When the microwave dinged, I took my dinner back to my desk—along with another glass of wine…OK, the rest of the bottle—and while I ate, I researched the history of French bread pizza. According to the Internet, where all Great Truths are discovered, Stouffer’s bought (or maybe copied) the idea from a guy who ran a food truck at Cornell University, starting in 1960. I filed that interesting yet useless maybe-fact away in my brain, which housed an entire library of those things, and tried focusing on my client again.
Needless to say, after that much wine, I ended up back on Instagram, and was rabidly scrolling through Quinn’s account (Jesus, did the guy ever take a bad pic? And did he get to keep all the little underpants he wore in these photo shoots or did he have to give them back? Like, if I snooped in his underwear drawer, would it be full of colorful banana hammocks or just plain old boxer briefs?) when my phone vibrated. I glanced down and saw a text from Claire, one of my two closest friends.
I need one of you to put ORC into motion.
Got it, I typed back.
Let me know if you need me, Margot responded.
ORC stood for Operation Rescue Claire. It meant I had to call her in five minutes with some reason she needed to leave the terrible date she was on, immediately. We’d set it up two years ago among our friends after it became clear that NO is not in Claire’s vocabulary, so she says yes to all dates. She doesn’t like to hurt people’s feelings, and besides that, she genuinely believes that her soul mate is out there, poor thing. She’s the kind of girl who thinks love at first sight is possible, people always mean what they say, and Jack somehow survived freezing in the Atlantic after the ship went down in Titanic. (“They didn’t have anyone confirm his death and there was no funeral! I think he survived and found her and she kept it a secret!”)
After a while I stopped arguing with her, although not only did I believe he was dead, I thought there was enough room on that door/raft that Rose could have saved him, but whatever. Pretty sure Claire believes in unicorns, too.
Honestly, I had no idea how we were such close friends, but we’d been together since grade school. Margot, the third member of our trio, had gone to private school up until ninth grade, when she finally convinced her parents that she couldn’t catch New Moneyitis by attending public schools. We’d each gone to different colleges but had moved back to the area after grad school, and we had standing GNO dates every week.
I waited the five minutes and called Claire, claiming to be her mother with an emergency at home. “I’ll be right there, Mom,” she promised in an unnaturally loud voice. “Fifteen minutes at most. Don’t move.”
We hung up, and she called me from the car ten minutes later. “Thanks. I was dying.”
“Good thing you drove yourself.” I carried my empty plate and glass into the kitchen and set them in the sink.
“Always. Especially this time. I had a feeling.”
“What went wrong?”
“He spent the first thirty minutes of our date talking about his ex. He was in tears by the time my second glass of wine arrived. I took my entrée to go.”
“What is it?”
“Veal piccata.”
“Nice. Why is he even dating if he’s not over his ex?”
“Who knows?” She sighed. “He was sort of cute, though. Great hair. It’s a bummer. All the good ones are taken, I swear. Or gay. Or both.”
“Speaking of cute, you’ll never guess who just moved in downstairs.” I turned around and leaned back against the sink, eyeing the fridge where he near-kissed me.
“Who?”
“Quinn Rusek.” I lowered my voice. I didn’t want him to hear me talking about him.
“Quinn Rusek just moved in downstairs from you? Why?”
“Because my brother told him he could.”
“Your brother,” she said wistfully. “A perfect example of cute, taken, and gay.”
“We are talking about me,” I reminded her peevishly. “And I have not heard the proper amount of outrage from you on my behalf that my cute, gay, and taken brother is subjecting me to this cruel and unusual punishment!”
“I’m sorry. It is cruel and unusual. What’s he doing here?”
I filled her in on the details while I rinsed my dishes, put them in the dishwasher, and hunted around in my pantry for something sweet. “And then when I saw him, he had the nerve to act like nothing was wrong. Like he hadn’t been such an asshole to me that night.”
“Well, it was ten years ago, Jaims.”
“That doesn’t matter! My humiliation is still fresh! It rose right to the surface the moment he brought up the thing I said.”
She gasped. “The ‘I love you’ thing?”
Spying a can of Duncan Hines frosting at the back, I pulled it out, took off the cap, and peeled back the foil lid. “Yes. Turns out he still remembers that. I’d been hoping he forgot.” I dragged a finger through the thick chocolate sludge and licked it off. “It was so horrible. He teased me about it. Made me feel seventeen years old and ridiculous again.”
“What an asshole,” she said, finally giving me what I wanted. “How did he look?”
I groaned and dug back into the frosting. “Good. Too good. You can’t trust people that good-looking. He’s probably an alien or something. He’s just here trying to charm women back to the mother ship to breed his ridiculously beautiful alien babies.” I sucked the chocolate off my finger.