Willa and Meredith had no problem ditching their husbands and kids to rush over with outfit options. It was an unusual occurrence for me to request date advice, so they had jumped eagerly at the opportunity.
“She’s going to a bar, Mer, not a rave.” Willa explained as she held up a skirt, embellished with reflective piping along the seams.
“Yeah, okay, and she’s not going to a goddamn tea party, either.” Meredith picked up Willa’s floral chiffon top with ruffled sleeves and tossed it on the floor.
“Oh, my God,” I muttered, dragging my hands down the sides of my face. “Remind me to never call you guys for help again.”
“Okay, okay,” Meredith said, holding up her hands in surrender. “We’ll take it seriously. So, what do you know about this bar?”
I frowned. “Well … I mean, I know they, uh, they serve alcohol, and …”
“You know nothing about it,” Willa stated astutely and pulled her phone out of her jeans. “What was the name of it?”
“The Thirsty Goose.”
Meredith wrinkled her nose. “The Thirsty Goose? Never heard of it.”
“Oh, I forgot you were the authority on bars,” Willa drawled, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Anyway, it looks like a nice place. Not one of those sleezy hole-in-the-wall type places.”
“The jury’s still out on this Vinnie guy, though,” Mer jabbed with a teasing smirk.
I looked up abruptly from my perusal of the pile of clothes on my bed. “What?”
“I’m just kidding,” she said, but her voice was so dry, I knew she was lying.
“No, seriously, do you think I should be worried?”
Meredith glanced at Willa, who smiled sweetly. “No,” she assured me gently. “But just keep in mind you know nothing about him. Like, have you even looked him up on social media?”
“Well, I mean …” I shrugged, allowing my words to trail off, because I hadn’t. And now I felt stupid.
Mer flopped on my bed beside the mountain of clothing options, with her phone in hand. “No time like the present!” she declared, already beginning to type. “You said his name is Vinnie?”
“Yeah,” I said hesitantly. “Vinnie Marino.”
It only took her a few seconds of typing and tapping before she read, “Vinnie Marino. Thirty-four—”
“Ooh, an older man!” Willa exclaimed, holding a short, black dress up to my body.
“By like, four years,” I muttered, rolling my eyes.
“—from Brooklyn, now living in Manhattan. Single, good. Employed at a pizza place called Famiglia Bella, not too bad, I guess,” Mer assessed, sliding her fingers across the screen. Her eyes met mine with a coy grin. “Damn, girl. He’s pretty hot.”
My cheeks heated wildly with my flush. “You don’t have to tell me that. It’s been torture having to look at him the past few days.”
Willa glanced at Mer’s phone screen and let out a long whistle. “I bet. Holy hell.”
I continued to dig through the clothes while my sisters occupied their time by stalking Vinnie’s social media. They gawked at pictures of him, with and without his family, and they looked into his interests. They scowled at his smoking habit, instructing me to get him to quit, and they cooed approvingly over pictures of him with his sister’s kids. The two of them didn’t seem to have much to say and I was grateful, until they began to browse through pictures he’d been tagged in by others.
“Wait, wait, wait. Look at this,” Mer said hurriedly, her voice full of alarm. “He looks stoned out of his mind.”
“Holy shit, yeah, he does,” Willa agreed, taking the phone and shoving it in my face.
The picture in question was indeed incriminating. A younger-looking Vinnie and his brother, Zach, stared out at me from behind the glass. Sitting on a beat-up couch, with their arms around each other’s shoulders, red-eyed and sleepy-smiled. What was worse than the eyes, was the joint pinched between Vinnie’s fingers and the small bag of white powder in Zach’s.
“Is that cocaine?” I asked needlessly. I knew what it was—I was a nurse, for crying out loud.
Willa turned the phone back to her curious eyes and raised her brows. “Uh … yeah. Sure looks like it.”
My stomach knotted as the room fell silent. Wordlessly, I selected a tight pair of black jeans and a purple, sequined tank top, and as I got dressed, I ignored the way my sisters stared at me from the bed. I knew what they weren’t saying. They didn’t want me going out with him and they didn’t trust him. And if I’m being honest, I wasn’t