On the Rocks(32)

Thinking of you

I knew I shouldn’t reply. I mentally went over the pros and cons of responding. The con list was seventeen pages long. The pro list was blank. Oh well. I replied:

Thinking of you too.

I didn’t know why I couldn’t just let him go. The problem was that every time he wrote me I kept hoping that he would have changed his mind, admit that he had made a mistake, and come back. It had been months, and I knew deep down the window for that happening had already closed, but girls behave irrationally when they want something they can’t have. Anyone can tell you that.

My phone beeped again.

Sorry, that actually wasn’t for you.

So much for that.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Ben was always quite the sweet-talker. I loved when he whispered sweet nothings meant for somebody else into my phone.

Oops. I thought the message was from somebody else.

Good one, Abs, no way he’d see through that.

I was ashamed of myself and the fact that I still gave him the power to upset me from the opposite side of the country. I turned my phone off, something I only did on airplanes, threw it in my bag, and started walking again. If nothing else, at least I would spend happy hour with people who didn’t tell their ex-fiancé by mistake that they were thinking of them when they weren’t. At this moment, that was all I wanted.



I WALKED INTO THE BAR and scanned it for my new pseudo-friends. Wolf was glued to a TV, wearing a German soccer jersey, and Bobby was holding court at the bar, which from what I knew of him so far wasn’t all that surprising. I reluctantly went and stood next to him, happy to have someone to talk to so that I didn’t have to stand in the corner by myself or jump into the middle of the European soccer fans and risk being trampled if the refs made a call they didn’t like. One thing I knew for sure: you didn’t screw around with Europeans and their love of soccer.

“I’ll have a martini, filthy, extra olives,” Bobby said to the bartender as I dropped my bag on the floor next to his feet. He immediately looked up at me and smiled. “Well, look who it is. What’s up, Abby?”

“Filthy? What kind of way is that to order a drink?” I asked. I was never a martini drinker myself, so I was unsure of the protocol for ordering one, but I was pretty sure saying you wanted a drink made filthy was not in the bartender’s manual.

“It just means extra dirty, like not just a dirty martini, a filthy dirty martini. That’s the way I like my cocktails. And my women. Nice to see you, by the way.”

They should study this guy’s brain for science.

“I’ve never met anyone who could turn ordering a cocktail into a sexually explicit event. Why can’t you just be normal?” I heard myself ask the question and then realized how silly it sounded. He had a Y chromosome. What chance of normalcy did he really ever have?

“You know, if you think about it, you should be able to order your cocktails in more, shall we say, diverse ways. I should be able to order a dirty, filthy, slut martini without someone making a comment,” he said, completely serious.

“And I’d like to order a man who’s half-normal and only half-bat-shit-crazy, but that doesn’t seem to be possible either, so I guess you and I will just have to suffer through our mutual disappointment.”

“I’d like a really slutty martini on the rocks, hold the olives. How does that sound? Maybe I’ll invent new cocktail names. Do you think there’s any money in that?” he asked.

“I doubt it. But you’re not working anyway and there’s no money in that either, so if you want to be entrepreneurial, who am I to stop you? Maybe you could go on The Apprentice and see what Donald Trump thinks of your idea. He could sell it in the bars in some of his hotels. I’m sure his super-wealthy clientele in their thousand-dollar suits would be more than willing to drop twenty bucks on a drink called a Slutty Martini.”

“See, now you’re talking.”

“I was kidding.”

“I bet you someone thought that a cocktail called Sex on the Beach wouldn’t be a hit either and look how fast that took off.”

He actually had a point. There was also a drink called the Fuzzy Navel. I wouldn’t have thought that would be popular either, and yet college kids all over the country were probably licking them off girls’ stomachs in bars as we spoke. Bobby would probably invent the next big thing, become a gazillionaire, and spend the rest of his life trolling for girls in the bars all over the Eastern Seaboard with the tagline “I invented the Slutty Martini.”

There’s simply no justice in this world sometimes.

I ordered a beer, and when I turned back around, Bobby was still standing there, munching on an olive.

“Don’t you have someone to hit on?” I asked.

“There’s no rush. I’d rather talk to you right now. Besides, I’m sure I’ll find someone. It’s still early!”

“Lucky me.”

“I talked to Grace before. Unlike you, she actually enjoys talking to me.”

“There’s no accounting for taste. And anyway, I think her taste in men is quite obviously flawed, no?”

“Ahh, that jackass of a boyfriend of hers. Though I don’t know if I can really call him a jackass anymore. It sounds like he’s making some real efforts lately. She seems happy for the first time in a while where he’s concerned.”