A nice guy with a great face and terrific shoulders and a completely frank way of dealing with menstrual cramps. A nice guy whose feelings I hurt.
A nice guy who hurt mine.
“Oh?” I can see that question mark expand—a big, metallic party balloon, hanging right over our heads.
I take another sip of my cocktail. I’m buzzy in my joints, something that only ever happens when I have liquor. I set it down and push it away. I know when I’ve had enough, and the last thing I need is to go home to drunk moping. Still, I can feel the way it’s loosened my tongue, my inhibitions.
“We had a fight.”
Lachelle stares at me. “What do you mean, you had a fight?”
“Oh, thank goodness,” Cecelia says, swooping in and taking one of the fake-bacon-wrapped water chestnuts from the plate in front of Lachelle.
She groans in satisfaction. “I keep forgetting to eat,” she says.
“Meg was telling me about this fight she had with a guy she’s dating.”
Cecelia’s stare somehow makes me feel more embarrassed, enough that I don’t even bother correcting Lachelle again. I mean, okay, I haven’t dated much since I started the planner business, but Cecelia’s looking at me as though I’ve torn off my nun’s habit.
But then she says, in almost exactly the same tone as Lachelle, “You had a fight?”
I nod miserably, silently running through its worst moments all over again. That awful thing I’d said to Reid, that look in his eyes. That terrible splash of liquid on his skin. The only letters that have come easy to me this week ares,o,r,y. I sincerely hope my clients aren’t on the lookout for hidden apologies that have nothing to do with them.
“Wow,” says Lachelle. “I’ve never even seen you get irritated, and that includes the time your movie star client made you sit in the back room for ten thousand hours over one set of treatments.”
“It wasn’t ten thousand,” I mutter, but my face heats at this mention of Lark, who hasn’t totally ghosted me, but she has sent me two e-mails saying she hasn’t had time to call to set up our next meeting. I wonder if she’s asking Cameron for quotes to use in my termination letter.
“I get irritated,” I add, thinking of Cameron and his terrible quotes.
Lachelle laughs. “I’m sure you do. But you don’t show it.”
“It’s a wonderful quality,” Cecelia says. “You’re still the best person I ever had work the desk.”
“Hey,” says Lachelle.
“But I agree,” Cecelia adds. “It is . . . unexpected.”
Under their gazes, I’m the malfunctioning machine I’ve felt like all week long. A normally cheerful Meg-Bot that’s finally short-circuited itself into a show of temper. They’ve removed the tiny screws for the cover of my control panel. They are staring right in there, surveying the damage.
“What did you fight about?” says Lachelle. “Was it the marginal tax rate? Those guys hate that.”
“No, he . . .” Called me out. Said what he meant. Pushed and pushed, until we couldn’t keep it light anymore. “Irritates me,” I finish, half-heartedly.
“Dump him,” says Lachelle. “There’s already a bunch of men out there to be irritated with, and that’s just on the Internet.”
“Shuhei irritates me all the time. On our first date he told me I was using the wrong fork to eat my salad.”
Lachelle looks at Cecelia as if she’s revealed that Shuhei has a tail. “Which hospital did you take him to after?”
Cecelia smiles. “We irritate each other in the right ways. I probably wouldn’t have managed more than three words if he hadn’t said that stupid thing about the fork; I was so shy when I first moved here.” She sends a dreamy look across the room toward where Shuhei stands. He seems to sense it, looking up at her and smiling.
“That’s a good point,” Lachelle says. “I irritated Sean into going to yoga with me, and now he has fifty percent less back pain.”
“So does he irritate you in the right way?” says Cecelia, raising her eyebrows. Someone from over by the bar calls her name, and she groans. “I have to mingle. Come by the shop next week, okay? I want to know how this works out.”
I nod and accept her hug, wondering if now it’ll be time to tighten my screws and get out of here. But when she weaves her way back through the crowd, Lachelle takes over the eyebrow-raising.
“Does he, then?”
