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"You know who Mr. Big is?" she asked, her eyes wide.
"I do. My ex was a big fan."
Ella nodded. She was probably embarrassed that I knew about the fantasy man who was the rich handsome guy who swept the heroine off her feet.
"What about you?" she asked. "Besides owning a huge media conglomerate?"
I took in a breath and considered what to tell her. "I aspire to make the Chronicle successful again one day."
"That's impressive," she said. "Did you study journalism?"
I shook my head. "Business."
She appeared impressed by that.
The waitress brought us our burgers and we both dug in. After several bites and exclamations about how great the fries were, it was my turn to ask another probing question.
"So, what do you want from life outside of living the life of a single girl in Manhattan?"
She shrugged. "I'm keeping all my options open."
"No husband and children?"
She shook her head. "I'm pretty sour on the whole marriage thing."
I dipped a fry into ketchup and frowned. "How come? You're too young to be jaded."
She sighed. "I was supposed to have been married by now, in fact. Luckily, I found out several weeks before the wedding that my soon-to-be husband was boinking his 'sexretary.’"
She raised her eyebrows and made air-quotes when she said 'sex'.
I couldn't help but laugh out loud. "Boinking?"
She laughed as well, her eyes crinkling at the corners.
"Yep," she said, her smile fading. "In the office. On his desk, to be exact. I can laugh now, but believe me, three weeks before my wedding, I wasn't laughing."
"Crap. That's terrible. How did you find out?"
She shrugged. "He'd started working on Saturday mornings, telling me it was because he wanted to get ahead on his projects so we could go on a great honeymoon. One Saturday, I thought it would be nice to bring him some bagels and coffee to help cheer him up, seeing as he was working sixty-hour weeks. There they were, boinking away, her naked butt on the Johnston file."
She shoved a fry into her mouth and chewed hard. I could still see fire in her eyes, despite the year that passed between the 'boinking' event and now.
"So, as you can imagine, I'm not all that positive about the whole till-death-do-us-part-happily-ever-after thing."
I watched her take a long drink of her spritzer and realized that she was a lot like me.
"Me either," I said. "In fact, I'm pretty sour about it. My fiancée was boinking her boss, but it wasn't in the office. It was on the bed we shared in our apartment."
"Oh, crap," she said, her expression sympathetic. "That sucks."
"It does. We called off the wedding, needless to say."
She held out a fry. "To us: losers at love."
I picked up one of my fries and touched hers with it. "To us."
We both popped the fries into our mouths and chewed, each of us probably remembering our own shock
