” Marcy said. “Chasing you and then letting you miss him.”
“Oh, yes!” Trey chimed in. “G, didn’t you read Candace Bushnell’s essay about cubbing? I think it was inVogue.…”
“Or maybeBazaar,” Marcy chimed in.
I sighed. “Okay. I’m taking the bait. What is cubbing?”
“It’s reverse cougaring,” Marcy said, and Diana burst out laughing. “You know, like when the younger man is coming on to you.”
“Except that that essay was about like twenty-year-old men and fifty-year-old women,” Trey said.
“Great,” I said under my breath. “That makes me feel so much better.”
“Hold up,” Diana said. “Trey, you mean to tell me that you readVogueandBazaar?”
He shrugged. “I have to read all the magazines Gray reads because then when she says like, ‘Trey, when we go to New York can you get us a reservation at that French restaurant they were talking about inVogue?’ then I know she really means the Moroccan restaurant in Chicago that she read about inElle.”
I didn’t love how that made me sound, but he wasn’t wrong. He was literally amazing.
