Sam smirks. “Oh, were you waiting for me to acknowledge you?”
I jump in quickly before the two of them can come to blows. “So—inside?”
Sam casts me a dismissive glance. “Not you. Go and say your hellos to Ari.”
“Oh, is she here?” I ask, scanning behind me for signs of Sam’s…Actually, I don’t know how to describe Ari. It feels rude to call her a fuck buddy.
“Come,” Sam orders, leading Carrie away. “You’ll need it explained to you.”
Carrie looks at me and rolls her eyes.
While Sam tours her through the gallery—with absolutely no regard for her personal space, I might add—I catch up with Ari, then say hello to the few other people I recognize milling around. I’m refilling my wine glass a few minutes later when Andy stumbles back out into the fading sunlight.
“Your roommate is crazily intense.”
“Yeah, sorry about her. She’s mostly harmless.”
“I tried to say something to Carrie and she said if I didn’t leave, she’d hex me.” He has the look of a man trying to decipher the most confusing interaction of his life. “What is that?”
“Um, I think it’s a curse,” I say. “She’s kidding, obviously.”
Probably.
“I’m not sure I want to take any chances,” he mutters, pausing to pull out his phone. Even from here I can see he’s texting someone on an app—now that Carrie is a nonstarter, he’s assessing his other options.
“You heading off?” I ask him eventually.
“Yeah, going to meet a friend,” he says, still staring down at his screen. “Tell Carrie I said bye?”
Totally unnecessary, as it turns out, because Carrie doesn’t ask. She returns to my side looking flustered, her cheeks flushed.
“Sorry,” I say. “Was Sam on one in there?”
“Just her usual,” Carrie says, taking a deep swig of wine. Sam is back outside too, now holding court in the middle of a group of friends, telling an animated story we’re too far out of earshot to properly hear.
Carrie and I look on for a minute, then lose interest.
“Hungry?” I askher.
“Starving. Let’s get out of here.”
“I’ll just tell Sam we’re leaving.”
“Don’t,” Carrie says over her shoulder, already walking in the opposite direction. “Let her wonder.”
—
I’m so mollified by Carrie’s extended report of her lunch with Connor that evening that I decide to say no more about it at work the next day, and for the second morning in a row greet Connor as if nothing untoward has happened.
He makes no mention of it either, and when he doesn’t reference anything of that nature for the rest of the morning, I consider our disagreement—if you can even call it that—totally over.
Today I’m working with John on some data inputting and spend most of the morning with my chair rolled over to his side of the table so we can work off the same screen. The other guys are deeply immersed in some task that needs to be presented to management later this afternoon, so there’s no time for the usual pointless joking around.
Around lunchtime, Ben pops up from his chair and says to Connor: “Should we get food before we run out of time?”
“Sorry, I can’t,” Connor says mournfully. “Annie doesn’t like it when I eat lunch with other people.”
I try and punch him on the arm, but he jumps out of the way. “OK, OK,” he says, laughing. “You can come withus.”
