Bri cackles alongside me. She taps my arm with a hand until she can calm herself enough to talk. “My anniversary gift is that I have to get an STD test.”
“Oh my god. Fuck him.”
She gasps and smacks my arm. “Someone else already did!”
My stomach burns with uncontrollable laughter, Bri gripping myarm as if she’d tumble out of the booth otherwise. We laugh so loud the table next to us gets annoyed.
Trying to shush ourselves, we drink again. In the quiet, the “laugh or you’ll cry” part comes to fruition, both of us on the verge of tears again.
“Yeah, so . . . more wine?” I ask.
Bri thrusts her glass toward me. “Yep!”
We give up on eating and resign ourselves to moving from tipsy to drunk with the help of another glass. Then another bottle.
Then the nightreallygets messy.
Two
Bri
When I wake up, sunlight feels like forks stabbing my eyes. I slowly open them, trying to let the death rays in bit by barely tolerable bit while I try to remember where I am and why I’m here.
David. The second I remember, I wish I could forget all over again.
To think how different everything was two days ago, packing up my little life into suitcases, excited that I was finally going to have something good to tell my friends at our next brunch. How did I not see this coming?
The best friend of my best friend’s husband, getting together with David was almost a given. We were good together, balanced,committed, I thought. Two years into our relationship, he took a new finance position that was meant to be eighty percent in California, twenty percent in New York. To no one’s surprise, the job became less and less bicoastal with every month that passed. We decided I would hold us down at home so he could focus on getting through his first year in New York, but his east coast clients kept him so busy I hadn’t seen him in two months.
When he called me and said he needed to “do something in person,” sending me a one-way ticket and putting me up in a swanky hotel, it couldn’t have been clearer that he was going to propose.
Then he dumped me. What the—and I cannot emphasize this enough—literalfuckwas that?
The blanket is hot and feels like it weighs one hundred pounds. When I push it off, it groans. My eyes dart open.Who—?
The man from last night lies beside me on the bed, splayed out on top of the sheets like a starfish, fully clothed down to the socks, same as me.
“Hey . . .” I say timidly. “You awake?”
“Mostly.” His eyes are red with exhaustion and dehydrated tear ducts. “Looks like I made it through the night. Damn it.” The man has jokes.
My hangover is too thick to remember most of last night, or the series of events that ended with us in bed together. Maybe “in bed” is a bit strong. Being adjacently horizontal on furniture is a more apt description.
Sitting up is a battle I unwillingly fight. “Good god. How much did we drink last night?”
“All of it.”
I look around the room for the remnants. “All of what?”
“The alcohol in the world.”
Judging by the struggle it takes not to lie back down and go to sleep, his explanation seems correct. Memories of wine, our stories, and crying—the wining and whining, I should call it—come back to me, hazy but there. Closing out the bar, taking our remaining bottle of wine to my room and sharing the contents of the mini fridge on the balcony while dissecting all the mistakes we may have made leading up to the breakups, coming to the agreement that we are perfect in every way, not an underachieving, emotionally stunted viper and a co-dependent, socially inept nerd.
For a night, we were each other’s greatest support system, as tight and pure a bond as two drunk women in a nightclub bathroom. But those relationships never continue into the daylight.
I peer down at him, watching him make no move to leave. He’s younger than me—maybe early twenties—with so much life and trauma to look forward to. An aura of innocence radiates from him, not only because of his youth but also his appearance. He has an effortless style only Gen Z can pull off, rocking a nerdy glasses-hoodie combo while having a modish haircut that perfectly frames a face I could only describe as . . .stunning.
Bone structure a model would die for—strong jaw, pointed chin, cheekbones reaching for heaven—flattered by genetic influences I can’t pin down. His curls, full lips, and brown skin are obviously Black, but I have never seen hooded hazel eyes like his before. He’s easy to look at, which is probably why I keep gawking at him.
