“I’m a simple man, Lilly Benedetto,” Nick says a couple of weeks later, raising his rocks glass in a toast. “But I will admit it is, on occasion, nice to eat dinner at an establishment where one is not worried about accidentally touching old gum underneath the table.”
Lilly laughs. “They should put that on Yelp,” she says as they clink. They’re at Charlotte’s for the December pop-up, Sharon Jones being piped through the sound system and the hum and clatter of the dining room all around them. It’s the last dinner before the holidays, the restaurant cozy and candlelit and smelling of citrus and cedar. Lilly loves this time of year—the whole city full of palm trees decked with twinkle lights and Santas wearing board shorts outside the Salvation Army, the cheery incongruity of celebrating Christmas in a desert.
She likes being here with Nick, too: how at ease he is with everyone around him, making fast friends with a pair of hipster jewelry designers seated beside them and joshing around with the waitstaff. He’s wearing a thermal pushed to his elbows, a leather bracelet wrapped around one wrist. The hair on his arms is golden in the light from the tiny votives lining the long tables. They’ve been seeing a lot of each other lately, grabbing lazy breakfasts atLittle Dom’s and going for long walks in Griffith Park; he’s the kind of person who can talk to anyone, who makes friends wherever he goes. He’s also an incorrigible, indiscriminate flirt, making eyes at the middle-aged housewives walking their doodles in Malibu and flashing his most charming smile at the bellman outside the Ace in DTLA, and if it can sometimes feel the tiniest bit tedious to wait around while he chats up the pixie-haired barista at Coffee Bean about the provenance of her fair-trade French roast, well, Lilly thinks there are worse qualities in a person. Better to like everyone than to like no one at all.
Tonight Charlotte’s featuring a Chinese American chef who grew up in Monterey Park, and the air is redolent with ginger and lemongrass and the cocktails spiked with star anise. Lilly and Nick split an enormous bowl of fried rice topped with duck eggs, their sunny yolks flecked with tiny black sesame seeds. The whole effect is bright and festive, the kind of showing that will have Charlotte and Lodge on every food blog in town come morning, but Lilly can’t get over the jangly, unsettled feeling that something—someone—is missing. She tells herself it’s just because her sisters aren’t here—Kit and Olivia begged off in favor of a launch party for some dubious NFT platform, June is nursing a cold, and Mari is Mari; Colin is here, somewhere, though thankfully he seems to have found someone else to pester for the night—and she always feels a little at sea without them. Still, the truth is she keeps catching herself glancing at the door, hoping in useless secret for... well.
“You didn’t happen to invite Will again, did you?” she whispered to Charlotte the other morning at yoga, tying to sound as casual as humanly possible.
“I did not,” Charlotte whispered back, fixing Lilly with anextremely skeptical expression as she pressed her thumbs against her third eye. “Should I have?”
“No!” Lilly said, too loudly; up at the front of the room, the instructor glanced disapprovingly in her direction. “Of course not. I just wanted to be... prepared. You know. For like. Whatever.”
“Mm-hmm,” Charlotte said, dropping down into a deep forward fold. “Eyes on your mat, Benedetto.”
Now Lilly nibbles the edge of a sparerib, listening with one ear as Nick engages the waiter about some gruesome-sounding Netflix series and clocking with some interest his smooth, warm palm creeping higher on her thigh underneath the table. They haven’t slept together yet, not that she’s necessarily opposed to the idea. The opportunity just hasn’t presented itself, on top of which she has the sneaking suspicion that his bedroom is likely going to be of the mattress-on-the-floor variety, and she’s trying to put off that moment of reckoning for as long as she can. Still, the last couple of days she’s been thinking she ought to just get on with it already: it’s been two years since Joe, and if it’s true that Nick doesn’t make her feel like her very skin is on fire the same way Will did that night in Rebecca Barnes’s hedge maze, at least he’s not a pompous, self-satisfied jackass who goes around getting people fired from their jobs for no good reason.
She waits until the waiter has trotted back off to the kitchen, then laces her fingers through Nick’s. “Hey,” she says impetuously, ducking her face close to his. “Do you want to get out of here?” Charlotte won’t miss her, Lilly reasons. Even if she does, she’ll understand. “Like, now?”
Nick grins at that, one eyebrow arching. “Like now, huh?” he teases. “I mean, yeah. I could probably be convinced.”
“Good,” Lilly says, glancing a kiss off the side of his mouth.“Let me just run and powder my nose, and then I’ll, you know. Do the convincing.”
Nick laughs, raising his glass in her direction. “I honestly cannot wait.”
She gets up and threads her way through the maze of long wooden tables, heading for the ladies’ room; when she rounds the corner into the dim, narrow hallway, she stops short at the sight of Charlotte with her back to the door of the storage closet. Colin—Colin?—is looming over her, suddenly taller and more intimidating than Lilly thinks of him as being; one hand is braced on the wall beside Charlotte, and the other very much on her ass.
The panic and rage surge through Lilly like a riptide, some earthquake in the middle of the Pacific sending a tsunami of cortisol through her veins. “What the fuck?” she demands, booking it down the hall in two huge steps and whacking Colin on one arm. God, she should have known. Guys like him are like this: they get one speck of acclaim and they think they can just go around taking whatever the hell they want, putting their grubby, entitled paws on asses as far as the eye can see. Where are those women from theNew York Timeswhen you need them? They’d grind him up in a Vitamix and eat him with a Tostito. “Get the fuck away from her.”
She’s so intent on giving Colin a piece of her mind that it takes her a second to register Charlotte’s hand on her arm, the way she’s pulling Lilly away from Colin and slotting herself in between them. “Lilly,” she’s saying. “Lilly Lilly Lilly, stop. Stop.”
Lilly turns to look at Charlotte, breathless. “What?” she asks, blowing a strand of hair out of her face.
“It’s not what... I mean, we were...” Charlotte trails off. “This,” she tries again, reaching for Colin’s hand and lacing their fingers together, “is like... a thing that’s happening.”
“Wait, what?” Lilly repeats. She’s hallucinating, she must be. There’s no way Charlotte could have been fooling around with Colin, of all people, because she wanted to. “No it isn’t.”
Charlotte shoots her a look. “I was going to talk to you later tonight,” she says quietly. “The two of us have been... you know.”
“I don’t!” Lilly exclaims, looking frantically back and forth between them. “I definitely do not.”
“Lilly,” Charlotte chides. “Come on.”
“No, no, I get it,” Colin says, completely misreading her horror. “Foods touching, et cetera.” He grins. “The foods, in this situation, being Char and me.”
Charlotte laughs at that, her hand still tucked into his for safekeeping. Lilly only stares.
***
Charlotte gets called into the kitchen before Lilly regains the ability to make compound sentences. Back in the dining room she sits down hard across from Nick, who’s chatting animatedly about blockchain with the second lead from a Starz show about a pod of sexy mermaids who do organized crime. “Hey,” he says. “Ready to go?”
“Why?” she asks, momentarily forgetting, then remembers and shakes her head. “I just caught Charlotte fooling around with my cousin in the hallway,” she announces, reaching for the bottle of wine on the table and splashing a generous amount into her glass.
“Whoa.” Nick smiles crookedly, slinging an arm around the back of her chair. “Good for them.”
“What? No! Not good for them,” Lilly corrects him. “Not good for her, especially. Colin, you might recall, is the worst. He’sone of those guys who calls himself a sneakerhead. His favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen.”
Nick looks at her blankly. “I... don’t know who that is.”
