Page 3 of The Boyfriend Swap

“Isn’t she a pip?” Anne Marie asked.

I watched as Sidney instantly drew the attention of the expert away from the crowd and toward herself. “She sure is,” I said with a chuckle. Anne Marie had mentioned Sidney was a driven and focused attorney, and I was surprised she’d accepted our invitation. Fortunately, it appeared she knew how to play hard too. Assuming she didn’t ask Anne Marie to send an email or make copies, I was confident my roommate would enjoy her own party even with her boss in attendance. As Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” played on my “Best of 2011” playlist—I was in the mood for “classic” tunes that night—I bumped my hip against Anne Marie’s. “I love this song. Let’s boogey.”

Sidney

I read the text from my boyfriend, Will, and frowned. He was having drinks with a friend from work. The wine expert and all the other guests had left, but I didn’t feel like going home yet if it meant being alone in my apartment. Maybe Anne Marie and her roommate would want to go out for another drink. After scanning the living room area with no luck, I spotted them in the small eat-in kitchen. As Anne Marie bent down to put leftover food in the refrigerator, her sturdy freckled legs stuck out from the red athletic shorts she’d already changed into. And slim Robyn, in striking hot pink pants and a black and white polka dot top, was simultaneously rinsing dishes and dancing in front of the sink. She had moves.

I walked over to them. “Can I help you guys?”

Robyn turned around and smiled. Still bopping to the music, she removed the rubber yellow gloves from her hands and placed them on the dish rack before sitting down at the round hardwood table. Waving me away, she said, “I’m finished and, besides, you’re our guest.”

Joining Robyn at the table, Anne Marie said, “Want to help us empty another bottle of wine?”

“It would be my pleasure,” I said before plopping myself on one of the high-backed kitchen chairs and accepting a generously poured glass of Malbec.

During the next couple of hours, the three of us went through almost two bottles of wine and laughed like sorority girls, making me homesick for Lisa, my best friend since childhood. We were inseparable until her family moved to the suburbs of Chicago in middle school, but we remained as close as sisters. I didn’t have the best track record with other female friends and hoped tonight would go a long way toward developing a friendship with Anne Marie outside of work. I delighted in witnessing her relaxed and in her comfort zone. And her roommate was like an encyclopedia for all things music. Since sitting down, I’d already downloaded three new songs to my iPod.

We’d reached the boy-talk phase of the evening, and Robyn had just told me about her boyfriend, Perry.

“I can truthfully say you’re the only person I know who met her boyfriend when he pulled her onto the stage in the middle of a live performance.” I doubted a tactic of that nature would have worked on me. I didn’t take kindly to being put on the spot.

“I think you misunderstood,” Robyn said with a giggle. “Perry was fronting a cover band at a bar where I was celebrating a fellow teacher’s birthday. When he learned I taught music, he pulled me on stage for a duet of Pink’s ‘Just Give Me a Reason.’”

“Your version makes much more sense,” I said with a nod. “I think I’ve had too much of this.” I lifted my glass before topping it off. “And what about you?” I jutted my chin toward Anne Marie. “Any cute boys in your life?”

Anne Marie confided about the crush she had on the bartender at a neighborhood dive bar. “I have no game, but my drinking tolerance is growing from all the time I spend in his pub.” She hiccupped, immediately belying her earlier comment.

I considered myself somewhat of a connoisseur in the art of seduction. “Let me be your wingman sometime. He’ll be in your bed before you can say ‘tequila.’”

“Word,” Anne Marie said before giving me a high-five.

“What about you, Sidney?” Robyn said. “Are you dating someone?”

I opened my mouth to tell them about Will as my phone pinged a text message. “Yes, and this must be him now.” I hoped he’d be game to meet up later. Drinking with the girls was a good time, but sleeping with my boy was agreatone. My lips curled into a grin as I reached for the device on the kitchen table. Only it wasn’t Will. It was my mom. She wrote: “Your father said you were on a date tonight. Good luck! Any chance we’ll meet him at Christmas?”

A surge of annoyance at my parental figures coursed through my veins, but it was nothing more alcohol couldn’t fix. I placed the phone back on the table without responding and took a swig of wine. “Sorry for the delay. My boyfriend’s name is Will and he’s a tall glass of water.”

“Bring him to the office one day. I work hard for you—the least you can do is provide me some candy to eye up,” Anne Marie said. She glanced out the window and beamed. “It’s snowing.”

I followed her gaze to the light dusting of snow outside.

“It’s almost Christmas,” she yelped while waving her hands in glee.

Robyn and I let out a groan at the same time, and I shot her a curious glance. Between chair-dancing to every song that played on the iPod and her generally giddy demeanor since we’d met, I pegged her as someone who lived for the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, kept her holiday playlist on constant rotation, and didn’t even mind the crowds at Macy’s.

“Personally, I wish we could skip straight to New Year’s Eve,” I said. Will’s parents were going to be in London for the holidays. In a moment of particular fondness—after he’d given me a mind-blowing orgasm—I’d asked him to come to my family home in Scarsdale for Christmas. Once the feeling returned to my legs, I regretted my spontaneity. The four months we’d been together had been filled with lots of laughs, great sex, and zero pressure. There was no doubt my parents would love Will—he was handsome, polite, intelligent, and funny. And he was a lawyer, which would automatically gain him points with my dad and assure my mom he had the requisite social graces to work a room. But I feared their fondness for my boyfriend would have an adverse effect on my own attraction to him. I was enjoying myself too much to risk it. But the invitation was out there, and I couldn’t bring myself to renege on it now.

“I love Christmas. McAdvenille is the home of the biggest holiday light display in the United States,” Anne Marie declared proudly before taking a bite from the bottom of a red velvet mini cupcake.

I snorted. “Christmas in North Carolina sounds like a dream. Quite the opposite of Yuletide in the Bellows home. All Harvey does the entire weekend is boast to anyone pretending to listen about his latest wins in court or new cases he’s taken on.” For Robyn’s benefit, I clarified. “Harvey is my dad. One of the two named partners in the firm. Anyway, we try to change the subject, to anything—the weather, the final season ofOrphan Black, politics—but he seamlessly ties everything to the successes of the firm. I’m proud of if too, but give it a rest.”

“Sounds exhausting,” Robyn agreed.

“It is. I really don’t want to subject my boyfriend to it. He’s also a lawyer, which means my father will grab his ear the entire time to talk shop and no doubt make passive-aggressive digs about Will’s firm not being as good.” I grimaced. “He might even recruit Will to work at Bellows and Burke. I like to keep my professional and personal lives decidedly separate.” My stomach clenched as I imagined Will taking a job at my firm. It was one thing for my dad to watch over my professional growth, but if my personal life was at his disposal, he and my mom might install surveillance videos around the office to keep tabs on the progress of my romantic relationship too.

“But you’re definitely taking him?” Robyn asked, leaning forward in interest.

I sighed. “Going stag would be equally as painful. Without an escort, my mom would entrust me with entertaining every unattached male at the very well-attended dinner party—mostly overgrown bachelors with egos as inflated as their stomachs or widowers over the age of sixty-five.” It was rare she thought any of them were appropriate life partners for me, but if I was unattached, she considered it my duty as their only child and junior hostess to make the single men at the Bellow shindigs feel at home.

---