“See … you’re saying you’re not threatened—but you sound threatened.” I delete a few more emails, exhaling, silently urging Jude to hurry the hell up.
“It’s hard to explain,” she says.
“Then don’t.”
“I just …” she continues anyway, and I’m convinced she simply wants to hear herself talk at this point. “I know I was technically the other woman.”
She wasn’t technically the other woman. She was the other woman.
Cupping her hand over her heart, she leans forward. “And I live with the guilt of that every single day.”
No, she doesn’t …
“But I wouldn’t blame her for hating me,” she says, making it even more about her than it already was. “I just figured we were past that whole thing, you know? Like, let it go. Let us live our life in peace.”
I’ve learned over the years that sometimes it’s better to keep my trap shut around this woman or she’ll make Jude’s life a living hell for the next few days. What he sees in her, I’ve yet to understand. He’s mentioned how loaded her family is—some off-shoot of the Kennedy family with oil money. And he’s shared on far too many occasions how “dynamite” she is in bed, bragging about how there’s nothing she won’t do. I imagine those are a couple of the factors at play here. The rest, quite frankly, is none of my damn business.
I’m not his keeper.
I’m simply his best friend.
“What’s up?” Jude shuffles into the kitchen, tucking his phone in his shirt pocket. He makes his way to his fiancée first, who leans in for a kiss. She lifts her hand to his cheek, giving it a soft pat before peering up at him through a fringe of dark lashes too thick to be real. “You ready, counselor?”
“Yup.” I respond to another work email, pretending not to notice when he gives her yet another kiss.
“You sure you don’t want to go, babe?” Jude asks her.
“No, no. This is your thing,” she coos. “I would never impose on your trivia nights.”
She says that now, but I have a hunch things are going to change after she pops out their first tiny human.
Jude turns to me. “You driving?”
I nod. Jude’s a terrible parallel parker so I refuse to let him drive us downtown. Sitting shotgun while he pulls in, pulls out, and cranks his wheel fifty ways to Friday isn’t exactly my idea of a good time.
Twenty minutes later, we pull up to The Bronze Whaler for 90s trivia night—our first Monday of the month tradition. I know these nights are limited, each one another grain of sand through the hourglass. The closer we get to Jude and Stassi’s nuptials, the more in danger these outings are of becoming extinct.
We make our way in, registering at the table and grabbing our buzzer before ordering a couple of beers and snagging our favorite high-top table. Ten minutes later, the game kicks off with a series of easy questions. We nail the first three.
“You hear anything else from Jovie?” Jude asks between the fourth and fifth question.
I’d almost forgotten that I replied to her earlier.
I didn’t mean to. And I hadn’t planned to. I came out of a particularly contentious mediation session and the next thing I knew, I was pounding away at my keyboard, letting off steam.
“What does the acronym A-O-L stand for?” the trivia host asks into her microphone.
I hit our buzzer, but the table to our left gets it first.
“You weren’t kidding when you said Stassi was upset about that whole thing,” I divert the topic, but only slightly.
Jude exhales before reaching for his beer. “It’s all she’s been talking about all day.”
“What is the first name of the sheep that was cloned in 1996?” the trivia hosts asks.
I slap the buzzer.
“Team Stude at table two,” she calls on us, using the ridiculous moniker we came up with as kids—an amalgamation of our first names.
“Dolly,” I answer.
“Correct! Team Stude is still in the lead with four points,” she says. “Next question … who sang the song Steal My Sunshine?”
A table in the back snags that one.
“How’s your dad doing?” I ask. Last I heard, Paul was living the good life at some place in West Palm Beach. The older he’s gotten, the less he can tolerate Maine’s punishing, everlasting winters.
“Good,” Jude says. “He’s excited to come back and see everyone.”
It’s been at least a year since I saw Paul last, and while he isn’t my dad, he’s raised me since I was ten and given me copious amounts of life advice that’s yet to be proven wrong. We text every now and again—mostly him checking in the way a father would. I appreciate it just the same.
“Moving on,” the host says. “Name the highest grossing film of the nineties …”
Jude smacks the buzzer and calls out the answer. “Titanic.”