“Charmed,” she says, suddenly a Gilded Age heiress.
“What can I get you?” he asks.
Ashleigh props her chin in her hand and leans forward to be heard: “What do you recommend?”
He drags a paper menu out of a nearby cup and pushes it toward us. “Kitchen’s out of a bunch of stuff, but we still have these.” He marks three of the six small-plate options, then flips the menu and circles the wine flights, drawing scrappy little stars beside the one he recommends.
He looks to me for approval. I look to Ashleigh. She nods and half shouts, “Whatever Miles says!”
“I’ll be right back,” he promises, disappearing with the marked menu, stopping to murmur something to a bartender with curtain bangs before slipping through the door.
Ashleigh swivels toward me. “So what’s this hilarious ‘joke’ about you being his girlfriend?”
“What’s this about my roommate being a drug dealer?”
She waves a hand. “That’s just what I call him in my mind, because of his aesthetic.”
“His selling-prescription-bottles-under-the-bleachers aesthetic?”
“More like eight-plants-and-grow-light-in-his-apartment. But that was before I unknowingly wandered into his bedroom thirty minutes ago. Now I have to revise his whole image in my brain castle.”
“Do you mean ‘memory palace’?” I ask.
“My turn to ask the questions.” Her eyes dance devilishly. I haven’t seen this mischievous side of Ashleigh before. It’s intimidating, feeling like I can’t escape her curiosity, but it also reminds me a little bit of Sadie, which sends a pang through my stomach. “Tell me about this joke, where you’re Hot Miles’s girlfriend.”
“Hello, ladies!” the curtain-fringed bartender says, making us both jump.
“Hi!” Ashleigh and I cheep in unison.
“Miles will be right back with your flight, but can I get you anything in the meantime?” She flips two water glasses onto the bar and fills them from a pitcher.
We shake our heads.
“Well, I’m Katya, if you need anything. Just shout.” She pats the bar and saunters off.
“So?” Ashleigh prods. “The joke?”
“It was just about this picture.”
She arches a brow, waiting. I give in, pull my phone out, and tap to the picture of Miles and me, avocado smeared on my face, our mouths suspiciously close. It’s more lascivious than I remembered. My stomach flutters uncomfortably.
Ashleigh stares at it, a divot forming in her chin. “What, because you look so much like a couple in this? That’s the whole joke?”
I grimace, debating how much more to divulge. This is my problem. I don’t know how to talk along the surface of things, but I also don’t want to unearth the ugly stuff, over and over again, for people who are just passing through my life. It’s depleting. Like every time I dole out a kernel of my history to someone who’s not going to become a fixture in my life, a piece of me gets carried away, somewhere I can never get it back.
You can’t untell someone your secrets. You can’t unsay those delicate truths once you learn you can’t trust the person you handed them to.
Ashleigh sets my phone aside. “Look. If you don’t want to be friends, I’m not going to make you. We’ve worked together for over a year, and I’ve managed to learn startlingly little about you in that time, and I haven’t pressed, because I can tell when someone’s a closed book—”
“I’m not a closed book,” I protest.
“—but what I can’t figure out,” she says, “is why ask me to hang out now? If this is just some Good Samaritan shtick, I would’ve rather stayed home than go on a pity outing.”
“It’s not a pity outing!” I say. “At least not on my end. And I’m sorry I didn’t make more of an effort to get to know you up front. It wasn’t you.”
She gives me a pointed look.
“Okay, maybe it was a little bit you,” I admit.
She lets out a guffaw of genuine laughter that makes me crack a smile. “What, you think I’m scary?”
“Well, yes,” I say. “But in a good way! It’s more that you’re always late.”
Another guffaw. “God, you’re not from Michigan, are you?”
“No, why?” I say.
“This honesty thing,” she says. “It’s refreshing. So you didn’t want to be friends with me because I’m always late to work.”
“And you didn’t want to be friends with me because of the gigantic stick up my ass?” I guess.
She chortles. “No, it actually wasn’t that. It was more that you were so happily coupled. The divorce is still too fresh for me to be around someone who’s got cartoon hearts in their eyes and baby birds carrying a long lace veil behind them.”
I didn’t tell anyone at work about the breakup, per se. But when you have three weeks scheduled off work for a honeymoon, then unceremoniously cancel the request, people talk.
“Well, even before my breakup,” I tell her, “I didn’t have either of those things.”
“Because of the stick?” she jokes.
