The Ex Talk

Despite this bar looking like you wouldn’t trust anything that comes out of its kitchen, the food is crisp and salted to perfection. I am eating Tater Tots with my former nemesis in a dive bar at eleven o’clock on a Monday night. My life has ceased to make sense.

After he’s had enough to stop swaying in his seat, I figure it’s safe for us to leave. He struggles to extract his wallet from his back pocket, though, so I fish out my own. “I’ll pay you back later,” he says.

“Oh, I know you will.”

The bartender passes back my credit card. “You two have a good night.”

You two. It’s not an implication that we’re together, just that we are two human beings leaving a bar at the same time.

It might be a Monday, but that doesn’t stop Capitol Hill. Hipsters loiter outside bars, the chilly April air thick with cigarette smoke and weed. Dominic isn’t wearing a jacket, just the slate-gray button-down he had on at work that’s come untucked.

He slings an arm around my shoulders and slumps against me, which, given our height difference, must look comical. After a moment’s hesitation, I reach around his waist to steady him. It’s the closest we’ve ever been—even closer when his shirt rides up, and for the briefest moment, my fingers graze the warm skin of his lower back.

I draw back so suddenly that he attempts to right himself, relying more on his own legs than on my five-two frame. “Sorry. I was probably putting too much weight on you.” He pats the shoulder of my jacket. “You’re tiny.”

“The least you can do is try not to insult me after I rescue you from Nickelback and Jägermeister.”

“It wasn’t an insult.” He stares down at me, his gaze impossible to read as always. I feel not just tiny but like I’m giving a presentation at a senior staff meeting wearing only nipple tassels and my favorite public radio socks—I wouldn’t be Shay Goldstein if I didn’t have multiple pairs—with a fish holding a microphone beneath the words Ira Bass. “What’s the tallest guy you’ve dated?”

“I don’t understand how that’s relevant.” And yet as I think through my dating history, my wine-jumbled mind snags on the memory of us in the station kitchen. The way he loomed over me, caging me in. Pressing the glass of water to my cheek. How I felt small but safe, and a whole lot of other feelings I never gave my body permission to feel. Feelings I am definitely not experiencing right now.

I guess it doesn’t hurt to humor him. “I dated someone a few years ago who was six one.”

“Silly,” he says, and he boops my nose. He’s going to die when I rub this in his face tomorrow. “You’re supposed to say me. Where’s the car?”

“Since I was in the middle of a glass of wine when you texted, I took a Lyft.” I pull up my phone to order another one, then maneuver us to a bench facing the street. He flops onto it next to me, head dropping to my shoulder. With this lack of control over his limbs, he’s like once of those inflatable tube creatures at car dealerships. But heavier. And smelling only a little like alcohol—much less than I’d think after spending a couple of hours in that bar—and a little like sweat, but mostly like Dominic. Woodsy and clean.

“Why did you drink this much?” I ask.

“Thassagoodstory.” He stretches it into one long drunken word. “I was already buzzed after Mahoney’s. I had to drink away my misery after you told me a story about a fake dog so you wouldn’t have to hang out with me.”

“He’s real! His name is Steve! I have photos!” I rush to get out my phone again, but Dominic just holds up a hand, laughing.

“I know. I know. Then I got home, and you were in a sexy Gritty costume, and I guess I wasn’t done celebrating the show. And you know. Being young and sprightly and everything.” He waves a hand at this. “And then I started thinking about how there was no one I could ask to come out with me. I don’t even like going out that much. Not enough to get in the habit of doing it alone. But there I was. Drinking alone at a bar on a Monday night, and I figured drinking more would help me feel less like shit about it.”

At first, I can’t formulate words. This isn’t the Dominic who teased me about Puget Sounds or even the Dominic who fed me truffles in the dark, his teeth on the tips of my fingers. I try to picture a version of Dominic lying on a couch in his comfy sweats, idly scrolling through Netflix but not finding anything to watch, texting with me because he had no one else to text with. Going out alone because he had no one else to ask. He grew up here, so this makes me even more curious about his background. He said he’s the youngest of five kids, and I’m not sure where his siblings live or if they’re close. I don’t know which Dominic this is, and it makes me both hesitant and curious.

His confession turns me serious, drags out a secret of my own. “I feel lonely sometimes, too,” I say in a quiet voice. “I basically have one friend, and she might be getting a job on the other side of the country.”

“I’m so sorry,” he says, and it sounds like he means it. Then he brightens, straightening his posture. “I’ll be your friend!”

“That sounds like the alcohol talking.”

“We’re not friends?” There’s an odd vulnerability there. He seems hurt, maybe, that I wouldn’t consider us friends.

“No, no,” I hurry to say. Are we friends? “We can be friends. We’re friends.”

He drops his head to my shoulder again, and I make myself stay very, very still. “Good.”

The Lyft shows up then, relief of reliefs, and I manage not to sprain anything while helping this giant into a Prius.

Once we’re inside, the driver confirms the address before returning to an impassioned argument about soccer with whoever’s on the other end of his Bluetooth. The throbbing in my head has become a maddening, insistent tattoo. I let out a long breath as I relax against the seat, shutting my eyes for a moment.

“You smell good,” Dominic says, and my eyes fly open.

“Oh—I, uh, took a bath earlier. It’s probably the lavender bubble bath.”

“When we were texting?”