“Even if you’re right—”
“I’m always right,” Rosie interjected.
“Well even if you are, it’s not like men are lining up at my door to date me.”
She scoffed. “They would if they knew your address.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Do not do something like hand out my home address to strangers on the street.”
She scowled. “I wouldn’t do that.”
I raised my brow.
“Well they wouldn’t be strangers, I’d ask their name, do a full background check and then give them your address,” she relented.
“No.”
“Fine,” she muttered. “But seriously, you know you’re a hot piece of ass. You’d get a date like that.” She clicked her fingers. “Plus, you’re not exactly new at the dating scene. You’ve had a boyfriend for every day of the week. You know where to find them.”
“I knew,” I corrected. “Before…” I trailed off.
Before what?
Before Heath?
Before Craig?
Before Heath…again?
Before I became horribly aware of how empty I’d made my life so I didn’t have to face the depth of my suffering?
“Okay, well, just get one of those phone apps, it’s what the kids do these days.” She’d snatched my phone off the coffee table before I could stop her.
“Rosie!” I cried. “I’m not going to date a guy on an app.”
Her nails clicked against the screen. “Of course you are.”
And like most times, Rosie was right.
* * *
“So what do you do, Polly?”
Crap.
I’d known this question would come up.
It was like the conversational blueprint in first dates.
What do you do? Where are you from? How many siblings do you have? What’s your sign? What’s the depth of your childhood trauma?
I’d had a lot of different answers to this in the past. Barista. Waitress. Dog groomer. Personal assistant. Sous chef at a raw food café.
I’d gone through careers like I’d gone through boyfriends, trying on different versions of life that never really fit.
But now I didn’t have anything. Not when my very skin didn’t feel like it fit.
Heath and I hadn’t talked about things like that when we first met.
Well, I’d asked his sign because I was on an astrology kick at that point and it turned out that he was crazy compatible with me. He was a Cancer and I was a Capricorn. Opposites that fit.
But other than that, we didn’t talk with that conversation filler known as the date blueprint. It was like the stuffing they put in purses when on display at the store. It made them look useful full so you could get the whole effect before you bought, but it was really useless once you brought it home and put all of your own stuff inside.
I wasn’t meant to be thinking about Heath here.
Not meant to be comparing.
I hadn’t done that after our first time.
I excelled at not thinking of him, in fact.
Where had all that skill gone?
Probably down the drain with whatever had been left of my childhood naivety.
“What do I do?” I repeated, fiddling with the straw in my margarita.
He’d made a comment about me not getting ‘white girl wasted’ when I’d ordered it. I think it was meant to be a joke.
I’d laughed.
It wasn’t funny.
He nodded, his overly styled hair not moving at all as he did so.
“Well, currently, I’m volunteering at the St. Mary’s Children’s Hospital. And I also do work with a couple of homeless shelters,” I said.
He inspected me, narrowing his suspiciously groomed eyebrows. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise. This was L.A. Everyone groomed their brows.
Even men.
Especially men.
This was a city of images, of perfection, of success and failure. Of beauty on the outside of ugliness.
“But you don’t have a job?” he clarified.
“Not one that pays actual money,” I muttered.
He nodded. In L.A. it wasn’t uncommon to not have a job and still not starve or go homeless. Not in the world of Instagram models, of rich boyfriends and richer fathers.
He opened his mouth, most likely to say something about himself. It was his favorite topic.
This was my second margarita and it was only now he was asking me what I did.
But the person storming up to our table kind of stopped that.
I was thankful until I saw who it was.
“You’re on a date?” Craig hissed at me.
Crap.
It was the first time I’d seen him since I’d left.
I should’ve had to have court appearances and all sorts of things that required interactions. But I had Rosie. And Rosie had her connections. Hence this being the first time in over a year I’d seen my ex-husband.
He hadn’t changed much.
He was slightly thinner than he had been, which was actually preferable than his unnatural muscles that I’d only found out after the marriage were thanks to testosterone injections more than lifting at the gym.
His suit was pressed, not as expensive as he usually wore, white shirt open collared underneath.
Clean shaven.
Eyes wild.
Full of hate.
How I’d never seen this was beyond me.
It was tempting to shrink back. To burst into tears. To run away.