1
EVIE
Tequila or my phone – it was either one or the other, but I couldn’t have both.
I wanted to, obviously, but there were too many risk factors involved tonight, starting with the fact that I was still a walking train wreck of a human being. I hadn’t actually shed any tears today, but my eyes were still puffy and red from several weeks’ worth of ugly crying at home, and I was still all weepy and heartbroken and steeped deep in this post-breakup fog where all I wanted was to just talk to him.
Five weeks.
It had only been five weeks since I’d gone from happy and engaged and all packed to move to the city with my fiancé, to single and bawling in a Starbucks while searching Craigslist for rentals I could afford alone.
The good news was that I’d found a cheap studio on Long Island.
The bad news was that until tonight, I hadn’t left the place in about two weeks.
And while I was out for the first time in ages, I was pretty much at the bare minimum of presentable. For starters, the dress code tonight had called for cocktail attire and I’d trudged in wearing leggings and the grey raglan I’d gone to bed in. I did put on a bra, and I did bring makeup and a change of clothes in my purse, but I also got points knocked off for the fact that my purse was a reusable grocery bag from Trader Joe’s.
I know.
My being-out-in-public skills had dulled significantly after spending thirteen days inside. Post-breakup, my existence had basically been a pants-less, bleary-eyed purgatory that involved me doing nothing but sitting on the couch, staring at the TV and trying to figure out just how broken up Mike and I were.
It wasn’t the easiest task considering what he had said to me right before he left.
“We could get back together, Evie. I mean that’s the plan. We’re soul mates. But I need some time apart first.”
Right. So…
Were we over? Were we not? Would we get back together in a month or a year? Or was that line just a fancy way of saying, “You’re my safety in case I don’t end up finding someone better?”
That was definitely the question of the day basically every day since the one he left, and it didn’t help that last week, we spoke on the phone for over three hours. We’d poured out our feelings and even shared a few tearful laughs before the call ended with him saying, “God, I miss you so fucking much… but please don’t call me again. I’ll call once I’ve had enough time.”
Fucking time.
It was the meanest word in the dictionary, as far as I was concerned, because it had me effectively trapped in a mental limbo – in this weird personal hell where I constantly jumped from depressed to confused to, most dangerous of all, hopeful.
Which was stupid.
I knew that.
But I just couldn’t help myself. I’d known and loved Mike Stuart for most of my life. He was as much a part of me as any one of the limbs on my body. I mean we were Mike and Evie. Evie and Mike. For the past seventeen years, our names had rolled off everyone’s tongues like one word, because we were a given. A team. Two best friends and lovebirds joined right at the hip.
At least we were.
Until now.
“You sure you won’t change your mind about this, right?” the bartender asked, letting me slap my phone into his palm as he slid my second Paloma across the bar.
“I won’t. Promise,” I answered with as much confidence as I could muster. “Once the birthday girl arrives, she’ll take my phone from you,” I said, hoisting my ugly tote back onto my shoulder. “But till then, please keep it far away from me and give me zero access – no matter how hard I beg.”
“No matter how hard you beg. Roger that,” the bartender grinned at me. “And which one is the birthday girl?”
“You’ll know. She’s the adorable blonde who everyone’s gonna yell ‘surprise’ at – if and when she decides to arrive,” I grumbled, before sucking down a third of my drink in one sip.
That was the second reason I had to forfeit my phone.
It was Aly’s big surprise party tonight. Her boyfriend Emmett had been planning it for ages, so I couldn’t risk drunk texting her to have her convince me not to drunk dial Mike. She would undoubtedly ask me where and why I got so drunk, at which point I’d probably spill the beans about how I’d actually dragged my ass out of the house to be at her birthday. She was, after all, my best friend and the only person in the world whom I’d break my no-going-out streak for – especially when it required stepping foot in a place like this.
We were at Boulevardier on Ninth Avenue. It was one of those super trendy hot spots where even the staff was drop dead gorgeous, and aside from the fact that I was dressed for the gym and hadn’t washed my hair in three days, I’d apparently also forgotten how to just exist in a crowded room. I’d been holed up in my apartment for so long that it felt as if I had no capacity to handle noise beyond the sound of The Office playing softly in the background of my day-to-day life.
So my solution was drinking.
Boozing, really. I was on pace to finishing my second cocktail in about thirty minutes, which was the opposite of pacing myself, but I reasoned that any tipsy mistakes I’d normally make had been taken off the table. For example: No phone? No drunk dialing. No heels? No falling. No Mike?
No desire to so much as look at another man, apparently.
It was nuts. The room was crawling with objectively handsome, well-groomed men wrapped in expensive custom suits. They were all friends of Emmett and they were all tall, built and beautiful – basically everything I’d fantasized about since the day I hit puberty. But they did absolutely nothing for me tonight because all I wanted was Mike, and after another hour passed without Aly’s arrival, I found myself getting dangerously antsy.
Crap.
The tequila was feeding my restlessness, and my
restlessness was feeding my brain. Suddenly, I had a million questions I was convinced I needed to ask Mike now, for example, what was to become of our joint bank account? There was no money in it, but still. Also, we agreed to cat sit for Hillary in August. Which one of us was going to do it? Also, which of our friends already knew about the breakup and which didn’t, and should we hold off on telling the rest in case we got back together?