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Alex’s eyes snap to mine, and I shoot Carla a glare.
“No wonder you needed a meeting,” Alex mutters, taking a sip of her drink. “I thought you were just nervous about going in general.”
“I’m fine,” I say, and Carla gives my shin a kick under the table. “Fuck!Ow.” I know what it’s in response to - fine is sort of a curse word in A.A. It’s the dismissal of emotions, which can and often will lead to resentments and development of further character defects, the foundation of the program. “I’m…I don’t know.” I take a deep breath.
“I mean, the man is still hot as fuck,” Carla says nonchalantly, and I see Penny and Alex give her looks. Penny downs the rest of her drink, and motions to the waitress for another. “But he’s a dick. A total dick.”
“I don’t think he’s a dick,” I argue, and all three of them look at me. “I mean, fuck.” I stumble on my words.
Why was this so difficult to articulate? Arguably, Fitz is a dick. Or at least, he was a decade ago. He had stood by while his best friend made it his personal mission to tear me down, and it had left me…hollow. Small. In a time where I had every opportunity to thrive, I let Andy make me small. A phenomenon that happened again and again, especially with Mickey, until I stumbled, hungover, into a meeting three years ago, reconnecting with Carla and finding my sobriety.
Fitz wasn’t to blame for my trauma, but he certainly didn’t help when he’d had the opportunity. And the small sliver of the man I saw today wasn’t enough to tell me one way or the other whether he was still the guy that stood by the sidelines while bad things happened in front of him. I could barely read his face, much less tell if the emotions behind it were any different.
On the stage in front of us, the lights start to brighten, and the band steps in from one side, taking their places behind their instruments. Forgotten is my struggle of explaining my current headspace. The waitress is just in time with Penny’s drink - she takes it, holding it in one hand over her head while she wolf-whistles loudly. From the stage, Brett, her husband, looks up from his bass, squinting through the spotlight on him under the brim of his fedora. He grins when he spots her, and signs “I love you” enthusiastically before going back to what he was doing.
“Bleh,” Carla wretches, squeezing her lime in her club soda. “You two are disgusting.”
“You’re just jealous.” Alex gives Carla a sideways grin over her shoulder, adjusting in her seat, and then turning to Penny. “I think it’s adorable that the two of you are still like this after ten years.”
“Like you two aren’t adorable too,” Penny says, taking a smaller sip of her drink this time and clapping as the mics screech on. Alex gives a hazy smile and holds her belly tighter.
The two of them have grown close, something I never could have seen coming growing up. Penny and I fought like lions as kids, and Alex not-so-secretly loved helping me torment her and her friends whenever possible. But when you’re married to best friends, like they were to Nolan and Brett, it changes your relationship. I should know. I was married to the other piece of that trio, even for the shortest of time.
When Brett’s band starts playing, I let my mind tune out a little bit. Meeting up to support Brett and his music has been something we’ve tried to do regularly - to stay together and close after experiencing so much together. Carla was an added bonus, as the other single woman and my friend in sobriety. She hadn’t been there with us as the shitshow that was the final months of Mickey’s life unfolded, but she went through her own trauma that put her in my path, and we had all bonded over that.
In the years since becoming a widow, I had experienced my fair share of ups and downs, but the one thing that always pulled me through was the friends and family who stood by Mickey and me when his own family couldn’t. Wouldn’t, really.
That ease, that healthy understanding provided by my support system is what got me through - and continues to get me through - the best and the worst days, is why today was triggering, but not in the way I’d thought.
It was almost…positive? Like I was buzzing all over still, remembering the gushing words Jackie and Fallon had said about my career. I’d put a lot of work into getting where I was, especially after years of setbacks while taking care of Mickey. And the reaction on the faces of the people I didn’t talk to - of Fitz, especially - made me feel powerful. I knew it wasn’t what they had expected, which made it all the better. They probably thought I’d go into kid’s clothing or something, with the way sunshine and rainbows practically shot out of my ass for years.
Fitz, though. Man, I hadn’t thought about him in a long time. Is he still with Olivia? I hadn’t noticed a wedding ring on his finger, but I also wasn’t paying particular attention. I’m not about to ask Carla if she noticed, she’d never let me hear the end of it.
But there’s a small part of me, I think, that has always wondered - what if? What if, instead of Andy having overheard my conversations with my friends about my escapades, if it had been Fitz? What if he had been the one I had found myself entangled with? Not that I would ever have been involved with someone knowing they had a significant other. History has shown that.
I shake my head, trying to refocus back on the room around me. Who was I kidding? Stoic, quiet Fitz? Our personalities would have clashed, even back then. With time and recovery, I’d become less restrained in my passion and excitement for life, even compared to the years before I started whittling myself away for men. That isn’t something I’m willing to do again.
WhenIslideintomy desk chair on a Monday morning a few weeks and several attempts to get out of reunion planning later, Vic pops his head over the cubicle wall and gives me a sly smile, his pristine eyebrows raised.
“So, how did it go?”
“Dismal,” I say, kicking my heels off and throwing my purse on the hook on the cubicle wall. In the nearly four years I’ve been at AllHearts, my space has truly become just that - a reflection of my time at the company and the work I’ve done. The walls of the cubicle are plastered with some of my favorite designs, along with photos of myself with models, other designers, at events and conferences. Vic’s, in comparison, looks like it’s been sterilized for anything seemingly personal, with the exception of the small cactus I gave him for his birthday last year.
As design team leads, our heads were constantly in the sand together, so why they put a wall between us…well, it was probably because we talk too much, and often forget our volume.
Truthfully, I never thought I would work for a company like AllHearts. I was in marketing when Mickey got sick, and the flexibility that world offered me became all too important as his disease progressed. But my mind always came back to designing. Even before becoming sober, I was sick of promoting other people’s designs instead of making my own. So when Vic told me about this work from home job on his team, I jumped at the chance. It wasn’t until I was in office, actively seeking sobriety, that I flourished. I needed to be around people, to suck in their creative energy and use it to fuel my fire.
“That bad?” Vic asks, sitting back down and rolling his chair around the wall to face me.
“It just went like it always does,” I respond heavily, fishing in my bag and pulling out a can of Dr. Pepper, popping it open and taking a long sip before continuing. “Things were going great, and then he wanted to know where I worked. He knew I was a designer.” I sigh, shaking my head, spinning one of my rings around on my finger. “It’s not like I could lie, so I just ripped the bandaid off, and it was like I’d flipped a switch. He couldn’t focus on anything I said, literally just stared at my boobs like he had x-ray vision.”
“Gross.” He makes a face, drinking his coffee, his big brown eyes surveying me over the cup. “So I take it there was no sexy time?” I grimace, shaking my head in disgust.
“Absolutely not.” It’s not like the man wasn’t hot. He was a firefighter, for fuck’s sake. I was with a firefighter - or two - during the craziest time of my life, and, oh, the stamina. But I’d worn out my widow-ho phase a long time ago, and the way his eyes stayed steady on my chest while I spoke made me want to puke. Then when he’d tried to kiss me goodnight, I could practically feel the hard-on through his jeans.
“Have you put any more thought into the designs for the reunion?” Half-ignoring Vic, I turn back to my desk and sign into my computer.
“Not really.” I look back at him over my shoulder. “Kyle and I are trying to find time in the next couple of weeks to get a plan together, but really, I need to go see the space, take some measurements. You know me. I’m visual.” He nods.
