Sarah took a reluctant sip. It was overwhelmingly sweet and intense, a more obnoxious cousin of the cosmopolitan. “This is excellent, Trish,” Sarah said, not caring whether it was true.
She pressed herself against the wall as the conversation ping-ponged around her in a non-linear tennis match about rental costs and new cell phones and what constituted charcuterie. As soon as she found a moment, Sarah slipped away and wandered out the back door into the garden, a deep, narrow space squished between seven-foot concrete walls on either side. The brick patio was crumbling around the edges but had been forcefully dragged into urban chic by the copious use of tiny lights and potted greenery. In one corner, a couple were having an intimate chat in the vicinity of a dwarf Japanese maple, and Sarah steered away from them to hide on a bench that was half-concealed behind a stretch of ornamental grasses. She took a breath, sipping at Trish’s drink cautiously until someone appeared in her periphery: Ian, Paul’s best friend and the taller half of one of the loving couples within. He saw her and approached with a friendly grin.
“Out here by yourself?”
“Communing with nature.”
They spent the next few minutes gamely talking about gardening, though neither of them had a garden, and how nice it would be to enter the real estate market, though neither of them had the money to buy anything, until he finished his cigarette and she finished her cocktail.
Standing up too rapidly to follow him inside, she discovered that she was, embarrassingly, quite drunk. She had apparently become a lightweight in her mid-twenties. Her drinking habits typically involved some red wine a couple of times a week, but that had declined even further now that Paul wasn’t around to have people over and Liam wasn’t there to take her to fancy meals. In the past two weeks, she had consumed exactly one drink when she went to Anya’s house for a Sunday brunch. It had seemed too maudlin to drink alone, mourning the break-up that she had asked for.
Now she carefully made her way into the kitchen to find water to sober herself up and found herself in the middle of an intense conversation between Paola and Trish about the toothpaste campaign that Trish had just booked.
“It’s still crazy to me that that’s where the money is,” Paola was saying.
“Well, television and movies, too,” Trish said. “But think about it. During a sports game, millions of people see an advertisement. In television, the viewership is so spread around now that ads reach way more people than TV shows.”
“So unless you’re in a huge movie…”
“And indie films pay nothing,” Trish said forcefully. “Nothing. You might as well be in a play.”
Sarah spoke gently. “I was looking for water?”
“Seltzer is in the fridge,” Trish said. As Sarah attempted to slip past them, Paola stopped her with one fine-boned hand on Sarah’s upper arm.
“Hold on a minute. I am dying to ask you something.”
Sarah paused, deer-in-the-headlights. “Yes?”
“What was Ren actually like in college?” Paola asked. “Did he hook up with tons of women? Because he will neither confirm nor deny.”
Sarah hesitated. “Oh, well…I guess you could say he got a lot of female attention, understandably, but?—”
“Why understandably?” Paola’s expression was sharp.
Shit. Sarah was drunk. She was usually more careful than that. “He’s attractive, I guess I meant, but?—”
“That’s true,” Trish interrupted. “He could do modeling. I was just telling him this.”
“No, I mean, but he wasn’t…” Sarah searched in the echoing cavern of her drunk brain for the correct words. “It wasn’t like he was constantly sleeping around. It was more like he had a few things with different women. I don’t remember anyone he dated seriously, but there may have been someone.” There. She felt proud of herself. That was well-stated for a drunk person, surely. “Not me, of course!” she added quickly, just in case that was Paola’s worry.
“Why not you?”
Paola was a lawyer, Sarah remembered too late, and she was being cross-examined. “Um, well…” Sarah’s bright tone was harder to maintain when the question poked at old wounds, but she did her best. “Well, I suppose we were better as friends. Or I wasn’t hot enough for him,” she added.
Whoops. That last part wasn’t supposed to leave her mouth. She had been scrambling for something that would make Paola realize that Sarah wasn’t a threat, but not that. Paola was staring at her.
“Sarah’s leaving out the part where I hit on her and she turned me down cold,” Ren said, entering the kitchen. So he must have heard everything. Excellent.
“Why did you turn him down?” Paola asked, her eyes back on Sarah.
“Because she thought I was an asshole,” Ren filled in.
“An interesting, well-read asshole,” Sarah added with what she hoped was a light smile.
“Well, some things don’t change,” Paola replied dryly, and Ren walked up to his wife and kissed her on the cheek.
Sarah found a can of seltzer and hurried outside again, this time finding the back patio mercifully empty. The evening had grown cool and quiet, settling down into the lush peace that the city sometimes found in the season between spring and summer. Sitting among Trish’s tiny lights, she felt like she was floating in a sea of stars. She felt like she was drowning.
