“Is that…his girlfriend?”
That’s an even harder question to answer. “Don’t know.”
Charlie studies the table with the intensity of a woman doing rapid calculations. “She’s stunning.”
She is. She looks exactly like the kind of woman George would go for.
I immediately hate knowing that.
“And look at them together. George always shows up looking like that and ruins the curve for every other man in the room. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it.” Another pause. “Does he know he’s doing it?”
I shake my head, staring intensely at him.
“That’s so much worse.” She puts her chin in her hand. “He just…” She waves her hand at the corner table. “Walks in and exists like that.”
I eat a fry.
Across the room, my best friend leans forward slightly, listening. The woman reaches across the table when she laughs, her fingers brushing his wrist like it’s already familiar.
George lets her.
Charlie makes a strangled sound. “God, that shirt is doing things to me.”
That makes the two of us.
I don’t know why seeing George there feels so fucking different tonight. I’ve watched people flirt with him before. Watched people want him. None of it lodged itself under my skin like this.
This one does.
Don’t get me started on Carter the other day too. What the fuck is wrong with me?
I think I’ve felt something like this before, actually. Little flickers I never let myself look at closely, such as the time that girl from his gym kept texting him nonstop. I suddenly developed a string of extremely urgent, completely legitimate emergencies that required his immediate presence—you know, shit like helping me move a fridge at seven in the evening, followed by severalquestions about absolutely nothing important. Or the time he started spending way too many nights at that blondie’s place three years ago and I suddenly found every excuse under the sun to drag his ass out for beers. Telling myself it was purely because I literally cannot drink with anyone else—obviously a real and serious medical condition. Definitely not because I was being a clingy, emotionally invested jackass or anything ridiculous like that.
Tonight I don’t get to shove it in a drawer and forget about it. It’s right here, ugly and obvious, and I can’t look away fast enough to pretend I didn’t see it.
Maybe that’s the real problem with starting to feel something for someone, whatever the fuck this thing with George is becoming. By the time it starts cutting into you, they’ve already rooted themselves somewhere deep enough that trying to pull them out would tear straight through you too.
It’s fucking me up a little how George is just sitting over there on a date I didn’t even know existed, while I’m over here overreacting to it like I had any right to be caught off guard in the first place.
I’m close to calling it and going home like a normal person with self-respect, but instead I do the smartest thing possible.
I pull out my phone to text him, clearly losing a private argument with myself in a public bar.
Me: Didn’t know you’d be here.
Across the room, his phone lights up on the table.
The woman is mid-sentence, one hand moving as she talks. George glances down, sees the screen, and picks up his phone.
He reads it right away.
For a second, nothing else in the room matters. His attention cuts away from the table almost on instinct, eyes moving through the room with the same focus he uses when he’s specifically looking for me.
It doesn’t take him long to spot me.
Our eyes lock.
And there it is—that horrible, pathetic relief that hits when he finds me. Some part of me had already started bracing for what it would feel like if one day he didn’t.
