I roll my eyes. “Oh come on. You’re not upset at her for her feelings. You’re upset at her for her choices. Including her choice to lie to you about her feelings.”
He blinks once, startled. “Can I bring you with me next time I see my mother?”
“Oh, I would have words.”
Ollie looks away for a moment. “I was always trying to measure up to my brother, you know? As a kid, I was trying to be as cool as Sean. And when I couldn’t do that, I tried to be more successful. And I didn’t manage that, but at least I had a stable relationship, while he hopped from woman to woman, and now he has the marriage and the kid and the wife.”
“You’re amazing.”
He shrugs. “You haven’t met him yet. That’s what I’d confess to you if I was really drunk. That I think if any woman I’m dating meets my brother, she’s going to fall for him instead.”
I can see that he means it. It is shocking how much he means it. “I’m going to fall for the asshole who slept with his brother’s wife?”
Ollie shrugs.
“Does he dance?” I ask.
“He’s probably taking swing lessons, for all I know. Phoebe still dances. But that’s why, when she left, she took everything good with her.”
“No, she didn’t.” I stare ahead at the traffic nearby as it piles in front of a stoplight and then speeds away. “You know what I know about that story, and you don’t?”
He shakes his head, gazing at me. His eyes are close enough that I can really see their colors, the dark rings of green and brown.
“There is no way in hell your brother would have done that if he wasn’t intimidated by you.”
Ollie shakes his head. “Nice thought, but he just likes to win.”
“He didn’t win. He lost his brother. I mean, my sister, no matter how screwed up I was, I always tried to be there for her. Because if I lost her, I lost everything. And you’re telling me he doesn’t care that he lost you?”
Ollie looks into the distance. “He still thinks I’ll come around. Sometimes he calls my office phone at work and leaves messages telling me to call him. And I don’t. But sometimes I think about it.”
He looks so sad that I don’t think; I just put my hands on his shoulders to meet his eyes. “Listen. You should do what you want. Just because you’re the better man doesn’t mean you have to be the bigger man. If he’s counting on that, if he’s using your own decency against you, then he can go fuck himself. Because you have a right to be angry. Don’t let him take away your anger, because you earned it and you get to keep it for as long as you want to.”
Ollie opens his lips to say something and then places a hand on my cheek and kisses me fiercely instead. It’s startling for half a second until he slows down, giving me space to move away. Another kiss comes more gently, then another, and our arms are around each other, and his hands are slipping around the back of my dress. It’s messy and uneven and not polite at all, and I feel the blood racing up to my cheeks. He slows down a little, taking a breath. When he finally pulls away, he meets my eyes. I kiss him once, gently, like an answer to a question.
For a long moment, I can’t speak. He looks a little dazed too.
“You’re so beautiful,” he whispers. “You’re so staggeringly beautiful it’s unreal.”
I feel myself blushing harder, unsure what to say in the face of a direct compliment
“It feels like a trick that you’re single,” he adds. “It feels like I can’t trust it. I can’t…” He trails off. “Can I kiss you again?”
“I think you should, because that kiss needed some work,” I tease. It was probably the best kiss in my life.
“Oh really?” He looks, a little wary.
“You need more practice. A lot more before you get it right, I think.”
He kisses me again, hard and confident, just long enough to melt my insides, then pulls back and puts his head down on my shoulder for a second, making a sound of frustration.
“I have to get you home,” he groans into me. We don’t move for a long moment. I kiss his neck, once.
“That’s not helping to motivate me,” he says.
He stands up and offers me a hand and sweeps me into his arms in a dance position. I am about to joke that there’s no music, except I realize there is, vibrating through the windows of a car that’s pulled up to a stoplight. A Justin Timberlake song. Ollie grins and runs me through a couple of moves on the sidewalk. He is still grinning when he pulls me back into his arms to dip me. I hear the cars near us moving away, and I wait for the car with the music to leave, but it doesn’t. The driver rolls down the window, the booming music getting louder.
“Awesome!” the man calls. He’s a young guy in a white tracksuit with an earring. “You guys are awesome!”
