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“Well, thanks, pudding.” Aunt Livi hands Kiersten the now-empty glass. “I owe you one.”
She looks around her living room, her eyes stopping on Dax, who was not there when she fell asleep. “Oh, Daxon, it’s lovely to see you. You’re looking as dapper as always.”
Dax blushes and gets up from his seat to give her a kiss on the cheek. I catch Kiersten enjoying her view of Dax’s ass as he bends over. She catches my eye and winks, and I feel my own cheeks heating.
“You woke up just in time, Aunt Livi,” Kiersten says. “We were just about to start the part of the night where we roast Stuart mercilessly.”
My aunt looks over at me as if asking if I’ve signed on to this activity. I shrug, figuring it’s cheaper than therapy.
“Do you want to start us off?” Kierst asks Dax.
He shakes his head, also eyeing me. “Ladies first.”
Kiersten licks the salted rim of her glass, then sits on the lounger, flopping her head in my direction. “Before I say what I’m going to say, you’re absolutely sure you and Stu aren’t going to kiss and make up, right?”
My mind drifts back to our breakup three weeks ago. “I threw a full glass of merlot on his blue Tom Ford suit. He didn’t speak to me for three days after that time when I had a bloody nose, and some droplets splattered on his khakis. And they were only J.Crew and it was an accident.”
Kiersten snorts. Likely because she has always thought Stuartwas too precious. I purposely kept the nosebleed story from her because of it.
“I think you were more in love with the idea of Stuart than the actual person,” she says.
My urge to glare at her is stifled by the realization that her words eerily echo Stuart’s from our breakup.
“You liked Stu because he had his life together,” she continues. “And a swanky apartment.”
This time, I do glare. “You make me sound like a heartless gold digger.”
Kiersten takes a long sip of her drink. “That’s not what I meant. At least not like a money gold digger. But maybe an emotional one.”
I’m too angry to respond. Or maybe too drunk. Either way, Kiersten takes my silence as a license to continue.
“Stuart was safe. He was easy. He gave you the predictability you craved. He was the human equivalent of toast and butter, but you can only live off of toast and butter for so long.” She gets up from her spot on the lounger and moves to wedge herself between Daxon and me on the couch, taking my hand in hers.
“I get your need for toast and butter, Gems. Hell, with the winners we scored as parents, I understand it completely. But I think you’ve swung the pendulum a little too far in the opposite direction. You need a little spice in your life.”
Kiersten thinks that all her time spent in therapy qualifies her to psychoanalyze me and my life. Our parents were, to put it simply, duds. Married young, my mom was often off finding herself, leaving Kierst and me to source our own dinners. My dad flipped between being unemployed with a regular seat at the local bar to rather gainfully employed at a remote oil field camp in Northern Alberta. So maybe she’s not too far off in her theory that their emotional damage drove me to someone so predictable andconsistent. I liked how Stuart would drive in from Toronto every Friday night to take me to Fornello’s Italian Eatery. He’d have the grilled chicken and merlot and always offer to share. After dinner, we’d have mediocre missionary sex because every other position aggravated his old soccer hip injury, but he’d tell me it was because he liked looking in my eyes when I came. I always knew what to expect with Stu. A cashmere crewneck every Christmas, aYou look greatwhether I showed up in lululemon or a negligee. You could give the man thirty-one flavors of ice cream, and he’d always choose vanilla. I know it’s messed up, but I found the monotony comforting.
Kierst squeezes my hands. “Think of it this way. You and Stu were done years ago, but you were too set in your ways to admit it. This is good. For both of you. Eventually, you need to stop watering dead plants.”
Again I don’t say anything. I avoid her eyes, and Dax’s, for that matter, wondering how the fuck this turned from roasting Stuart into an intervention. Tonight was supposed to be fun.
“You’re mad at me.” She says it like a statement.
I pull my hands from hers. “I think you should stick to analyzing your own life and leaving mine alone.”
She crosses her arms over her chest. “You’re probably right. And I’m done. Said my piece. Over to you, Dax.”
She stands, picks up the empty glasses from the coffee table, and takes them to the kitchen. I’m left with the option to stare at my hands or meet Dax’s green eyes, which I do.
“Do your worst,” I say, but inside I think I’m done with this activity. It’s starting to seep in. That sinking feeling you get when you’ve made a mistake but then gained enough perspective to overanalyze every wrong turn or poor life decision. All of the wrongs that led you to invest four years in a man who irons his boxer briefs. Yes, Stuart kind of sucked. I’m starting to see thatmore and more. Still, I’m the sucker who stayed with him for so long. Doesn’t that mean, by default, that I sort of suck too?
“Well…” Dax clears his throat, looking as uncomfortable with all of this as I am. “I think Stuart’s an idiot. He never appreciated what he had, and I think you deserve someone better.” I’ve heard this statement before. From friends. From my sister. It’s a canned response for anyone who has taken a flying elbow to the heart. But the way Dax says it makes me believe that I deserve more than a man who left my twenty-seventh birthday party after an hour because it conflicted with his CrossFit.
Our conversation is interrupted by the aggressively loud buzzing of Aunt Livi’s doorbell announcing the arrival of the pizza.
“I’ll get that.” I get to my feet, grab my wallet, and move as fast as my tequila-fueled body can take me out Livi’s apartment door and down the stairs that lead to the back door to her bookshop. I return a few moments later with a steaming cardboard box that makes drool pool beneath my tongue.
The living room is empty. The sounds in the six-hundred-square-foot apartment hint that Kiersten is on the phone in the bedroom and Dax is in the bathroom. Aunt Livi is in the kitchen, pulling plates from the cupboard. I set the pizza down on the counter beside her. Before I can remove my hand, she covers it with one of hers and squeezes. “How are you holding up there, poodle?” She opens the pizza box, loads a slice onto a plate, and hands it to me.
