Page 36 of Level With Me
At the bar, Eli had seen me coming and was already ordering another two scotches.
“Your wife doesn’t look too happy about you joining tonight’s problem child,” Eli said as I settled onto a stool.
I cringed at the word wife, but masked it with a smile. “It’s fine.” I glanced back at the table, but it wasn’t Lila I was looking at.
“Part of our job is to make sure our clients are happy.” I turned back to the bar. “And you don’t seem very happy.”
“Neither do you, buddy.”
I let out a breath. “Well. I’ll be honest. It’s been a shit few days.”
It felt good to say it. I checked my phone as our drinks came. Lila had texted a minute ago at the table.
LILA:Get your shit together!
I almost laughed. She sounded like my father.
It was going to be a shit few more days, too.
I pocketed my phone.
“So?” I asked Eli. “Want to talk?”
“Not unless you want to hear about what it was like to have the love of my life dump my ass.”
“Your ex-wife?”
“Yeah. I won’t depress you with the details.”
“Feel free,” I said. “This dinner’s gone kind of sideways, anyway.”
Half an hour later, I’d learned a lot about Eli Dunham—not Kelly. He’d married a woman he’d met in New York State. He’d devoted himself to her—even taken the generous step of changing his surname for her when she married because her name was Kelly. “She couldn’t be Kelly Kelly, but she still wanted to take my name, so I took my mom’s last name.”
“Wow,” I’d said.
By then our drinks had come, also our dinner, brought over not by Reese, but by a bubbly blonde woman who brushed against me as she handed me my beef bourguignon.
“Oh gosh, I’m sorry!” she said. She didn’t look sorry, but I was now officially inebriated. I’m pretty sure she winked at me too, which maybe should have been flattering, but only made me scowl. Why couldn’t Cassandra brush against me and wink at me instead? But Cassandra didn’t seem like the type.
The server hovered a moment longer, unabashedly drawing her eyes up and down the length of my torso. “You need anything else—anything at all—you let me know.”
I grimaced, hoping that would be enough to pass as a polite smile. Thank God I wasn’t back at the table. And thank God Eli had immediately dug into his burger, so he hadn’t noticed the exchange.
“So, what happened with you and Reese?” I asked as I poked at the dish I’d ordered. My stomach was woozy from all the booze.
“We hooked up right when I was going through my divorce,” he said, chewing. “It was messy. My divorce, I mean. Reese was… she was too sweet for my shit, you know? She wanted to be all in with me, but it just… wasn’t a good time. And, hell, I didn’t handle it well.”
“Then your sister hired her to work here.”
Eli scowled, shoving his plate aside. “I swear to God she did it on purpose.”
I wanted to ask him more—why she’d do that, for instance. But Eli took a swig of his drink. “What’s up with you and her anyway?”
“Me and—”
“Cassandra.”
My stomach jolted. I glanced back at the table, where the rest of them seemed to be having a good enough time without us. Suddenly I felt queasy.
