I bite my lip so I don’t start giggling. Still, the sound escapes anyway.
“You can laugh.”
“Didn’t you and Sadie used to date?”
He makes a vaguely pained noise in his throat. “Yeah. So?”
“You must’ve seen something in her.”
“For a while. But then she got…boring.”
It’s an unexpected response. “Because she asked you to take her to that gala thing?” Sadie is one of the most popular girls on campus. A lot of guys would give up a kidney to date her, including a couple of the baristas at the café.
Weirdly enough, the fact that Grant found her boring enough to dump makes me feel oddly satisfied. It’s a bit of a shock—I’ve never experienced such petty vindictiveness over somebody else’s relationship gone wrong.
“No. She was boring before that. But the gala is a good excuse. I really don’t feel like going.”
“Something doesn’t add up, though. She’s a proud girl. She wouldn’t be clinging if you were the one who dumped her, saying you don’t want to be her date to the event.”
“I didn’t.Shedumpedme,” he says.
“She did?” Wow. That’s…surprising. And the weird satisfaction I felt starts dissipating.
Our waiter returns with the food. The service is extra fast today, probably because we’re eating so late. I wrap my chicken and shrimp in the warm flour tortilla and take a bite.
“I let her,” Grant says with a nonchalant shrug. “Generally, it’s easier. When the girl gets to be the dumper, they’re less stalkerish because they know I spared them their reputation.”
“You don’t care about what people think of you?”
“Why would I? It’s just some college drama nobody’s going to remember or care about. So what if I dated Sadie at some point? There were other girls before her, and there will be others after.” He pauses to take a sip of Coke, then looks at me. “One of them might end up meaning something.”
The air in my lungs seems to go still. I don’t know why it suddenly feels like he’s talking aboutme, specifically, not some woman he might meet some day. It’s probably the intensity of his gaze. But, of course, anyone would get serious about the love of their lives. My grandfather is super serious when he talks about how lucky he was to have met Grandma.
I’m pretty sure I’ll meet someone that special at some point, but I’m not sure when or how. It probably won’t be in college, though. I’m just too busy to meet the love of my life right now.
“That’s great.” I take a quick bite to avoid having to say more.
Grant looks vaguely let down—or maybe annoyed about something—but then he smiles again, so maybe I imagined his disappointment. His phone pings, and he looks down at it briefly and purses his mouth.
“What is it?” I say, glad to have another topic to hop to.
“It’s the Investment Society alert. Someone’s freaking out about the team ranking after this week’s tally.”
“You’re a member?” I say, surprised. He seems too active to sit down and do market analysis.
He nods, tapping a few times on his phone.
I try not to sigh with envy. The Investment Society is a club for students interested in stock and bond trading. I’ve been trying to join for two years, but failed.
“Somebody made a trade I asked them not to, and now we’re falling behind,” he explains, putting his phone down. “Thisis why I don’t like group work.”
“Is there a team competition?” It’s impossible to totally hide my envy. I’d die to be in the group, even if I had to deal with people doing things I asked them not to.
“Yeah. Every semester, we’re put into a team of two or three to make trades. Well, paper trades—we don’t use real money. We just place the number of shares and price into the app, and it automatically tallies our profit or loss. Normally I wouldn’t bother with a club like this, but George—a polo teammate—begged me to.”
Could this man and I be more different? Grant has people begging him to join clubs he isn’t interested in, and I have nobody asking me. When I tell people what I’d like to do, they laugh and brush me off, like the future I’m dreaming of just isn’t within my reach. Or maybe they think I can’t be smart enough or serious enough to have it.
“So you’re mad at George?” I ask.
