Page 2 of That's Not a Thing

When the waitress reappears a few minutes later, she drops a slender hand on Aaron’s shoulder and turns her back to me as she stands between our chairs. Is she kidding? We told her not two minutes ago that the apparent object of her affection is engaged.

“Hi,” she says again, all throaty-like. “I asked him, but he said he’ll come talk to you guys himself. He’ll be out in a minute.” She looks down at Aaron’s plate. “How’s the chicken? Everything good?”

Aaron glances at his plate, the roasted chicken thigh that he’s been working on mostly finished, and then looks back up at her. “It’s thunder-ful.”

The blank expression on the waitress’s face makes clear that she has failed to comprehend his statement as a joke about the name of the restaurant.

“Okay, good,” she finally answers before swaggering away.

The rest of us last only a few seconds before we burst out laughing.

“Oh, man,” Reese snorts, “you did not just say that. You’ve only been engaged a month, and your game is already slipping big-time.”

“I don’t need game.” Aaron laughs. “I’ve got what I want.” He puts his thick arm around me and pulls me closer to his side. “WhoI want,” he corrects himself, kissing me quickly on the side of my head. “Thunder Chicken,” he says again, smiling and shaking his head at the name.

As I wiggle back into the center of my chair, I see a man in chef’s garb making his way through the restaurant. One customer after another stops him, most likely to compliment the food—which is, admittedly, outrageously tasty. Truly thunder-ful. I wonder if the chef and the owner are one and the same.

The man in white turns toward our table, and I freeze. One glimpse of his face, and it’s as though I have suddenly been thrown to the ground, pummeled. Memories reach out to squeeze my heart, crushing me all over again.

He doesn’t notice me, doesn’t see me, as he glances toward our table but gets distracted by someone else nearby. I know him. Knew him. At one point in my life, I knew him better than anyone. This is his restaurant. Of course it is, I realize now; everything about this sleek room—the offbeat food pairings, the nonsensical humor of the menu—starts to fit into a certain picture, falling into place as Wesley’s vision. It’s the restaurant I didn’t know he had, hadn’t known if he would ever manage to create. But here I am, sitting in a chair in what is obviously his establishment, and I can’t be here, cannot. My eyes shoot to Aaron for help, but he is focused on his food, still laughing about the absurdity of his own behavior a moment ago. And anyway, I can’t tell him, can’t talk about Wesley to him. That’s the deal we have, what we settled on when we first started dating and I was still so raw from the blame Wesley had placed on me. But as I see him again now, all the air is knocked out of me.

My eyes shoot back to the bowl of pasta in front of me and I duck my head, hoping irrationally that there’s some way I can hide. I think about running to the bathroom, remaining unseen, and then smuggling myself out from the restaurant after Aaron finishes talking with him. But Wesley might recognize Reese, I remind myself, and he will definitely know Lana. He’ll remember her from all the times he gave her dating advice and helped with her math homework when she was a teenager.

I wonder if I can grab Lana and get both of us into the restroom without him seeing, but he’s too close to the table now. I dig my fork into my pasta and twirl noodles, trying to appear nonchalant while I struggle to think what I should say when he reaches us. I will have to admit I know him. But will I have to tell Wesley I’m engaged again?

And now he’s standing at our table.

“Hi,” he addresses us collectively. “I heard you folks had a question.”

The sound of his voice sends shock waves through my veins, as it always has. I look up, reluctantly dragging my eyes out of my pasta. As our gazes collide, his green eyes sharp as ever, I see him swallow in surprise.

His features are more chiseled now; his bones seem to have matured and refined themselves in the years since we last saw each other. If anything, he’s grown even more handsome, weathered and masculine. I can’t tear my gaze away as I drink him in, not realizing until this moment how desperately I have missed him.

He and I stare at each other for too long. Lana and Reese are shocked into silence. The only one oblivious is Aaron, my sweet Aaron. I can’t fathom what I am supposed to do at this moment, how I am supposed to handle the fact that standing before me is the man who still haunts my dreams after all these years. He is the first man I ever loved, the first one I agreed to marry. He is also someone I can never be with again, no matter how often I think about him, no matter how much I still miss him.

Not when he will always blame me for killing his parents.

Chapter Two

January 2008

Don’t be a cockblocker.

Those were the words I was reading when I met Wesley for the first time. Scribbled in bright yellow marker on the dry-erase board outside my dorm room, Daphne’s message had effectively made me homeless for the night, yet again. It was only the fifth night of second semester, and it seemed like my roommate was aiming to screw her way through all of Carman Hall before spring break. I’d spotted the guy from the previous evening a few minutes earlier, clowning around on the library steps with his hockey buddies, so I tried to guess which member of Columbia University’s student body had drawn today’s golden ticket.

Our friend Bina was definitely going to launch into another tirade when I showed up at her suite, asking to use the ratty sofa in her common area one more time. Recently, Bina had declared that accepting physical attention from the opposite sex without first establishing an intimate emotional connection was one more way in which women on campus were demeaning themselves. Put more simply, she was convinced that hooking up with random guys was bad for female empowerment. She had begun quoting Doris Lessing and other feminists at every opportunity.

I hadn’t bothered to point out that only a couple of months earlier, Bina had used many of the same quotes to support the opposite position—that women must be permitted to pursue sexual gratification without critique from others. It seemed to me that she was just decrying Daphne’s behavior based on the teachings of the week rather than engaging in the kind of open-minded exploration she purported to espouse, but she had the couch, so I would probably just nod along with whatever doctrines she spewed tonight.

Daphne was my best friend—had been since elementary school, actually—and I was trying to be considerate of her approach to coping with her last boyfriend’s sudden defection. If rolling around in the sheets with a vast array of preppy frat boys would prevent her from succumbing to post-breakup depression, who was I to stand in her way? Still, I was craving my own space and wished Daphne had thought to venture out to her new friend’s room tonight, instead of bringing the guy to ours. I stared back at those words on the whiteboard and wondered whether it would count as cockblocking if I just snuck in for a few seconds to grab my fleece pajama pants and maybe my toothbrush. Since when had “cockblocking” even become a word, anyway?

“Second night in a row, isn’t it?”

I looked up to see a guy I didn’t recognize walking toward me from the other end of the dusky hallway. He was tall and muscular, wearing clothes that were covered in paint. As he approached me, I took in his square jaw and full lips, his short, honey-brown hair that flipped up slightly in the front, and I bristled. He was so good-looking that I guess I just expected him to be a prick. His light green eyes were nearly translucent, and somehow, I felt as though he could see right through me.

“I’m Wesley.” He stuck out his hand as he reached me.

I looked down at his large palm, splatters of green and white paint littered across fingers that were outstretched and waiting to meet mine.