On the Rocks(79)

I WOVE MY WAY back through the crowd and exited onto the pier by the street. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why some girls had it so easy and the good Lord chose to make my path so f*cking hard. I mean, I had finally felt better. I had felt confident. I had felt empowered, and yes, I had felt skinny. And then, He decided to send Ben down on me like a thunderbolt just to remind me that my road to happiness was currently closed for construction. And he decided to do it on the one night when I didn’t even bother to blow-dry my hair.

“Abby, wait,” Ben called from behind me. Maybe I needed a refresher course at jilted fiancée obedience school, but I was pretty sure telling me to “wait” wasn’t going to do jack shit. Not anymore at least.

“Leave me alone, Ben,” I said, quickly spinning around to see how much distance there was between the two of us. Funny, not too long ago I felt like two time zones was way too much. Now he was closing in on me from a half-block away. I thought I caught someone else coming out of the bar when I turned around. I hoped it was Grace, getting ready to crack a bottle over his head like she promised she’d do if she ever saw him again.

“I tried to tell you I was coming to see you. I didn’t want to sneak up on you like this, but you didn’t give me a choice,” he yelled. “I sent you texts telling you I needed to talk to you, but you never answered and you haven’t logged on.”

“You should have taken the hint. We don’t need to talk. It’s way too late for that,” I said, walking as fast as was humanly possible in platform wedges and jeans that were dangerously close to ripping.

“I know that, but I had to at least try. I thought maybe it could be kind of romantic—you know, my coming to find you.”

“Romantic? Are you kidding me? How is ambushing your ex-fiancée in a bar romantic? You know, I realized you had a severely f*cked-up way of communicating with me when you broke up with me on Facebook, but this is a stretch even for you.”

“Maybe that wasn’t the best idea in retrospect,” he admitted sheepishly.

“Considering this isn’t a bad romantic comedy, yeah, I’d say that’s a safe bet.”

First the ring in the soufflé, now this. Maybe he was a closet Jennifer Aniston freak.

He had annoyingly long legs and caught up to me much faster than I expected him to. The streets were crowded with laughing, drunk groups of friends all out on the town for a night of harmless fun, and then there was me: a walking, talking dating apocalypse.

“I understand that you’re mad,” he said, rationally, as if he was trying to calm me down because he was an hour late for a dinner reservation instead of a year late for our wedding.

“Mad? What gave you that idea? How’d you even know where to find me? What, did you hire someone to follow me around or something, you sick f*ck?”

“It wasn’t exactly difficult. I just checked Grace’s Facebook page. She’s constantly posting where she’s going. It’s probably so that that guy Johnny what’s-his-name knows where she is at all times. Are they still together?” he asked, as if it was perfectly normal for him to be making small talk.

I was going to kill Grace. Somehow she had failed to realize that alerting everyone to what she was up to on Facebook also told everyone what I was up to. And now she had enabled Ben to find me by simply reading a wall post. Facebook must be a nightmare for the marshals in witness protection.

“Get away from me, Ben, before I scream that you’re trying to attack me and have every good guy in a ten-block radius pummel you to bits.”

“I deserve that,” he said, although I don’t think he meant it.

“You deserve to have your balls put through a meat grinder,” I said, and I definitely meant it.

“That seems extreme,” he replied as he reflexively put his hand over his crotch to make sure they were still there. I was wondering that myself, since all evidence pointed to him not having any whatsoever.

“Oh, you think so? What do you think is an appropriate response to you asking me to marry you and then ditching me with no warning and no explanation?”

“Can you please let me explain?” he begged.

That actually made me laugh. “There is no possible viable explanation for what you did, and even if there was, it’s too late. Why do you want to explain now? Is this some sort of twelve-step process for *s where you have to try to make peace with those you have wronged? Am I step ten or something? Right before you see the light and become a born-again evangelical and start traveling the desert in search of the meaning of life? Because I’m all for that as long as that means you’ll be denied access to Wi-Fi.”

He reached out and touched my shoulder, and while part of me shuddered with disgust, I was ashamed to admit that part of me shuddered from something else—that physical reaction that can only be induced by someone who you loved so thoroughly, for so long, and who for whatever reason would always be able to get under your skin and stay there.

Which I guess makes him sort of like a rash or something.

“I’m not saying it’s one you want to hear, but I know I owe you one.”

“You owe me a refund on the save-the-dates is what you owe me.”

He motioned to a small iron bench just behind a nearby streetlight. This was not how I had played this out in my head. This was not how this conversation was supposed to go down. I was supposed to scream, yell, hurl insults I had been working on for the last nine months, and walk away with my head held high, making him wish he had never let me go. I was not supposed to be sitting next to him on a park bench illuminated by moonlight. All we needed was for someone to start spontaneously playing a violin and this horror show would be complete. Cupid clearly hates me.