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“Really?” I said in disbelief. “Paying for laser surgery? Doing, I assume, months of workouts? You weren’t trying to get hot?”
“Not specifically.” He frowned. “I just wanted to change. Be less me. Or maybe more me. I didn’t really analyze it.” He looked at me, his gaze frank. “You’ve always been hot, even before you were blonde. Though you didn’t need to lose the weight.”
My spine straightened. “Are you passing judgment on my weight, Dane Scotland?”
“No, ma’am,” he said instantly. “It’s just an observation. You’re hot either way.”
That gave me tingles, which was bad, so I said, “I work in the fashion industry in New York. I assure you I definitely needed to lose the weight. And I need to lose more.” I took a deep sip of my margarita.
“Why? You’re behind the camera, not in front of it.”
“You sweet, innocent baby,” I said. “Everyone in the business needs to look good, no exceptions. In exchange for the body image issues, I get clothes.” I motioned to my leopard-print dress.
“It’s very nice,” Dane said.
“Nice? It’s eight hundred dollars nice, though I didn’t pay anything close to that. And these.” I flexed my leg out, showing him my black high heel—and, incidentally, my bare calf, which I thought looked pretty sexy now that I’d had a margarita. “You have no idea who designed these shoes, do you?”
Dane frowned. “If you think I do, then you haven’t been paying attention.”
I sighed theatrically. “No wonder you need me, Dane. You may be hot, but you don’t know how to dress.”
“What’s complicated about it?” He sipped his beer. “You find clothes that fit, you put them on. Clothes keep you warm and keep you from being naked. That’s it.”
I was about to argue, and then I felt my jaw drop. I realized what he was doing: playing Bait the Fashionista, his response to Bait the Nerd. I could tell by the tiny quirk of a smile at the corner of his mouth, the bastard. “For that, you owe me another margarita,” I said, sliding my empty glass over the bar. “I’d like to get tipsy.”
“Why?” he asked, motioning to the bartender. Drinking hadn’t been my thing when I was a teenager—I’d been more of a square, but I’d changed. I didn’t know a single person in New York who didn’t drink like a fish.
“Because my bank account is empty and my life is held together by glue and Scotch tape,” I said, realizing as the words came out that the first margarita had hit me hard. “And I’m dressing my ex in the same city as my shitty childhood, the place where my mother still lives.”
Dane got a cautious look on his face as he slid my drink toward me. He knew everything about my background, my life, the childhood that Aidan and I had. “Are we going to talk about your mother?” he asked.
“No, we’re not.” I took a deep sip, letting the icy alcohol hit my veins. Aidan and I had grown up fatherless with a single mother. She said she left our father because he hit her, but I always wondered if that was a lie. God knew my mother lied about enough things, big and small.
Some people should never be a parent, and my mother was one of them. We were in her way; we were a headache who took up her time and cost her money. She had no time for us, no patience. Aidan had let it roll off him somehow, but I never could. I spent my childhood trying to please my mother, hoping to win the affection and love she couldn’t give. I tried, and I tried, and I tried. It never worked.
When Aidan moved out and I spent more time with the boys, my mother never asked where I was. She never asked if I was safe or happy. When I finally moved out too, she was so relieved s
he didn’t bother to hide it. You’ll be fine, she said, her only words of wisdom. The underlying message was clear: If you’re not fine, I don’t want to hear about it.
A few years ago, our mother started losing her memory and becoming confused. The degeneration was rapid, so fast that she now lived under 24-hour care in an excellent home, with Aidan paying the bills. Instead of getting the chance to come to terms with my mother, or even reconcile with her, I now had a mother who was quickly forgetting about me altogether.
Dane knew all of this. He’d been with me for every minute of it since I was eleven. It was both comforting and disconcerting, sitting with someone who knew so much about me. I’d gone to New York to reinvent myself, become a new person. A person who never talked about her increasingly ill mother. I didn’t talk about her now, but it was because I didn’t need to.
“I guess you know everything,” I said to him, looking at the line of his jaw beneath his beard.
“I do.” He sipped his beer, which was still his first drink. “I thought we weren’t talking about it.”
“We aren’t. Where are your parents now?”
“Divorced,” Dane said. “My mother remarried and moved to Washington state. My father is still in Chicago, working. Neither of them wants my money.”
I felt my eyebrows go up. I remembered Dane’s parents as always working, leaving him home alone for much of his life. You’d think people like that would be happy to have a rich son. “What do you mean, they don’t want your money?”
“My father says he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he wasn’t working. My mother says her new husband does just fine.” Dane rubbed a drop of beer from his bottom lip. “I think both of them think my money is immoral. Like there’s no way you can get as rich as I did without robbing someone or taking what isn’t yours. They used to ignore me, but now they pretty much don’t trust me.”
“Jesus, Dane.” I cupped my chin in my hand. “We’re both the products of such fucked-up parenting. No wonder we freaked out when I was nineteen. Do you think we would have made good parents?”
“Is that a serious question?” He frowned at me.
