I’m relieved when Seth falls into conversation with Marian and Marcus about Chicago, where Seth lives. They then turn to Marian’s home in Miami and Marcus’s in Atlanta, and their jobs in advertising and sports management.
I practice my French on Georgette, who now lives in Paris, is a stylist, and has the same disgust for scallops that I do.
“Tu es avec Seth?” she asks in a low voice, nodding at him.
“Non!” I sputter. “I came with Dezzie and her husband.”
“Ah,” Georgette says, with a very French puff of air. “Tant pis.”
Her tone has the slightest whiff of disappointment.
I shrug it off. Georgette only attended school with us for junior year. She is no doubt unaware of the sordid story of our breakup.
“Tell me,” I say to her husband, “how did you two meet?”
At a photography opening at the bar on the roof of the Centre Pompidou, bien sûr.
I allow myself to become absorbed in the glamorous tale of their courtship. Or, perhaps more accurately, I feign deep interest in it so that I can swivel my body away from Seth, like Georgette’s words are a force field that might protect me from having to talk to him for the rest of the night.
But then Marian stands up and reaches for a pile of cards at the center of the table.
“Time to do our icebreakers!” she chirps.
“Fun!” Seth enthuses, somehow making it into a two-syllable word.
He does not appear to be kidding.
I can’t believe we used to date.
Granted, he was beautiful in high school, and has somehow become even better-looking—tall and lanky with wavy black hair, dark eyes that sparkle with mischief, and a nose that slightly twists at the bridge in a way I can only describe as sexual.
And then, of course, there is the fact that he was once infatuated with me, rather than alienated or scared like all the other boys at our school. And the small detail that I became a puddle of goo in those stolen moments when we were alone.
He’s still the only person I’ve ever been in love with.
I shouldn’t have sat next to him.
Even through the glaze of my anxiety and my attempts to concentrate on Georgette’s anecdotes about Marion Cotillard, all those groping-each-other-in-the-backseat pheromones are rushing back, and I’m distracted by Seth’s nearness. I’m caught between the urge to go to the bathroom to collect myself, and the urge to grab him and disappear under the pier where we used to make out.
Sex, you see, is an excellent balm against anxiety. It relocates you in your body, as it’s difficult to be in a mental doom spiral when someone is touching your breasts. This phenomenon accounts for at least 70 percent of my otherwise inexplicable ex-boyfriends.
Seth’s arm brushes mine as he reaches for his drink, and I feel his touch reverberate somewhere in the vicinity of my ovaries. My shoulders relax for the first time all night.
I sneak a look at him for any sign that he is overcome with vestigial lust too.
Instead, he’s focused on Marian.
“First question!” Marian says, waving the card at us. “What’s your favorite memory from high school?”
Oh God.
Marcus raises his hand. “That’s easy. It was getting to be prom king next to this beautiful girl.”
Marian blushes and takes Marcus’s hand. He looks into her eyes, his gaze alit with something like wonder. You can feel the heat between them.
“That was my favorite night too,” Marian purrs.
I accidentally catch Seth’s eye. I wonder if, like me, he’s remembering how I persuaded him to skip prom and go on a beach walk instead. How the night was exactly like this—ever so slightly sticky and lit up with a full moon. How we jumped into the ocean in our finery, and showed up at the after-party giddy, me in soaking wet sequins, him in a waterlogged tux.
We both look away.
Georgette takes the floor, describing scuba diving on a class trip we took to Costa Rica, and then it’s my turn.
I blank.
The truth is that all my favorite memories from high school involve Seth. But I’m certainly not going to admit that. So I dredge up the first innocuous thing that comes to mind.
“I’ll always remember this one night when Dezzie and Alyssa and I snuck out of a sleepover, looking for an old-school country-western bar we’d heard about out east, in ranch country. We stole Dezzie’s mom’s convertible and drove for like an hour down these dark, dusty roads blasting Patsy Cline until we found it. No one carded us and we ate barbecue and danced with a bunch of old cowboy-ish guys until two in the morning. It was incredible.”
What I don’t add is how that whole night, I wished Seth had been there. How Dezzie and Alyssa kept chiding me for calling him, so he could listen to the band through my cell phone.
“That’s so sweet,” Marian says, beaming at me.
“It truly is,” Seth says. “Wish I’d been there.”
Seth literally had wished he’d been there. He was sad I hadn’t invited him. He loves—loved—country music. And dancing. He’s one of those people.
I tried to take him there for his birthday a few months later, to make it up to him, and found that the place had closed down.
