TWO HOURS AGO, I never would’ve guessed I’d end the night at a neighborhood bar called MEATLOCKER, but here I am, taking shots with my roommate and an old biker named Gill.
Gill had thoroughly approved when Miles started up “Witchy Woman” on the jukebox in the corner, and after drunkenly sidling up to us and making conversation, he’d wanted to know how we’d met, likely assuming we were a couple. Without any hesitation, Miles told him, “The love of my life ran off with her fiancé,” and this had inspired much alcohol-based charity on Gill’s part.
As we’d played a round of darts, two rounds of pool, and a drinking game whose rules were completely incomprehensible to me, I watched in awe as Miles expertly extracted Gill’s life story from him.
Born in Detroit to a nurse and a maintenance tech injured on the job at an automobile manufacturer, Gill had fled the Midwest at sixteen via motorcycle. He’d followed a band on the road for a decade, then briefly joined a cult in California, done security for the stars, and wound up back here after some mysterious trouble, either with the law or possibly the mob—the only thing Miles couldn’t get out of him.
For someone with the innate social charm of a mounted fish (me), watching Miles befriend this stranger felt like seeing Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel: impressive, but also dizzying. Like any second, he might fall off his ladder and splatter on the marble below.
Gill kept buying us drinks, except for when the bartender, a cute redhead with a nose ring and a literal MOM tattoo, bought all three of us drinks.
Now, when last call rolls around, Gill shoves a twenty-dollar bill at us. “For the cab ride home.”
“No, no, no,” Miles says, pushing the bill back toward him. “Keep your money, Gill. How else are you getting to Vegas?”
Vegas, we’d learned, was his next destination.
But Gill tucks the bill in the pocket on Miles’s shirt, then claps one leathery hand on each of our cheeks. “Stay strong, kids,” he says sagely, then turns, tosses his beat-up leather jacket over one shoulder, and literally whistles a goodbye to the bartender.
By the time we’ve finished our last round, the rain has stopped, and the night is pleasantly cool, so we decide to walk home in a drunken zigzag, Miles’s arm slung over my shoulder and mine around his waist like we’re two old friends rather than very drunk, newly minted allies. “Does that kind of thing happen to you often?” I ask.
“What kind of thing?” Miles says.
“Gill,” I say.
“There aren’t many Gills in the world,” Miles replies.
“The free drinks,” I clarify. “The hours of stimulating conversation about crimes he may or may not have witnessed.”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Sometimes.”
“How often do you get free drinks, Miles?”
He casts a bemused look over at me. “It’s a friendly place.”
“MEATLOCKER?” I ask.
“Butcher Town,” he says.
I smack my forehead and he stops short in surprise. “That’s why it’s called MEATLOCKER,” I say. “I spent the whole night trying to figure out if it was a fetish bar or something.”
Miles tips his head back, laughing. “You thought I took you to a fetish bar?” He looks delighted. “Did Peter tell you I was into BDSM?”
“Wait, are you?” I ask.
“Not that I know of,” he says. “Why? Are you?”
“Probably not,” I say. “I think I’m pretty boring. In that realm.”
“What realm?”
“Sex Realm,” I say.
“Do you lie there and stare at the ceiling in silence?” he asks.
“Excuse you,” I say. “This is none of your business.”
“You brought it up, Daphne,” he reminds me.
“I don’t stare at the ceiling,” I say. We’ve reached our building. He opens the door for me, and we start up the stairs. “I just make utterly unblinking eye contact like any respectable woman.”
“See?” he says, gesturing for me to take the stairs ahead of him. “Not boring. Haunting, maybe. But not boring.”
“But how does that happen?” I ask, and Miles’s eyes widen, his mouth screwing up into something between a smile and a grimace.
“Well, when two people find each other attractive—”
“The free drinks,” I interrupt.
He shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s not like I set out for it.”
I must be making a disbelieving face, because he frowns. “You think I’m some kind of con artist?”
