It was then I sensed the hovering waiter. I glanced to my left and gave him a forced smile. “You need the table back, don’t you?”
He shook his head. “No, you’re fine. I just wondered if you wanted to order anything?”
“Do you have an alternate-reality special on the menu? You know, the kind where I don’t get stood up?”
The waiter gave me a sympathetic smile. “Sorry, we don’t. If it makes you feel better, a lot of people would order it if we did.”
I laughed. “Yeah? See a lot of this, do you? I wonder what his excuse will be. If he offers an excuse, that is.”
“Maybe his dog died.”
“Or his dog ate his goldfish and he had to do the Heimlich maneuver.”
The waiter chuckled. “I once got stood up and he texted me to tell me that his visa had expired, and he’d left the country that day. I saw him in Andersonville two weeks later.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.”
Feeling a little better at the reminder I wasn’t the only person to have ever been stood up, I told the friendly waiter I was going to head home, and he offered me a bolstering smile as I left the restaurant.
Despite joking around about it, I felt stupid for making myself vulnerable to someone who would stand me up.
As I strode toward the L, I kept checking my phone to see if Aaron had replied, but nothing. I tried to figure out how the guy I’d spent hours talking to for four weeks could do this. If he’d changed his mind, why hadn’t he just said so? He’d seemed like the kind of guy who would just be brutally honest with me.
Not a coward.
Not a dick.
I winced.
Well, he had warned me he could be a dick.
But I’d thought it was real of him to admit that. I didn’t think beyond our cute banter and the fact that he loved Shakespeare just as much as I did. We’d discussed our favorite Shakespearean tragedies and argued over which of Shakespeare’s comedies were best. He said Two Gentlemen of Verona; I said Twelfth Night. I’d been pretty excited to find someone who enjoyed my favorite playwright so much in this day and age. On top of everything else, he really had seemed too good to be true.
It all was too good to be true, apparently.
Or . . . what if Aaron had shown, saw me, and decided I was too fat or too tall or too—
Evie, shut up! I yelled at myself.
I would not let him do this to me.
Enraged, I pulled out my phone.
ME
You at least could have had the decency to say you were no longer interested in meeting me.
My heart raced and my palms were clammy as I saw he immediately opened it.
But no reply was forthcoming.
What the hell?
Hurt, sad, angry, confused, all of it mingled as I jumped on the Blue Line to get to my tiny studio apartment in Wicker Park. All that emotion I’d kept buried at the restaurant started to flood up out of me. By the time I got into the apartment, tears were streaming down my face. I brushed them away with frustration, cursing myself not only for letting Aaron upset me but for how much of myself I’d put out there to someone I hadn’t met in person.
What a naive moron! I knew better than that.
No. I shook my head. I couldn’t do that to myself. He wasn’t worth my tears. And he didn’t get to make me feel like I’d done something wrong.
Maybe he was just another boring, judgmental jerk that was looking for the kind of woman who didn’t exist outside of movies and airbrushed magazines.
Did that sound bitter?
“That sounded bitter,” I murmured to myself.
Okay. So maybe I was a little bitter.
But this was why I avoided dating, because even in my thirties it could reduce me to feeling like a rejected sixteen-year-old.
My phone buzzed in my purse, making my heart jump into my throat. There was a text on the screen from my best friend, Greer. Disappointment filled me and then I felt instantly horrible about it. I tapped to open the message.
How did the date go? Or is it still going?
I snorted, my lips trembling as I bit back more tears and quickly texted back. He never showed. I messaged him, he opened them, but he never replied.