I don’t want to admit this, but after everything else I’ve told them tonight, I figure I might as well come clean. “After pretty much every evening work event we attended together, we’d …”
“Go out for drinks?” Beckett guesses.
“Make out?” Leslie suggests.
“Head home together.” Aunt Star doesn’t make it a question. She knows.
I clear my throat and avoid looking any of them in the eye. “All of the above.”
They’re all silent for a moment.
“Is he one of the guys you were talking about earlier who wanted to sleep with you but wouldn’t commit?” Beckett asks gently.
I nod. “He never wanted anything more than a physical relationship, yet for some reason I could never tell him no. I kept thinking at some point he’d want more than that, but he never did.”
“How did it feel to see him again?” Leslie asks.
“I felt …,” I search for the right words, “… embarrassed and … confused.”
“Why confused?” Aunt Star asks.
I look at Leslie. “You can’t tell Ash what I’m about to say.”
“I won’t. I promise. If this is something you need to talk to Randall about, he needs to hear it from you, not his brother.”
I take a deep breath. “Confused because when I first heard his voice, before I was embarrassed, I was excited. And then when he put his hand on my shoulder, I couldn’t make myself move away.” I twirl my empty shot glass and focus on it instead of the other women. “I don’t want to be with him anymore. I really don’t. I only want to be with Randall. But if that’s the case, why didn’t Joel repulse me? Why did I let him carry our drinks and put his hand on me?”
“He caught you off guard,” Leslie says. “Don’t read anything into that. The important things are you don’t want to be with him, and you didn’t do anything inappropriate. If you tell Randall any of what just happened, he’s not going to be mad. He may well be pissed off at the way the guy treated you in the past, but he won’t be angry with you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Up next,” a voice announces over the speakers, “Wendy and friends with ‘You Give Love a Bad Name.’ Come on up, ladies!”
The other women burst into laughter as we stand.
“You couldn’t have picked a more appropriate song,” Beckett says.
fifteen
“We told you to stop flirting with Tammy,” my brother says, “multiple times.”
Bobby helped Ash get me home, and then he headed back to his hotel. I don’t blame him. I don’t want to be around for this conversation, either.
“I don’t need an ‘I told you so,’ jerkface.”
“Jerkface?”
“I’m trying to clean up my language.”
“Let’s hope you’re more successful with that than you are with relationships.”
“Stop. If you’re trying to make me feel worse, it’s not going to work, because there’s no possible way I could feel worse than I do right now.” I put my hand over my mouth. “I think I’m going to be sick again.”
Ash sighs, disappears into the kitchen, brings me a Tupperware bowl in case I need to hurl, and plops down beside me on the couch. “I’m not asking this to be a jerk. I only want to try to understand. What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t thinking. I shouldn’t have drunk that much, but I was trying to forget what Dad said to me.”
Then I tell him what happened with Tammy.
“So you didn’t initiate the kiss?” he asks.