“I think you’re a very charming guy,” I say.
“As far as insults go,” he says, pausing halfway up the stairs, “that’s a new one for me.”
“I’m not insulting you,” I say, though truthfully, I’ve never trusted people who are too charming. My dad’s a charming guy. Doesn’t mean he actually means anything he says. “It’s just—look, I’m terrible with new people.”
“Gill loved you,” he argues.
“Because of osmosis,” I say. “Because you were there. I love talking to people I already know, but when I meet someone new, half the time my mind goes blank, and the other half of the time, I make a joke that absolutely no one realizes is a joke, or I ask something way too personal.”
He glances sidelong at me as we start climbing again. “You didn’t do that with me.”
“You may have noticed,” I say, “I’ve barely spoken to you before tonight.”
“That’s why?” he says, another quick flick of his eyes over to me. “And here I thought you just hated me.”
Heat flares through me, head to toe. “Of course I don’t hate you. You’re unhateable.” And then, because I’m wasted, I admit: “Maybe that makes me mistrust you a little bit.”
He looks aghast at this.
“I just mean,” I hurry on, my words slurring together, “I’ve always been more of a few close friends person. And when I meet people who like everyone, are liked by everyone, this alarm goes off in my brain. Like, Okay, this person isn’t going to stick around, so don’t get attached.”
Now he looks mortified. “That is,” he says, “so depressingly cynical.”
“No, no, no,” I say, searching for a better way to explain. “It’s fine! Unless your fiancé dumps you, and you spent the last year working to befriend his friends, and now you’re thirty-three and trying to remember how to even make friends. But who would ever find herself in that situation?”
“Making friends isn’t that complicated,” Miles says, which makes me scoff, which in turn makes him smirk. “I’m serious, Daphne. I just like talking to people. And as far as the free drinks, I’m a good tipper. So if I go to a place more than a couple of times, I tend to get discounts, because the staff knows I’ll make it up to them in tips. Plus I’m in the service industry, and I think bartenders can smell it on me. That I’m one of them.”
“Does it smell like gingersnaps?” The slur in my voice has worsened as we climbed the stairs.
Miles stops outside our front door, laughter gurgling out of him. “Gingersnaps?”
That’s what he smells like. Sweet and a little spicy. A natural earthy smell folded into a sugary baked good. I wave him off rather than answer, and try to get my key into our door’s lock. Unfortunately, it seems the door has grown three extra locks and I can’t seem to line the key up to the right one.
Through laughter, he bumps me aside, clumsily swiping the key from my hand to make his own attempt. “Shit!” he says as it glances off the lock.
We keep fighting for control of the doorknob, knocking each other out of the way in increasingly dramatic fashion, until he almost knocks me over and just barely manages to catch me by pinning me to the wall with his hips.
We’re both laughing so hard we’re crying when our elderly neighbor pops his head into the hallway to hiss, “Some of us are trying to sleep around here!”
“Sorry, Mr. Dorner,” Miles says like a chastened schoolboy.
Mr. Dorner retreats.
I squint after him, confused. “Doesn’t he usually have hair?”
Miles bursts into not-at-all-quiet laughter. I smush my hands over his mouth to shut him up. “You thought that hair was real?” he asks. “You have to be the most gullible person on the planet.”
“I mean,” I say, “despite my innate cynicism, I think the last six weeks have already proven that both of us are way, way too trusting.”
A couple of hours ago, this might’ve tripped the start crying ASAP wire in my brain. Instead we’re just back to cackling.
Mr. Dorner’s lock rattles again. Miles spins away to get our door unlocked, yanking me inside before we have to face another scolding.
We slam ourselves against the door to shut it, catching our breath. “I feel like we’re in Jurassic Park,” he says, which makes me laugh harder.
“What,” I gasp.
“Like we just slammed the door against a bunch of raptors,” he explains.
