“Are you honestly asking me that?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “Or is this another bid to pick on her?”
“Honestly asking.”
He rubbed a divot in the wooden bar, his dark hair tumbling over his face. “She’d feel better if you had a boyfriend.”
“So tell her I do. It’s super serious. His name is Marco, and I want fifteen of his babies. We’d need to get a fleet of minivans, but it would be worth it to have the whole block looking like him.”
He scowled at me. “A lot of people would be jealous in her situation, Nora. She’s not being unreasonable.”
He scooted his stool back an inch, signaling the conversation was over. I placed a hand on his arm to keep him from leaving, but he looked down at it as if I’d grabbed his junk.
I pulled back, wounded. “We can’t even touch each other anymore?”
A sigh seeped from him. “Look, I’m sorry.”
“We tried being together for two months. Two months out of ten-plus years of friendship. This is ridiculous, José.”
I knew he agreed with me. It was there in the lines of his face, which I knew almost as well as my own, but he said, “I can’t tell her the way she feels is ridiculous.”
“So tell her I have a boyfriend,” I insisted. “I’ll find one, so it won’t be a lie.”
He laughed, looking more like himself for a second, but it slipped into a grimace. “I don’t want to force you into dating someone just so?—”
“I’ll do it, and hey, maybe he’ll be my soulmate, and I’ll have Pansy to thank. Just don’t ask me to name my kid after her.”
“Nora.”
“Tell her,” I said, my voice dangerously close to pleading. “We can’t lose this place. Wecan’t.”
Ican’t lose this place. I don’t have the money to buy himout. And it would be pointless for him to buymeout given I’m the one who makes the ginger beer we sell. He never caught the ginger bug himself—he hitched himself to my dream because he believed it could be successful, and ithasbeen.
We’ve both poured so much of ourselves into this place. For either of us to step back now would be unthinkable. I mean, what would he even do?
Pardon the pun, but he’d be livin’ on a prayer.
“All right,” he said after a moment. “I don’t want to lose this either.”
And I knew he wasn’t just referring to the brewery. He was talking about our friendship and working relationship.
Of course, Pansy swung by the brewery after hearing about my new “boyfriend,” because she haddozensof questions.
She wanted to know his name.
Marco.
She was desperately curious about his job.
Computers, but his position was classified.
Most of all, she wanted to know when they could both meet him.
In a reckless game of kick the can, I told her it would happen at my mother’s wedding.
Back then, the wedding had been months in the future, and I’d figured there was plenty of time for me to start dating a man who’d pretend his name was Marco.
And, no shit, I’d actually met a guy whose namewasMarco. I’d half convinced myself I should marry him just to make my life easier, but he’d broken up with me two weeks ago, saying he was worried I liked the idea of him better than the reality.
No one could say that wasn’t fair.
