“With a very good lawyer. Yes, I remember every time I write my alimony check,” Ned said as he stepped up to the counter. “Ham and pineapple, please? Two slices.”
He paid, waved off the offer of change, and turned to look at Tag. Sympathy creased a familiar line across his forehead as he nudged his glasses up his nose. “Look, it was shitty of Kieran to turn up with Freddie at the charity ball. I told him that, but… well, done is done. Now that they’re….” He paused, nose wrinkled as he thought of how he was going to put it. “Out. Well, it’s different isn’t it? Freddie isn’t the dirty mistress anymore, and, ah, you’re going to see them around. So maybe it’s time to just accept it?”
The one thing you couldn’t do in a breakup was ask your friends to pick sides. Most of them would anyhow, so why waste your time? The rest you just had to get used to the awkward timeshare and the fact that they knew the name of the hot nurse with the tattooed ass.
“You think I should go on a double date?” he asked wryly.
“No, of course not,” Ned said. He scratched his head and shoved his hands into his trousers, his white coat tucked back behind his elbows. “Or maybe. One day. For now start to iron it out with him? Stay in the same room?”
“There’s nothing left to iron,” Tag said. The depressing thing was that was true. Five years, and it had taken a fifteen-minute fight to divvy everything up. The music was on the cloud, Tag couldn’t afford the rent on the hipster ecolodge by the shore, and all Tag’s clothes fit into one admittedly large suitcase. It was who got the Netflix account that took the longest to settle. The server leaned over the counter with a slice of pizza on a cardboard wedge. It was hot against Tag’s palm as he took it, the cheese liquid and greasy as it dribbled over the edges of the flatbread triangle. “It’s fine. Seeing them gave me the push I needed.”
Ned gave him that encouraging smile that said he didn’t actually believe Tag but appreciated the effort it took to lie. He took his pizza from the server and picked up one of the pieces to bite the end off it. “It isn’t easy. I know that. When Elsie asked for a divorce, it still took a while to really… get that it was already a done deal for her while I was trying to bail out the boat. Hence the framed texts.”
“Like I said, I’m already there,” Tag said. He juggled the pizza from one hand to the other as he fished his phone out of his pocket. “By the way, thanks for signing me up to that app.”
“Really?” Ned mumbled through a mouthful of pizza. He covered his lips with his hand as he asked, “You, ah, putting yourself out there?”
“You could say that.”
Tag tapped the message one-handed as he fell in behind Ned on their way back into the hospital. Luckily it was short and, now he’d thought about it, easy enough. What turned him on? He typed the answer.
You.
