Misery Loves Cabernet (17 page)

Jamie rolls his eyes. “You’re not doing anything wrong.”

I shrug as I continue to stare at my napkin, and away from the perfect guys in the bar with their perfect wedding rings and their perfect wives and their happy lives. I look over to see a beautiful blonde reporting for ESPN on the game. “Why can’t I be like her?” I say, jutting my chin in the direction of the TV.

Jamie turns to look at the reporter. “Kelly Timbers? Why would you want to be Kelly Timbers?”

“Because every guy in this place is watching her,” I say.

“That’s because she’s interviewing the Chargers coach.”

“No, it isn’t,” I insist. “It’s because she’s Cameron Diaz.”

“Huh?”

“In
Something About Mary
: Cameron Diaz is the perfect woman, she’s a beautiful blonde who loves sports. Which I always said there was no such woman, she’s a figment of men’s imaginations designed to make the rest of us feel bad about ourselves.” I point to the screen. “But there she is! That little hussy is a beautiful blonde with big breasts who can effortlessly flirt with a middle-aged guy as she asks about special teams and turnover differential. I hate her.”

Jamie glances at the screen, then back to me. “Do you really think you’re not married yet because you don’t know enough about turnover differential?”

“No, I think I’m not married because I don’t know what men want.” I take the last gulp of my beer. “Though they all seem to be in universal agreement that they don’t want me.”

As I renew my interest in my cocktail napkin, Jamie looks at me sympathetically, then rubs my arm. He tries another approach. “Look, why do you think people make such a big deal about weddings? Do you think girls would make such a big thing out of the wedding, and the dress, and the party, and all that stuff if they found ten right guys and they had to do it ten times?”

I look up at Jamie, then nod my head.

“Okay, yes,” he concedes, “you all probably would throw the party ten times. But that’s because all women are bat-shit insane. My point is, it only happens once. There’s nothing wrong with you. You just haven’t met your guy yet.”

“Do you think I’m fat?” I let slip out.

“Yes,” Jamie says immediately, clearly kidding.

I laugh a little. Then I sink back into my depression. “I just don’t know why this has to be so hard. Why can’t I just find a guy who’s cute, and funny, and nice to me?”

“Well, you have,” Jamie deadpans, “but I’m related to you.”

I give Jamie a snarky smile just as Drew and Liam suddenly appear at our table. “I’m sorry we’re so late,” Drew says cheerfully. “I left my phone on the set, so I had to go retrieve it. Fortunately, I ran into Liam there, and he had the game on, so I invited him to come with.”

Liam turns to me, smiles, and gives me a quick kiss on the lips. “Hello, dear. I hope it’s all right I’ve joined you.”

“Of course,” I say, confused, but not altogether unhappy to see him. He looks so good in a blue and green rugby shirt that it makes me want to take up the sport.

“What’s the score now?” he asks.

At this moment, I have no idea. What are they doing here? How did they know we were here?

“Six to three.” Jamie tells Liam. “It’s been a bit like a soccer match. Everyone moves up the field—then nothing. Everyone down the field, then nothing.”

“Sounds like my dating life,” Liam jokes as he flags down the waitress, and signals he and Drew need beer glasses.

Is he joking? Was that a joke? Are men who look like that ever let out of a woman’s bedroom once she’s got him trapped?

“Will you excuse us a moment?” I say to Jamie and Liam as I pull Drew away from the table.

With the eyes of the bar following us, and people subtly using their cell phones to snap a photo of Drew, I yank him into a private corner.

“What are you doing here?” I say quietly, but urgently. “In the first place, I saw you leave with your phone. And in the second place, when do you ever drive yourself anywhere?”

“You know, I
do
have a driver’s license,” Drew says snippily.

“Yeah. And I have a treadmill,” I counter sarcastically. “What are you doing here?”

“I was bored,” Drew says cheerfully. “Dawn said you guys were here, so I figured I’d do you a favor, and bring Liam over. I checked, and he’s totally available.”

Drew smiles, gives me two thumbs-up, and starts to head back to our table.

I grab his arm and yank him back. “What are you talking about? Why do you think I want Liam?”

“Come on. Jordan dumped you today by phone. By phone! If that doesn’t deserve a revenge sump-mmm, sump-mmm, I don’t know what does.”

“He didn’t dump me. He is thinking about taking a job in Germany next year, that’s all.”

“You know, men are totally okay with being the rebound,” Drew tells me. “We get sex, and we don’t have to break up with you afterwards. So for us it’s a win-win.”

“I don’t need a rebound. I have Jordan.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do!”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I . . .” I stop mid-sentence. “You know, there’s a reason someone needs to write your dialogue. It’s not exactly riveting.”

Drew crosses his arms, and looks at me accusingly. “You yelled at your iPhone.”

