“Do you come here a lot?”
She tried to decide if the house salad was a safe bet, even though it came, inexplicably, covered in kelp.
“No. It’s my first time.”
So far, nothing about this date was her idea of normal. For one thing, Naomi had spent an inordinate amount of time getting ready. Usually, she didn’t waste energy considering what to wear, especially for dates with men. She cared what women thought about her clothes. But in her experience, men usually unanimously agreed less was more. Of course, in this matter, like so many others, Ethan remained an outlier.
He barely seemed to notice her slinky silver dress. Thankfully, the long sleeves covered the grapefruit-sized bruise on her shoulder. Not that Ethan would know. His eyes hadn’t slipped below her neck once. He was probably too busy thinking about world peace or the capacity for human suffering or something else equally righteous while she sat here shimmering like a horny disco ball.
Ethan, in all his dark-chinos-and-perfectly-pressed-dress-shirt-with-the-sleeves-rolled-up-to-reveal-his-taut-forearms glory, scanned the room and seemed to come to a conclusion.
“Did you offer to come to this restaurant as a trap?”
Naomi took a long sip of her water, trying to decide if it was unnerving how quickly he’d seen through her plan. “If only you’d figured that out before they brought the bread.”
He closed his menu and leaned forward, keeping his voice low. “I picked this one because it’s the closest to your house. The other options you gave me were all the way across town.”
“Wait, you picked this place because you wanted to cut down my commute?”
Measuring the distance between the various restaurants she’d picked from their respective work neighborhoods hadn’t occurred toher. She knew people like Clara, who consulted menus online before deciding where to go, but not Google Maps.
“Well, yeah.” Ethan took a bite of the aforementioned bread and then very quickly put it down on his plate with a look of distaste. “Traffic on the 405 sucks, and there’s construction again this week.”
“That’s really... sweet,” she said, chewing on the foreign word.
“Not that sweet.” Ethan fiddled with his napkin. “I figured you’d be in a better mood if you didn’t have to battle rush hour. If I’d known that you would dock me points for picking the only restaurant on the list with four types of bone broth on the menu”—he shook his head, teasing—“I’d have let you hike out to Koreatown.”
Ethan crumbled a corner of the weird bread between two fingers and lowered his voice even further. “I’m not sure anything here is actually edible.”
Naomi frowned. Why was he worried about her mood? Sarcasm and snark were the calling cards of her hard-won persona. Had her surliness lost its charm already?
She had no desire to sit here and question her every move, but she also couldn’t stop thinking about how high the stakes for tonight felt.
Even people who knew Naomi well occasionally accused her of being fearless. They didn’t realize that her daring didn’t come naturally, that she’d built a persona to protect a girl who’d had her plans for the future taken from her. The first time Naomi had stepped on set and shrugged out of her clothes, it had been a dive into the deep end.
People were always saying “Oh, I could never do that,” when they found out she had performed.Of course you couldn’t, she constantly wanted to answer,you’d never have the guts.
Dating Ethan also required bravery, but it didn’t inspire the same swooping belly and trembling hands she’d felt all those years ago. Instead, sitting across from him required her to flirt with her own softness. To decide if she was willing to put down the armor she’d worn foryears and risk finding, when this whole thing ended, that she’d lost the strength to pick it up again.
Ethan reached for her hand across the tabletop. “Naomi, you still with me?”
“Yeah—” she started to say—only then she wasn’t.
Her ex-girlfriend Jocelyn, arm threaded through another woman’s, ducked through the cheesy beaded curtain hanging in the entranceway. The hostess led them straight toward Naomi’s table.
Joce quickly covered the little start of surprise that passed over her face when she saw Naomi, smoothing her brow and painting on a quick, if resigned, smile.
Naomi got to her feet, not thinking, and oh man, was that a mistake, because now it wasn’t just Jocelyn looking at her, it was everyone in the restaurant, including Ethan and the woman on Joce’s arm. Why on earth had she picked out such a stupid, shiny dress? She might as well have worn a neon sign around her neck inviting disaster.
“Hi,” she said limply.
She hadn’t seen her ex in five years, but not much had changed. Joce’s beauty was still the arresting combination of sharp and delicate. The specter of their former relationship hung in the air between them, mocking Naomi with a failed future she’d never know.
Jocelyn hadn’t looked tired when she’d walked in. She did now, as if simply coming into contact with Naomi were draining. If only someone in this restaurant would knock over a wineglass. Send it shattering against the wood floor in a hundred jagged pieces, creating a big enough distraction that Naomi could slip away and not have to face these two people, one past and one present, who wanted something from her she wasn’t sure she could give.
“Hey. It’s been forever.” Joce threaded her fingers through her companion’s, and Naomi caught the flash of a gold band even in the low light of the restaurant’s Einstein bulbs. “This is my wife, Alice.”
Naomi sucked in a sharp breath and tried to cover it with a cough. Ethan stood up and handed her a glass of water off the table.