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“Nope. I’m going with something different for a change.”
Gwen grins at me while Allie walks away. “I bet it’s for you!”
That’s what I’m afraid of.
Allie takes the mic and says, “This one’s an oldie but feels particularly relevant today.”
It takes me a few seconds to recognize the tune, but when I do, my heart sinks. She’s singing Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots are Made for Walkin’.’ I sit, watching her, embarrassed at the thought that her coworkers might pick up on the fact that this is for me.
“Huh, this seems like a weird choice,” Gwen says, having a sip of some sort of fruity-looking cocktail. “I didn’t even think she likes this song.”
Trying to look nonchalant, I say, “Oh really? That is odd, then.”
I stare at Allie as she dances a little to the beat while she keeps on singing, her glare growing stronger by the second. She’s really selling it as a woman who’s about to leave a bad man in her dust, and the crowd is loving it. They’re all cheering while I sit here, knowing I’m the bad man who deserves to be left behind.
Gwen leans over to me. “Hey, is she pissed at you about something? She looks pissed.”
Rather than give a direct answer, I say, “You know her better than me. Do you think she’s pissed?”
She squints, then nods. “Yeah. She’s pissed.”
As the song starts to wind down, Allie puts the mic back in the stand, then makes her way over to the table, keeping her steps in tune with the beat. She grabs her handbag and her coat, then struts her way through the tables and right out the door.
Ty narrows his eyes. “Huh. She’s really committing to this.”
Tina, who’s sitting on the other side of the table, says, “Is she … actually leaving?”
Yes, yes, she is.
I grab my jacket off the back of my chair and follow her out.
Chad shouts, “Hey, Hudson, we haven’t done our song for you yet!”
“I’ll be back.”
I hurry out into the dark parking lot, jogging over to her car just as Allie’s hunting around in her bag for her keys. She glances up at me, then shakes her head. “Dammit, why can’t I ever find my keys in this thing?”
“It’s because of all the partially-finished packs of TicTacs,” I tell her, hoping a private joke will help soften her up.
It totally backfires of course. She stops digging through her purse long enough to glare at me. “Nope. No callbacks. You do not get to make me laugh. Or smile, or do anything else fun or otherwise pleasant ever again.”
I rub the back of my neck. “Ever again?”
She stares at me, the pain in her eyes nearly killing me, then turns her attention back to her bag. “You heard me.”
“I know I screwed up. I promise, I get it, and I would never, ever think about doing anything remotely that dishonest again.”
“When we first met, I made it one-hundred-percent clear to you how I feel about liars,” she says, starting to pull things out of her bag and place them on top of her car. “And you told me you would never lie to me again. I shut off all the alarm bells going off in my head—the ones telling me you were just too smooth and too perfect to be real, the ones telling me a guy like you was never going to fall for a girl like me, the one telling me I had already seen how easily lying comes to you.” She tosses a couple of lipstick tubes and some balled up napkins on the roof so hard they bounce. “But did I listen? No! I ignored all my instincts because I wanted to believe for once in my stupid life that I was worth something. That maybe I could be the girl who gets the guy for once. That maybe fairy tales do come true. I mean, Gwen got her fairy tale ending, so it didn’t seem so far-fetched somehow, but it was all bullshit.”
“It was all real. It still is.”
“It was all bullshit.” She digs around some more, and I pull my phone out of my pocket and turn the flashlight on, then hold it so she can look inside her purse. She tsks loudly, then says, “Oh my God, can you stop please?”
“Stop what?”
“Being so fucking helpful?” she asks, lifting her keys out of her purse and giving me a hard look. “It’s impossible to hate you when you do shit like that.”
“I don’t want you to hate me. That’s the last thing I’d ever want.”
