Page 73 of She Used to Be Nice
She sucked in a breath. She had hoped her date with Pete tonight could be their own private send-off before they left for Colorado next week, but for the last couple of days she’d been feeling uneasy about the news that Ryan was coming to the wedding. The thought of Pete and Ryan being in the same room was almost more than she could bear. And the romantic elegance of this restaurant wasn’t helping to relieve any pressure.
Pete ordered some appetizers and a bottle of red wine for the table. A few minutes later, a waiter wearing a vest and black tie poured some of the wine Pete had selected into a glass for him to taste. He made a dramatic show of swirling the wine around, sniffing it, drinking it, and letting it sit on his tongue. His silliness helped relieve some of Avery’s anxiety.
“Perfect,” he said.
The waiter poured each of them a glass. Avery tried to relax. But she couldn’t stop envisioning the nightmare of Ryan being at the wedding—Pete’s one-way ticket to finding out what everyone thought Avery had done and disappearing from her life forever. Her past and present, colliding in a nuclear blast.
“Can you honestly tell the difference between those wines?” she asked, doing her best to stay present. “This place could serve me Franzia and tell me it’s a hundred-dollar bottle and I’d have no clue.”
“No, I can’t tell shit. But it’s fun to pretend I can. Look at this place.” Pete gestured around emphatically. “You can’t come here and not at least act like you know the difference between a cabernet sauvignon and a pinot noir.”
“A what and a what?”
Pete pointed at her. “Exactly.”
The waiter returned with a silver tray of oysters surrounded by lemons, sauces, and two tiny forks, all arranged on a bed of ice.Avery stared at the tray. She’d never eaten oysters before and had no clue what to do. She carefully picked up one of the gray and white shells.
“It looks like a booger,” she observed.
Pete laughed as he sprinkled some of the more translucent sauce onto a shell and dug into it with a tiny fork. Then he tipped his head back to slurp the fish. He put the empty shell back on his plate.
“Tastes better than one, trust me,” he said.
Avery mimicked Pete’s motions, swallowing the salty, briny shellfish just like he did. “That was good.” She smiled at herself. She felt like such a grownup, eating an oyster at a bougie restaurant with the man she was dating.
Don’t think about the wedding.
“So, how was work today?” she asked as she took another oyster.
Pete shrugged. “It was all right. I’ve been advising on a merger and it’s taking forever. One company is getting cold feet at the finish line, and my MD has to do a lot of handholding.”
“Ooof. That sounds terrible.”
“Yeah. And this meeting we were having about it today was running late, which it always does—these old guys in suits can talk your ear off. So I told them I had to go meet my girlfriend for dinner and we’d finish tomorrow.”
Avery nearly choked on her oyster as it slid down her throat. “Girlfriend,” she repeated slowly, like it was a foreign word she needed translated. He’d never called her that before. “Is that what you’ve been calling me?”
Pete looked taken aback. “I guess, yeah. For a little while.” He paused, tossed her a questioning glance. “Is that weird to you?”
Avery repeated the word inside her head to try it on.Girlfriend,she thought.Pete’s girlfriend.I’m Avery Russo, and I’m Pete’s girlfriend.It was lovely, that word. And it made sense for where they were at. But it was also a sign that Pete trusted her, was committed to her,that they’d reached the final frontier of vulnerability. All she was doing in return was lying to him.
“Well, how long have we been doing this thing?” she asked.
Pete blinked hard. “Thisthing?” He sounded irritated, rightfully. “Thing” was flippant. “I don’t know, several months? Weareexclusive, aren’t we?”
Avery nervously wrung her hands out in her lap. “I mean, we haven’t discussed it, but … yeah, I haven’t been with anyone since we reconnected.” She tried to see herself through his eyes, as someone he’d want to call his girlfriend. But the kind of girlfriend Pete deserved wouldn’t have a history of infidelity. She wouldn’t rope him into toxic situations, the way Avery would if she brought him to the wedding and Ryan were there. She would be sweet and gentle, supportive and emotionally available, not a cold-hearted bitch keeping this massive secret from him.
The waiter came by with their steaks and set them down on the table, filling the air with the scent of butter and garlic. Avery felt the urge to rip off her dress, throw on a leather mini skirt, and do something reckless, something to show Pete she wasn’t the girlfriend type, since apparently her irrational, emotional behavior the whole time they were dating hadn’t made that clear.
Pete exhaled loudly, angrily, and took a sip of his wine. “What do you want, Avery? Tell me what you want me to do here.”
Avery ripped off a piece of bread and popped it into her mouth. She couldn’t stand pretending to be someone she wasn’t and watching Pete fall for her bullshit. It wasn’t fair. He had no idea what he was getting himself into. He shouldn’t do this to himself. She needed to protect him. Put him back at a distance.
“I don’t think our relationship is what you think it is,” she said as gently as she could.
Pete watched her chew, his dinner remaining untouched in front of him. “As in, you’renotmy girlfriend?” he demanded.
Avery didn’t know how to make him understand without telling him everything. And she just couldn’t. Not now, not yet, not ever. “I’m sorry. I’m just not ready for that label.”
