who, barely a half hour ago, watched me with the intensity of a predator while I got dressed. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, “Just having a moment.”
“What kind of moment were you having?” I ask now, and Ethan looks back up.
“Moment—what?”
I realize I’m digging for a compliment. He was watching me get dressed with a thirst I didn’t see in his eyes even on mai tai night. But I guess I’m still in that weird fugue where I don’t actually believe that we’re getting along swimmingly, let alone having fun being naked together.
“In the room,” I say. “ ‘Having a moment.’ ”
“Oh,” he says, and winces. “Yeah. About that. Was just freaking out a little over having sex with you.”
I bark out a laugh. I think he’s joking. “Thank you for being so consistently on-brand.”
“No, but really,” he amends with a smile, “I was enjoying watching. I liked seeing you put your clothes back on.”
“One would think the undressing part would be the highlight.”
“It was. Believe me.” He takes a bite, chewing and swallowing while studying me, and something in his expression takes me back an hour, to when he kept whispering, It’s good, so good, in my ear before I fell to pieces beneath him. “But afterward, seeing you put yourself back together was . . .” He glances over my shoulder, searching for the right word, and I’m guessing it’s going to be a great one—sexy, or seductive, or perhaps life-altering—but then his expression turns sour.
I point my fork at him. “That is not a good face for this conversation.”
“Sophie,” he says, both in explanation and greeting as she steps up to the table, cocktail in one hand and Billy’s arm in the other.
Of course. I mean, of course she approaches us right now, wearing a bikini under a tiny, sheer cover-up, looking like she just walked off the set of a Sports Illustrated photo shoot. Meanwhile, my hair is twisted up in a haystack on my head, I have zero makeup on, and am sex-sweaty, wearing running shorts and a T-shirt featuring smiling ketchup and mustard bottles dancing together.
“Hey guys!” Her voice is so high-pitched it’s like having someone blow a whistle next to your head.
I study Ethan from across the table, eternally curious how that relationship worked once upon a time: Ethan with his deep, warm-honey voice; Sophie with her cartoon mouse voice. Ethan with his watchful gaze; Sophie with her eyes that bounce all over a room, searching for the next interesting thing. He’s also so much bigger than she is. For a second I imagine him carrying her around the Twin Cities in a BabyBjörn, and have to swallow back a giant cackle.
We let out a flaccid “Hey,” in unison.
“Catching a late lunch?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he says, and then puts on a plastic expression of marital happiness. If I recognize how forced it is, Sophie—his live-in girlfriend of nearly two years—has got to see through it, too. “Spent the day in.”
“In bed,” I add, too loudly.
Ethan looks at me like I am eternally hopeless. He exhales through his nose in a long, patient stream. For once, I’m not even lying and I still sound like a maniac.
“That was our day yesterday.” Sophie’s eyes slide to Billy. “Fun, right?”
This entire thing is so weird. Who talks to each other like this?
Billy nods, but isn’t looking at us—who can blame him? He doesn’t want to hang out with us any more than we want them here. But his reaction is clearly not enough for her because a cloudy frown sweeps across her face. She glances at Ethan, hungrily, and then away again, like the loneliest woman on the planet. I wonder how he’d feel if he looked up and noticed it—the flat-out yearning in her expression, the Did I make a mistake? expression—but he’s back to obliviously poking at his noodles.
“So,” she says, staring directly at Ethan. It looks like she’s sending him messages with the power of her mind.
They are not penetrating.
Finally, he glances up with a forced blank expression. “Hm?”
“Maybe we can get drinks later. Talk?” She’s clearly asking him, singular, not us, plural. And I assume Billy is also not included in the invitation.
I want to ask her, Now you want to talk? You didn’t when he was yours!
But I refrain. An awkward weight descends, and I look up at Billy to see whether he feels it, too, but he’s pulled his phone out of his pocket and