“I feel like I can’t trust anyone,” she spoke over me.
“Welcome to the club.”
Whoops. I slipped. The words just came out. And as they did, I watched her cry again, this time into her hands. Her shoulders shook and she tried to stifle her sobs but I heard them, and as I did, I flipped the switch I did whenever women decided to cry in front of me. It generally worked like a mute button so I could comfortably skip this part of the conversation.
But apparently the batteries were finally out.
“Look, we’ll stay for a little longer,” I said, cupping her elbows and bringing her closer. “But this has nothing to do with Mike. This is just to give Helen the benefit of the doubt.”
“Hillary,” Evie corrected with a frustrated groan but then she broke into a conflicted laugh. “Drew, God. What is wrong with your memory? Did a baseball hit you in the head once?”
“No, I just save my memory for what actually matters,” I said, prompting her to blink at me a few times and give me a funny look. But then she wiped the last of her tears and took in a deep breath.
“You don’t mind staying a little longer?” she asked, her voice small.
I minded. I really didn’t think she was going to find the answer she wanted and I wasn’t a fan of wasting my own time.
“Okay. Just a little longer,” she said, interlocking her fingers in mine. “And then we’ll go home?”
“And then we’ll go home,” I echoed, returning the squeeze she gave my hand before we pushed through the door and headed back out.
22
EVIE
One thing led to another and by a quarter past midnight, the proud “foodies” of the dwindled group – down to about ten now – were talking about taking the after party to an amazing new gastropub inside some boutique hotel in DUMBO. Mike said we’d never get in even with his PR connections, at which point some drunk guy suggested we just drop Drew Maddox’s name.
And since it pissed off Mike, we did exactly that.
Besides, I was still trying to get my closure on Hillary. I’d seen Mike whisper to her a few times but other than that, she went nowhere near him. That said she avoided me too, and for every time I went up to her and she scurried away I felt my heart sag.
Because I didn’t want Drew to be right.
Since the day we’d met, he’d been proving me wrong and I wanted to change that. I wanted to prove to him that there was hope left. That trust wasn’t a guaranteed set-up for failure. I couldn’t get behind his morbid outlook on the world, and I was desperate to debunk it.
But as everyone but me got progressively drunker, I began to see things.
I saw Hillary instinctively smile when Mike whispered something in her ear while tickling her waist. But when she caught my eye across the bar, she quickly shoved him away. She looked miserable as she continued to duck both Mike and me all night, and at some point, I saw her rubbing her temples before taking shots of whiskey by herself.
And since she was proudly not a party girl who famously hated the taste of hard alcohol, I had a feeling she was trying desperately to relieve herself of something. Nerves, definitely.
And guilt, perhaps.
“The hotel gave me a free room,” Drew said as he came up to me and tossed a key card onto the bar. My eyes fluttered from Hillary to him.
“What? Why?”
“Because I’m Drew Maddox.”
“What did we say about referring to yourself in third person?”
“Sometimes it makes sense, alright?”
I gave him a look.
“Alright, I’ll stop,” he relented with amusement before dropping his voice to a murmur. “How you feeling, by the way?” he asked. Placing two hands on either side of me on the bar, he caged me in with those strong arms.
“I was feeling vaguely weird. But I’m better now,” I replied honestly as I gazed at his biceps, the deep line of muscle on his forearm, and the sleeve of tattoos that covered his right arm, right down to his wrist. I noted the birds, flames and lion heads hidden in the sea of ink. “Do they all mean something or did you just get them because they look cool?”