The Rules of Dating My Best Friend's Sister(21)

“Holden. Good to meet ya.”

“You from out of town?”

I shook my head and sipped my drink. “Nope. Live a block away.”

“You meeting a woman here on the sly?”

“Nope.”

Evan leaned an elbow on the bar. “Okay, I give. Why are you here in this shithole?”

I chuckled. “Do you really want to hear it?”

He pointed to the other patrons. “That’s Fred, Ken, and Walt. I’ve heard their stories five hundred times. So yeah, why not? It’s not like I have better options.”

“How about a shot first? Yours is on me, too.”

“Alright. What would you like?”

“Your choice.”

Evan came back with a bottle of tequila and two shot glasses. He filled them both to the brim. “We don’t do salt or lime or any of that fancy shit here.”

I picked up the shot and sucked it back. “That’s fine with me.” It burned going down, but I liked it.

“So what’s your story? You look like you belong on one of them Abercrosley ads in Times Square. So it can’t be about a woman.”

I smiled. “It’s Abercrombie, and yeah, it’s about a woman. Isn’t it always?”

“You got a point. She married or something?”

“Engaged.”

“Oh boy.” The bartender refilled our shot glasses. “This one’s on me.” He held it out to clink, and we sucked our second tequilas back.

Then I filled my new friend Evan in on Lala—starting from my school-age crush and ending with her currently living in the apartment next door.

“Oh, and I forgot to mention that I’m currently hiding out here instead of meeting a free-spirited woman at the bar a block away, a woman who wants nothing more than a fuck from me.”

Evan shook his head. “You got it bad for this Lala, huh?”

I gulped the rest of my Jack and Coke. “What am I supposed to do about it?”

“There’s only one thing you can do, my friend.”

“Go meet Sienna and forget anyone else exists for a few hours?”

“Nah. That never works. You’ll just hate yourself after.”

“Sit here and get loaded then?”

“Nope. You gotta try to break up that engagement, Abercrosley.”

I shook my head, not bothering to correct him this time. “I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”

“Trust me, you’ll get over the guilt of stealing some other guy’s girl. But you’ll never get over letting the woman you love slip through your fingers.”

I wasn’t in love with Lala, though, was I? Then again, how the hell would I even know if I was? The only person I’d ever been capable of being committed to was me.

“Let me tell you a little story,” the bartender said. “When I was twenty, I met a woman. Her name was Elizabeth, and as stupid as it sounds, I knew in the first hour that she was the woman I was supposed to marry. There was just one problem.”

“What was that?”

“She was my best friend’s girl.”

“Oh, man.”

Evan nodded. “I had just joined the military. My buddy Phil met Elizabeth while I was at boot camp. They were going to college together. After about a year, I went to visit Phil while I was on leave. He worked and went to class, so I spent a lot of my visit hanging out with his girl. I fell head over heels, and she felt something, too. But she was my buddy’s girl, so I wasn’t going there. Fast forward four years. I married Catherine, and Phil and Elizabeth got married the following summer. It took me five more years in a miserable marriage to realize I’d married a woman I wasn’t in love with. Because when your heart belongs to someone else, it’s not available to give to anyone, even when you want to.”

“What happened with Phil and Elizabeth?”

“They were having marital trouble, too. But Phil and Liz moved out to Long Island, and we lost touch. I hadn’t seen them in a few years. Long story short, they got divorced, and six years later I ran into her. The chemistry had never dulled, even after all that time. We wound up getting together, and I was happier than I’d ever been. So was my Lizzy. Then one day, she goes for a routine exam at the doctor, and they find a lump in her breast. Six months later, she was gone. Metastatic breast cancer. She was only thirty-three.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry.”

“So am I. But you know what I’m most sorry about?”

“What?”

“Losing the ten years we could’ve been together but weren’t. Life’s shorter than you think.”

I slammed back two more Jack and Cokes and decided not to go meet Sienna after all. Instead, I walked home with a nice buzz and a lot to think about, courtesy of my new bartender friend. My head was all fucked up from the story he’d told me, but I knew for certain that I needed to keep away from women for a while—all women.

But when I got into the elevator and turned around to push the button on the panel for my floor, that vow flew out the window faster than Sienna’s clothes would have come off.

Lala.

She’d just walked through the front door. I put my hand on the elevator doors to stop them from closing while my heart sprinted off in a gallop.