“I don’t think Dorner’s teeth pose that kind of threat, Miles,” I say. “I’m fairly sure he wasn’t even wearing them.”
“You know what I think?” he says.
“What?” I ask.
“I think we should just fucking do it,” he says.
My heart spikes upward. My skin goes very hot, then very cold. “What?”
“Let’s RSVP,” he says. “Let’s go to their wedding. And get wasted. Eat the cake before they’ve even cut it, and puke on the dance floor.”
I laugh. “Okay.”
“I’m serious,” he says. “Let’s go.”
“No way,” I say.
“Okay, fine,” he replies. “Then let’s just say we’re going.”
“Miles,” I reply, “why?”
“To make them sweat,” he says. “And pay ninety dollars a plate for dried-out chicken that no one’s going to eat.”
“Their parents will pay for that chicken,” I say. “And I don’t know about the Comers, but the Collinses are lovely people.”
He flinches. I’m not sure at which part, but something I said definitely shifted his mood a bit. “They’re also rich,” he says. “Ninety dollars is nothing to them, and at least this way, they have to spend the next few months worrying that we’ll show up and ruin their big day.”
“Maybe they don’t care,” I say.
The smirk seeps from his face. “Shit,” he says. “You’re right. I guess that’s why they invited us.”
I snort. “You know why they invited us, Miles. Because they’re both addicted to being universally loved. And they’re good at it. Good enough that they don’t realize you don’t get to be loved by people whose hearts you completely fucking destroy. They think they’re being the bigger people right now. But they don’t get to be the bigger people. For the next few years, they have to live with being the assholes.”
He seems unconvinced, but now I’m sure.
“We should RSVP,” I say. “They’re not the bigger people. Fuck that!”
“Fuck that!” he agrees.
“Fuck that!” I half shout.
Mr. Dorner pounds on the wall. Miles presses a pointer finger to my lips. “Fuck that,” he whispers.
“Fuck that,” I whisper back.
He watches my lips move against his finger. I feel another pleasant zing. “We should go to bed,” I say.
And then, because it came out a little too low, I say, “I mean, I should get to bed.”
He lets his hand fall away. “After we RSVP.”
I AWAKE TO bright midday light and a walloping headache. Last night returns to me in bits and pieces, in no particular order.
A drunken walk home.
The tattered felt of a pool table.
A rough finger against my lips.
Laughing in the hallway.
And then Mr. Dorner? Was? There? For some reason? At some point?
Before that, or maybe after, Miles and I drank red wine straight from the bottle.
At some point, we were out on the street, walking with our arms around each other, his hand curled against my waist where my shirt had ridden up. My neck and face go hot.
I’m trying to fast-forward through the memories, to be sure I only did anything mildly embarrassing and nothing irrevocably humiliating.
The fast-forward doesn’t help. I remember falling into bed, exhausted, only to realize I couldn’t sleep, because I was also a little bit turned on.
Oh my god, did I cry at some point?
Wait. Did Miles cry? Surely not.
I feel around for my phone and find it tangled in my sheets. I guess I at least had the wherewithal to turn off my alarm. It’s almost noon.
I never sleep this late.
I scroll through my texts, searching for incriminating evidence of my drunkenness. But I didn’t send a single message after work.
There is, however, something else worrying on my home screen.
A new icon.
A dating app.
I have no recollection of downloading it. I don’t really remember anything after the bar.
I clamber out of bed and wait for the pounding in my skull to subside before staggering out into the living room. I feel like I’m made of nuclear waste.
The apartment is quiet, but not clean. A half dozen half-drunk water glasses litter the coffee table, the counter, and the two-person breakfast table. The bottle of coconut rum is empty, and both wine bottles are down to dregs.
I feel like Hercule Poirot, stumbling on a murder mystery without any body or even blood, just the bothersome suspicion that something happened here. Something important.
And then my phone starts ringing in my hand.
I see his name onscreen.
All at once, I remember.
And I really, really wish I didn’t.
