Her smile warms with love. “He is. Sebastian is wonderful.”
“Agreed.”
“I wish I had known you back then,” she tells me. “You guys needed a friend.”
I can’t help smirking. “We had Stella.”
“Ugh,” she mutters, rolling her eyes. “I said friend, not tricky little ho.”
“We had each other. That was all we needed. Besides, you would’ve been a kid back then. When I was 18, you were only, what, 11?”
Moira rolls her eyes at me. “That’s not such an enormous age difference.”
“Not now that it makes you 24, but back then it would’ve been a little unsettling.”
I see the server headed our way, so I ask her, “Do you know what you want to order?”
“I’m so much more interested in the dessert. There’s chocolate soufflé and crème brûlée. How’s a girl to choose?”
“Well, we have three courses to get through before we come to that life-altering decision.”
“Why don’t you pick for me?” she suggests. “No oysters or escargot. Otherwise whatever you want.”
Whatever I want? I’m not the one eating it. I have no idea what her tastes are. She’s already decided the matter though, putting the menu down and turning her attention to her drink.
The nice things about restaurants like these are the chefs don’t like giving you too many options. Each course only has four choices and she told me what she didn’t want, so I make sure to order us both different things; if she doesn’t like what I ordered for her, we can swap plates and she can have mine.
I bet Seb orders for her all the time. He’s a bossy motherfucker. Always had to be, so he learned to love the role.
“Do you and Seb come here?”
Moira shakes her head, gently placing her cocktail back down. “We came once to see what all the fuss was about but we didn’t like it so much that we went out of our way to come again. It was a different menu then, though,” she adds, probably realizing she’s telling me she’s not too fond of the place I picked. “I’m excited to try what you ordered tonight. And I do remember the crème brûlée was delicious.”
“We’ll get one of each and we can share, if you’d like,” I offer.
“I would like that very much, thank you.”
“You don’t have to keep thanking me for things,” I tell her.
Lightly rolling her eyes, she says, “I don’t remember how to do first dates. It’s been a long time. I never thought I’d go on one again, so I threw out the manual.”
My eye gets drawn to the sight of her left hand, decked out with a sizeable engagement ring and a platinum wedding band. I look at my own hand, suddenly missing the wedding band I’ve worn for years. I actually didn’t take it off until this morning. Didn’t feel right to wear it after last night. You can still see a faint indent on my finger where it used to be.
“Do you miss her?” Moira asks, gingerly.
“No,” I answer, quickly.
“It’s okay if you do,” she assures me, empathetically. “She was part of your life for years. That would be completely natural.”
“It’s not that I miss her,” I say, shaking my head. “Honestly, I wish now I’d never married her. She’s being a pain in the ass about the divorce.”
“Do you think she’s still in love with you?”
My eyebrows rise and I look up at her. “No, I think by the time she took the third or fourth dick that wasn’t mine, she was pretty firmly not in love with me.”
Moira darts a look to our left, then our right, subtly making sure no one overheard.
“Sorry,” I mutter, grabbing my drink and taking a long sip.