Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [5]
Aha. So here we go. The opportunity to see this ménage through has presented itself. As I make small talk with Mitch, I can’t decide if this wedding reunion for our triumvirate is a good idea or an incredibly terrible one. It would make the ménage story even better, I think.
“Why don’t we meet at Jones at 8 P.M.?” I ask rather suddenly, surprising even myself. “If that works for you guys.”
“It works for us,” Mitch says, not even checking with Chris. “See you then!”
The first lemon drop goes down smoothly, so I follow it with two more. Licking the sugar off my lips, I glance at my cell phone, wondering if I should call Stephanie. She’d actually been so excited by the prospect of my meeting up with my ménage partners that she begged to come along. Not to have drinks with us, mind you—that would be a bit too normal for Stephanie—but to be somewhere in the restaurant so she could spy. I rejected the pitch on the spot but am beginning to wonder if her presence might have been comforting.
But suddenly, before I even have a chance to call her for backup, Chris arrives. Or I should say a guy claiming to be Chris walks up to me. Was he really this short? Did he actually have this much of a receding hairline last month?
“Hi there,” he chirps, enveloping me in an awkward hug. Too late, he goes for the cheek kiss but I’m caught off-guard, and he ends up inhaling a section of my hair. Had he developed horrific halitosis since the wedding, or had I just lost my sense of smell that night? I hope my hair doesn’t capture and begin to emit his mouth stench. “Mitch is dealing with the valet.”
I motion for the waiter before he even sits down. Sipping from my lemon drop, I marvel over how much drunker I must have been than I realized the night of the wedding.
“How have you been?” I ask him as he slides into the booth.
He’s looking me straight in the eye and grinning, and the look is altogether too intense. “God, it’s great to see you.”
I smile, trying to erase the image of him shoving his tongue down my throat from my mind, and take an enormous gulp. “You, too.”
My mind is racing all over, trying to figure out what the hell I could have possibly been thinking wedding night. Had I been roofied? But wouldn’t I then be experiencing the pleasure of having my entire knowledge of Chris blocked out? I take another sip and tell myself that Mitch is going to show up and make Chris seem better. They had appeal as a duo, not as individuals.
“Hey there,” I hear from a deeper voice as Mitch slides next to me in the booth and wraps his hand around my waist so that it rests on my right love handle.
“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” he continues, looking at me like I’m an enormous sandwich and he’s just decided to break his year-long carb-free diet. On my other side, Chris slides in so close to me that his breath seems to replace any oxygen in the vicinity. I notice that Mitch has the crater-faced complexion of someone whose adolescence was defined by acne that he attempted to pick off. I’m suddenly intensely grateful for Jones’s dim lighting.
“Drink?” I ask them, motioning for the waiter and they both nod enthusiastically. They’re sitting so close to me that I almost feel like we’re a single unit. Had they decided ahead of time to act as aggressive as possible or were they both only children who had absolutely no sense of what the term “personal space” meant? There was only one way to deal with this: get wasted and see if they seemed any better.
I stumble out of Jones an hour later, marveling at the fact that my ménage à trois partners had turned out to be so creepy and lame. You’re supposed to have a ménage à trois with, like, a member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Jane’s Addiction and your most outrageous girlfriend, not two dorky groomsmen from a wedding that took place at your mom’s house. Why am I always getting everything so horribly wrong?
Just as the valet guy hands me my keys, I hear a guy say,