Page 51 of Unrealistic Expectations

His sense of impending doom eased when Jessica defended him to her friend, and he liked the way the word “boyfriend” sounded coming out of her mouth. He hoped that he would never take that for granted.

“I can’t even give him a little bit of shit?” Barbara asked, disappointed.

Jessica shook her head. “No. It’s weird enough that you both hooked up with him in college. I won’t have you speculating about his level of dick game while I’m trying to keep my eyes akimbo for my ex-boyfriend.”

Galvin didn’t remember hooking up with Barbie. He usually remembered his hookups. He wracked his brain trying to come up with a sliver of memory, until Barbie laughed. “Listen, I think I just kissed him that one time because he was bad at suck and blow.” When Jessica looked at her quizzically, she continued, “You know the game where you suck on a playing card and then someone sucks it off of your mouth? Of course you don’t.”

Kelly and Barbie laughed, and Jessica gave them a sharp look. “Can we go five minutes without talking about sucking or blowing?”

Her friends stopped laughing, but Kelly looked at Jessica seriously and said, “Well, you haven’t been available for brunches or lunches or yoga classes in forever because you’ve been busy actually sucking and blowing. You’re going to have to let us fit this in somewhere.”

“Can we go to brunch next weekend and try to get through this nightmare?” Jessica still sounded strained.

“We can leave,” Galvin said as Jessica’s friends opened their mouths to argue against Jessica’s characterization of the evening as a nightmare. “Seriously. I’m sorry I pushed you into coming.”

If her friends weren’t going to be nicer to her, then they weren’t going to stay. Jessica had eaten shit for too long dating Luke—at least, that was how Galvin saw it—to eat shit from her supposed friends.

“We’re sorry,” Barbie said. “We know you don’t like to talk about sex in public, and we’re just being salty because you’re getting reliably laid.”

“You were never like this when I was with Luke.”

Kelly snorted. “That’s because we never thought of him as a reliable lay—more like a reliable bore.”

“Apology accepted, as long as it comes with a glass of whatever boxed wine they are serving at the bar.”

They walked into the ballroom that they were using for the reunion proper. There was a DJ on the back wall, playing a song that would have been popular during their time at the school, and there were several middle-aged guys testing the integrity of their knee cartilage and pant seams as they tried to “get low.”

“I hope there’s some wine left here,” Jessica said with a look of disgust on her face as she surveyed the crowd. He realized then that she hadn’t wanted to come here tonight because this was very silly. The whole idea of spending several hours making small talk with people they might have known fifteen years ago was sort of wild. With social media, you could see so much about people’s lives without actually having to come into contact with them.

This kind of thing was for people who had peaked in college. Jessica certainly hadn’t—she’d only gotten better with age. He might have, but he hoped he was turning it around.

“I’m on the committee, so I made sure they ordered plenty,” Kelly said. “Plus, I think that whole morass is courtesy of Fireball.”

Galvin’s stomach turned just thinking about that beverage. He’d once ghosted a girl after she’d come to bed smelling of the stuff. He’d lost a whole night of sleep nauseous from it, and it seemed like a weird thing to tell her bothered him. She’d never contacted him again, either.

They went to the bar and got drinks. Galvin had come here for nostalgia and got a vodka soda.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Jessica thought she was fully prepared to run into Luke. She thought she was over their breakup. It made sense. They hadn’t been in love in a long time, and maybe they never had been. She knew she wasn’t going to be able to sidestep the pain forever, but she thought she’d be able to process it on her own time, after her rebound relationship with Galvin fizzled out.

But now that she and Galvin were really trying to move forward, she thought she might be able to avoid the kind of searing pain and ruthless self-examination that she would have put herself through absent Galvin’s presence in her life completely.

She should have known better.

It wasn’t seeing Luke that she couldn’t have possibly braced herself for. It was seeing him with someone else—a very pregnant someone else.

Barbie, Galvin, and Kelly were complaining about the cheap vodka available at the open bar. Jessica murmured her agreement and sipped her wine. Cheap vodka reminded her of her mother, but the scent didn’t make the hair on the back of her neck stand up the way it did before Galvin threw Laurie out of her house. But her friends actually had something to agree with Galvin about, and they were no longer interrogating him, so she wasn’t going to interject.

She scanned the room, looking for other people who had been in her sorority or classes or study groups, when her scan stopped on Luke. He’d been so familiar to her not so long ago, but it was a bit of a shock to the system to see him now.

He looked as though he’d actually made an effort—changed out of his scrubs and actually put on a suit. It fit, and so he’d actually had something tailored for once. When they’d first met, she’d thought it was charming that he cared so little for his own appearance. He was all substance and no style. She’d always thought that meant that he was deep and only cared about what was on the inside. Maybe he just didn’t care what she’d thought of what he looked like.

It took her a beat to notice the woman on his arm, and the first thing she noticed was her broad smile. It was almost too wide—like a cartoon—and it didn’t feel like a genuine smile. It reminded Jessica of her third grade teacher. Mrs. Heffenslag had always had a smile on her face, but it would get even wider when she was meting out punishments for behavioral infractions. She’d had a smile on her face as she’d smashed Jessica’s hands in her desk for reaching in for her favorite pink pen.

Jessica didn’t know why she remembered that moment right now, when she was looking at the woman who was clearly her replacement. But maybe she felt like she was being punished for reaching for something for herself. And, of course, she’d wondered if Luke had met someone else before leaving her, but he’d denied it. She’d believed him, and she’d put it out of her mind and then distracted herself with Galvin.

She felt stupid for believing him now, especially when she noticed that the woman had a very prominent baby bump. Her hand rested there protectively, and that was what made the ache in Jessica’s chest start up. She didn’t do anything—she just stared at the two of them, reading their body language as though it would give her any explanation for how this had happened.

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