Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,69

almost wounded as Brian stays silent, and for a second I feel something like triumph. Then I look at Chrissie. Her pout is gone, and she is smiling at me with a giddy sort of pride. It makes me want to hit something that this is the thing that has finally put me entirely back in her good graces.

Miranda grabs her purse from the back of the chair, and makes a show of fishing out her keys. When she finds them, she holds them aloft for a second, like she’s not sure what happens next.

“OK,” she says, standing up. Nobody looks at her directly. “I’m going home.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It was just a joke. I shouldn’t have said it.”

“I hope next time we meet, you find our engagement just slightly less hysterical,” she says. “I want to like you. Brian wants me to like you.”

Brian still doesn’t look up. “Are you coming with me?” Miranda asks. He throws up his arms as if this decision is out of his hands.

“I can’t leave before Angie’s set is over,” Brian says. “I’ll call you later. I’ll get a ride home with Alan.”

“Yeah you will,” says Miranda, and I want to tell her right then how much I like her, how at this point the last fiancée would have been weeping and begging and making a total fool of herself, but she’s already leaving. Brian doesn’t get up.

“You’re a bitch,” Brian says to me—not like he’s mad, just like it’s an observation.

I turn to Chrissie to tell her to go outside for a second, but Alan is already motioning her toward the bar. I let them go and turn back to Brian.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “This probably wasn’t the best week for this. We’re all a little high-strung.”

“Are you OK?” he asks. He puts a hand on my knee. There’s a faint flicker of a scar below his index finger, from where I accidentally burned him with a cigarette lighter once.

“I’m as OK as I get.”

“I really do love her,” he says. “Not the idea of her, but her. This isn’t like the other times. I’m trying to do something right here.”

“Which other times?” I ask.

“Don’t do that,” he says. “I’m not going to lie to you about what you and I were. Are.”

“I know,” I say. “I know. I’ll apologize to her tomorrow.”

“If she ’s speaking to me tomorrow,” he says.

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

“Right,” he says. His hand is still on my knee. “Why wouldn’t she be? I’ll call her later.”

I lean into him and reach for the cigarettes in his shirt pocket, and brush my arm against his while he lights my cigarette.

“I should get Chrissie,” I say, but I don’t look away from him. The look in his eyes could melt glass.

Chrissie’s laughter from across the room interrupts our silent negotiation. She’s standing at the bar with Alan and a girl in a tissue-thin tank top. Alan’s already got his hand on Tank Top Girl’s hip, and Chrissie’s holding something in her hand that is clearly not a Shirley Temple and probably not straight soda. Her eyes are scanning the room, and I assume she’s looking not for me but for a guy she can use to make Alan jealous, because she doesn’t realize she’s already lost this fight.

“I should get her out of here,” I say. “Where’d you find that asshole?”

“Please,” says Brian. “If I weren’t here and you weren’t babysitting, you’d have gone home with him already.”

“I go home with a lot of assholes,” I say. “At least I don’t love any of them anymore.”

“Really?” says Brian.

“I’m over Jay,” I say. “We don’t speak. And anyway, he told me once that love was not a real thing because it was comprised of too many subsidiary emotions.”

I wait for Brian to laugh, but he doesn’t.

“Jay wasn’t the one I was talking about,” he says finally.

“Stop,” I say. I look away from him and then turn back.

Brian told me once that I was the only woman in the world he was completely honest with. He said my problem with relationships is that I make everyone feel like it’s good enough to be who they actually are. At the time I had thought these were both good things.

“Trust me on this,” he’d said. “Appreciate the liars. When people don’t hide things, it means they don’t care enough to be afraid of losing you.”

Chrissie finally seems to realize she’s been outplayed and starts to head back to the table. Behind her,