Liar

“How old is she?”

“Almost one.” Snagging my phone from the table, I brought up a picture of Ava smiling to the camera.

“Oh, my gosh. She’s adorable.”

“And she knows it.”

“She must take after her uncle, or is your brother as arrogant as you?”

“I’m not arrogant. I’m confident.”

She rolled her eyes but laughed. She loved my confidence, and I loved knowing it.

“How often do you get to see them?”

“Mom is pretty big on doing dinners at least once a month but tries to rope us all in for more if she can.”

“It sounds very normal.”

“Ninety-nine-point-nine percent. It was nice.” My family was a lot like hers in a way, but I didn’t need to ask many questions about her life because I knew almost all of it anyway.

“Did they like your wife?”

A bark of laughter broke free. “No, not really. They knew she wasn’t right for me but never said anything until after the divorce. They’re big on letting us make our own mistakes.”

“You mentioned that she almost came between you and Daniel…”

“Yeah,” he breathed. “Honestly, I look back, and I’m not even sure how our relationship got started when I remember all the differences between us. Maybe because partying was the priority in all our lives in college. I asked her to marry me, and we did it the next week. Three months later, we graduated, and she went to law school. While I stayed the same, she became more and more reserved.”

I looked up, my mouth twisted to the side.

“What?”

“Are you sure you want to hear all this? Some of it includes Daniel.”

“You mean Daniel isn’t a virgin?” Olivia mock gasped.

“Hardly,” I laughed.

“Yes, I want to know. I asked, didn’t I?”

“Okay…Well, Daniel and I shared women in college, and on more than one drunken night, we shared Ivette. That was before we got married. On a desperate attempt to pull her out of her reserve, I set up a night with Daniel.” I dragged a hand down my face and huffed a laugh. “It didn’t go well. At the time, Daniel and I were in the beginning stages of Voyeur—just ideas. She said it was polluting my mind—that he was polluting my mind.

“After that night, she refused to have Daniel over. When we were around her law school friends, she’d ask me to lie about Voyeur—about what I was doing. She was embarrassed. It was only the beginning of the lies she asked me to tell, wanting me to hide parts of myself like she was ashamed of me.”

“Oh, my god, Kent. She sounds like a raging bitch.”

“I think Daniel used those same words.”

“I learned how to insult from the best.”

“The final straw was when she said she was tired of having to split my time with Daniel. She wanted me to walk away from him and Voyeur. Be respectable were the words she used. Needless to say, I walked away from her. All her demands had added stress to my friendship with Daniel, and in the end, the thought of losing her affected me less than losing my best friend.”

“Well, I like who you are.”

“Good. Because at this age, I’m not changing.”

“Have you been serious with anyone since?” The question was light, but her eyes dropped to her empty box of fries, purposefully avoiding my stare.

“No.”

I held my breath, my skin growing taught with each inch she covered scanning up to reach my face. This conversation was toeing the line of dangerous, and I worried my mouth would land us on a bomb waiting to go off.

“Do you want to be?”

Swallowing hard, I considered my answer carefully—not ready to admit too much, but also not wanting to be too flippant and hurt her feelings. “I don’t know.” I settled with a neutral—if maybe a little cowardly—answer. “I haven’t excluded it, but I’m getting older.”

Her teeth sunk into her lip, and time slowed, the thudding of my heart ticking away the seconds. After last night, we seemed balanced on the edge of a precipice, and I didn’t know which way we would fall. I didn’t know which way either of us wanted it to fall, but I think we both knew which way was pulling us harder.

The doubt left me having no idea what her response would be. Would she push for more? Would she be okay with my answer? Would she be hurt by it? I braced myself for impact, unsure of which way the storm would turn.

But nothing ever came. She released the tight grip she had on her lip and smiled the coy smile I knew so well. “You’re soooo old.”

It took me a moment to catch up on her change of mood. I hadn’t been prepared for her to be aloof and let the topic go completely.

Apparently, Olivia—like me—wanted to avoid that conversation. Maybe she saw the hesitation written all over my face and decided to give me a break. No matter what her reasoning was for offering an exit, I was taking it. We could resume this conversation another day.