And I was. I did—care about him, that is, which was…something I did not want to explore.
“Promise,” I told him, selecting a marinated artichoke heart. “Last month I had a bride chase the groom around the reception hall with the cake knife because she found out from his brother that he was taking her to Iceland for their honeymoon but she wanted to go to Paris. And that’s not even the craziest bridezilla story ever. That’s just the craziest from this month. So trust me, I’ve seen it all.”
Chris looked away. “Addison didn’t chase me around with a knife. She did insist on waking me up in the middle of the night to... well...”
“I know,” I said, trying not to sound cross. This wedding isn’t real. You said you were going to listen. You can’t complain when he opens up to you.
“Yeah…” Chris said. “So after a few of those, she started saying condoms weren’t necessary. She was on the pill.”
“Lies,” I said, taking another sip of wine.
“Yeah.” He tipped his head back. “Then she showed up with a positive pregnancy test.”
My eyes bugged out of my head.
“You have a kid?” I squawked around the wine.
“No, thank God! I could not be tied to that woman. She wanted us to marry right then. I said yes. Then my dad got wind of it and told her absolutely not. He talked sense into me, and I told her I would pay child support.”
I ate a sun-dried tomato.
“Addison went nuclear,” Chris recounted. “She immediately filed a bunch of paperwork to force me to pay her a stipend every month to support her and the unborn baby. I was looking at a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-month payout. Until my father—thank God for my father—he somehow found out that the whole thing was a scam.”
“A scam!”
“She was never pregnant. Addison was paying some poor teenage homeless girl to give her her pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and lab reports.”
“Was she going to get her baby too?” I asked in horror. “How would that even work?”
“I have no idea. My dad thinks that the endgame was for me to marry her, and then this baby shows up, and it’s automatically mine because we would have been married. Addison was furious when the whole thing fell apart. Just out of spite I gave the homeless teenage girl all the money I was going to be giving Addison.”
“That’s nuts. That must have been so stressful.”
“I would have married her too,” Chris said in frustration. “I was this close. We were at the courthouse. The only reason it didn’t happen was because my dad saved me.”
“Thank goodness for your dad!” I exclaimed.
Chris nodded. “His whole goal in life is to make sure I don’t end up like him—trapped with some gold digger. Ever since then, he’s been vigilant about drilling in my head that you can’t trust women, that they’re manipulative and out to get you. That all they want is to suck you dry of your money, and they will use any means necessary to do it.” His face was dark.
Aaaand this is why we do not need to be involved with Chris. Best to just make a clean break.
Still, I’d had too much wine on a mostly empty stomach to let it go.
“You can’t say all women are like that,” I protested. “My friends aren’t like that. I’m not like that. None of us would dream of acting like Addison. And we wouldn’t be friends with anyone who acted like her either.”
“I know,” Chris said in frustration. “It’s just that none of the women I’m around act like rational humans.”
“Probably because you pick them up in clubs at three in the morning,” I said tartly. “You know, just a thought.”
Chris’s face relaxed, and he gave me a small laugh.
“Touché.”
Antonio came over with a huge tray of Italian food and began to set the dishes out in front of us.
“Ravioli, risotto Milanese, spaghetti and meatballs, chicken parmesan, linguini with clams, caprese salad, and of course, lasagna.”
I took a bite of the lasagna. “Damn, that’s good.”
Chris reached out to take a forkful.
“I don’t know if I like you enough to share this with you,” I told him, fencing his fork out of the way.
“That’s funny,” he said with a smirk, “considering you liked me enough to have my tongue on your clit last night.”
46
Grace
“That’s my new favorite restaurant,” I said as I staggered out of the elevator. Antonio had loaded us down with bags of leftover