Page 12 of So Thirsty

She signals the waiter and orders two shots of vodka and a tonic with lime.

“I don’t do shots anymore,” I tell her.

“Good, ’cause they’re both for me. Don’t give me that look—you know I’m a lush.”

“I can ask them to change the song.”

“Fuck the song.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” she asks, looking over her shoulder for the waiter. For her shots.

“Why don’t you tell me about Europe? Let me live vicariously through you. Please.”

“You should have come with me.”

“I have a job.”

“It’s remote.”

“I have a house. I have…It’s…” It’s too difficult to explain logistics to a free spirit. “Come on. Don’t make me beg.”

“That’s what he said.” She winks at me, and I roll my eyes.

Her shots arrive, she takes them in quick succession, and then she tells me her stories, slurring through tall tales of tour adventures. Outsmarting a pickpocket in Berlin. Befriending an Italian heiress in Rome, getting invited to her villa somewhere on the Amalfi Coast. Drinking the best wine she’s ever tasted with a view of the Tyrrhenian Sea, passing around rare artifacts from the ruins of Pompeii stolen from an archaeological dig and kept in a private collection. Drinking gin and tonic out of cans in the shadow of the Tower of London, communing with the spirit of Anne Boleyn.

At some point, she goes up to the bar for another drink, leaving me alone at the table to pick at soggy calamari and the undesirable remains of charcuterie. Tiny sour pickles and colorful stinky cheese and mounds of congealed mustard. She was the one who ordered it, but she hasn’t eaten much; frankly, I don’t know how she’s still standing. Her tolerance to alcohol has always been much higher than mine; she’s a born party girl.

She’s made a friend. Some tall, strikingly handsome stranger with curly dark hair and tattoos, dressed like a hipster pirate. He appears somehow completely out of place but also like he’s part of the decor, like the bar is his home and he can never leave. There’s a weird aura about him.

Naomi’s into it.

I anticipate her returning to the table, but minutes pass. Half an hour. She hasn’t looked back once, hasn’t taken her eyes off the stranger. She’s had another shot and another drink, maybe a tonic. I’m keeping tally on a napkin. What else do I have to do?

Focusing on Naomi, I’ve lost count of my own drinks, which is unlike me. Is this my second or third? Maybe third?

It must be because I think I’m imagining things. Because I think someone’s staring at me. In the corner, a man whose face is half concealed in shadow, half washed out by a red neon sign. He leans back against the wall, but his shoulders hunch forward, his head angled down. His hair, almost as long as mine, hangs over his eyes. Something about him is familiar but I can’t place him. Maybe if he were closer…

There’s a prickly heat rising from somewhere inside me. Exhilarating. Uncomfortable. What if he comes over here?

Someone breaks a glass, the sound shattering the delusion I have about the man in the corner. He’s not looking at me. No one’s hit on me in a bar in years, and that’s not going to change tonight. I take another sip of my drink, finish it off. I pull out my phone and text Joel, wait for him to respond. Wait for Naomi to come back.

This whole thing isn’t a new experience. Naomi’s been abandoning me to flirt since we were fourteen. The night she and I solidified our relationship, went from classmates to actual friends, we were attending Meghan Fitzpatrick’s birthday party. We’d gone to the movies to see some forgettable rom-com and then migrated to the mall. Everyone split off into groups, and somehow Naomi and I ended up in the food court, just the two of us, licking cinnamon sugar from a shared Auntie Anne’s pretzel off our fingers.

“What kind of music do you listen to?” she asked me. I’m sure we’d spoken before then, at school or in dance class, or at some other mutual friend’s birthday party, but this is the first time I remember.

“Why?” I was being defensive—a strategic choice. She was the coolest girl in school; I was desperate to be her friend, but I didn’t want her to know that.

“Sorry, what?”

“Why do you want to know? So you can judge me?”

She started to laugh. She has the most delicious laugh; I had to bite my lip not to smile, to maintain my stone-cold façade. “I mean, obviously.”

“What do you think I listen to?”

“I think you listen to Fiona Apple.”