Lies She Told(28)

She leans her forearms on the table and looks up at me from beneath a wrinkled brow. “And Nick would have shed a tear over you? Come on. He was cute and charming and very driven . . .” Her honey eyes get a bit soupy at the thought of her once crush. She shakes her head to pull herself out of the daydream. “But we both know he wasn’t that nice, especially not to you. He always treated you like the girl David had settled for.”

“Well, I took away his clubbing buddy.”

Chris grimaces. “Most people grow up and get over that. Nick used to call you ‘Little Miss Mistake’ and say that you were too troubled to have real friends so you made up people to keep you company.”

Though I never heard Nick say such things, I can imagine him doing it behind my back, whispering it to one of those milquetoast girls he always brought on group dates that looked like she’d been pulled straight from a Robert Palmer video. I have a harder time picturing him insulting me with Christine in earshot. “When did he say that?”

She sips her coffee, hiding her face behind the mug. “When we went on that date.”

I burst out laughing. The reaction is involuntary and not at all rational. Nothing is particularly amusing about my beautiful maid of honor and David’s handsome best man trying each other on for size. Yet I find it absurd. “You’re kidding. You never went on a date with him.”

“I did. A little less than two months ago. I told you about it.”

“You did not.”

“I did. You don’t remember.”

I give Chris my best Really? look. There is no way that I would forget my closest friend going on an official date with my husband’s law partner. She must have glossed it over, acting like she ran into him and they had one of their usual stilted conversations. “Well, give me details.”

She scans the table and groans. “Ugh. I need a drink for this story. Where’s the bottle we didn’t get to?”

Part of me feels that I should tell her that drinking before noon is a sign of alcoholism. But I have zero moral authority to warn her when I was the one who couldn’t hold her liquor the prior night. “There’s a Riesling in the fridge.”

She heads into the kitchen. “It was at the start of the summer, actually.” The fridge door opens, hiding Chris’s face. “I’d put Emma on a plane to see George a few days earlier and was feeling a bit lonely. So, because the universe tends to steel-boot kick people who are feeling sorry for themselves, I ended up bumping into Nick in the city.”

The fridge shuts. Sunlight from the screened back door glints on the green bottle in her hand. Glass clinks as she looks through a cabinet above the dishwasher for a wine glass.

“You’re leaving me in suspense,” I say.

“You’re the last person who can complain about that,” she quips, removing a stemless wine glass from the cabinet. “Anyway, Nick was looking GQ as always, so we started talking. Then he asked me what I was doing later . . .”

I try to catch Chris’s eye as she says this. I can picture her asking Nick on a date, but not the other way around. After her divorce, she’d asked me to set them up. David had insisted that he wouldn’t go for her.

Chris returns to the table with the white wine in her right hand and the rims of two glasses pinched between the fingers of her left. The mere suggestion of alcohol turns my stomach. “I’m never drinking again.” I take a massive bite of my sandwich for emphasis.

She shakes her head at me and twists off the cap. “So anyway, Nick takes me to this speakeasy-type place in Brooklyn, one of those bars without an officially marked entrance. I forget the name of it. I do remember lots of gold-framed mirrors and red leather booths.”

“Stalling.”

“Okay. Let me get a drink in me.” She pours a taste and takes it like a vodka shot, tilting the glass back until it has disappeared. “Okay. So I’m in Marie Antoinette’s bedroom, hanging on handsome Nick’s bicep, wondering whether it’s bad form to sleep with him on the first date given that we’ve known each other socially for years, and I realize that every single person in the place is gay.”

“He took you to a gay bar?”

“Well, it could have been a hipster bar,” Chris concedes, pouring herself a real portion. “Or maybe it was a straight bar most of the time and we stumbled in on gay night. So anyway, he acts like the whole thing is completely natural and takes me to a booth. We order drinks.” She takes a Pavlovian sip of her wine. “He spends the whole night basically bitching about you in hopes that I would relay the message, which I never did because fuck him, right?”

I’d known Nick wasn’t a fan of mine. But the act of taking out my best friend for the sole purpose of trashing me is something out of a mean-high-school-girls movie. “What did he say?”

Chris grimaces. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I want to know.”

“Typical complaining from an insensitive man.” She rolls her eyes to show she doesn’t take any stock in the forthcoming criticism. “The hormones had made you all emotional and clingy, and David couldn’t do the things he needed to because you might fall apart.”

“What, like work?”

She shrugs. “Nick said at one point that he brought in all the big-money clients, so maybe he thought David wasn’t pulling his fair share because he was busy taking care of you.”