I stare at him, confused. “What?”

“In the car,” he clarifies. “When you were driving me home. Your iPhone beeped. You read the e-mail, then you made a yelly kind of grunt sound, turned off the phone, and threw it into your console so hard you nearly broke it.”

That’s weird. I don’t remember my reaction to Jordan’s e-mail being quite so violent.

“That was my mother,” I quickly lie.

Drew flashes me a self-satisfied smile. “Darling, I’m an actor. I know behavior. If it had been your mother, you would have made a nasty comment about your family under your breath, then ignored the e-mail. But you wouldn’t have turned off your phone. After all, you always need to be available for me and what if I was calling?”

I glare at him, not quite believing his story.

He shrugs. “Okay, fine. I saw his e-mail address at the top of the e-mail when you read it.”

I nod. Yeah, that sounds more like what happened.

“Then I called Dawn to find out what was going on with you two, and she told me everything, including that you were here tonight trying to find a new man. So, I figured, why waste time finding a new man, when there’s a perfectly good ‘old’ man you already want to do the horizontal mambo with?”

Ouch. He nailed me. I try to cover. “I never said I want Liam—”

“Oh, please. You want Liam like a shoe wants the other foot. Why else would you have me read the script for his movie?”

I decide to ignore the botched metaphor completely. “I told you to read the script because it shoots in Paris. Which is where Jordan is working until the end of January.”

“Oooohhhhhh,” Drew says, suddenly understanding. He looks over at Liam, casually conversing with Jamie and Dawn at the table. Then Drew turns back to me. “But you like Liam.”

“No, I don’t,” I insist.

Drew looks at me suspiciously. “Do you want me to make him go away?”

I turn to watch Liam with the others. Damn, he is hot. “No, he can stay,” I concede. “But I don’t want you trying to set me up anymore.”

“What if Orlando Bloom was asking about you?” Drew asks me.

“Was Orlando Bloom asking about me?” I ask, kind of intrigued.

“No. But I’m asking, if he was, am I allowed to set you up?” Drew says. “It’s sort of like asking a woman if she’ll sleep with you for ten million dollars. She says yes. Then you ask if she’ll sleep with you for a dollar. If she says no, really she’s open to the idea, but you have to negotiate. So, if I could set you up with Orlando Bloom, that means really I could set you up with Liam.”

I’ve been working for Drew too long. I’m starting to follow his logic.

Drew looks up at the ceiling, thinking. “Wait a minute. Or was I supposed to ask you if you would sleep with Liam for ten million dollars?” He looks at me. “Or maybe it’s me. . . . Would you sleep with me for ten million dollars?”

I roll my eyes, and can’t help but throw one back at him. “I guess since you’re economizing, you’ll never know.”

Before Drew can respond, I grab his arm and pull him back to our table.

After we take our seats again, Liam leans into me. “So, who’s your team?”

I quickly glance over at Jamie for an answer. He mimes something that’s completely foreign to me. I guess I let my eyes stay on him too long, because Liam turns to see Jamie pretending to shoot a gun.

“I was gonna have you tell him the Cowboys,” Jamie tells me, smiling.

“Why?” I ask.

Jamie shrugs. “For my own amusement.” Jamie looks at Liam. “Charlie doesn’t know much about football.”

“Oh,” Liam says, turning to me. “So what is your favorite sport?”

Tonsil hockey. Naked wrestling in six hundred thread count sheets
. . .

“Truthfully, I like playing sports more than watching them,” I lie. “But Jamie invited us out tonight, so we decided to come out and see how the other half lives.”

“Other half?” Liam asks.

“She means men,” Dawn quips.

Liam gives her an appreciative nod, then turns back to me. “So how is it you were a cheerleader, but you don’t know much about football?”

Dawn guffaws at that. I glare at her, then turn my attention back to Liam. “At my high school, the cheerleaders did a lot of dancing, so we were always focused on what the next dance or cheer was. We didn’t really have much time to watch the game, we were always setting up for the next big cheer.” Then I can’t help but ask. “How did you know I was a cheerleader?”

“The night of the Halloween party: everyone kept asking you why you weren’t wearing your cheerleader costume.”

“Oh, that,” I say, sighing. “I guess I should have just worn the cheerleader uniform again. It’s just that I wear it every year, and I wanted to do something different. Of course, it made me look like a ten-month pregnant elephant amidst a horde of size-zero swans, but I hadn’t completely thought that through.”

“Nonsense. I thought your costume was delightful,” Liam says, smiling as he takes a sip of his beer. “To me, it showed a woman filled with self-confidence, and a dash of whimsy.”

Could the man
get
any more charming?

“Oh,
that
is an awesome closer,” Jamie says, pointing at Liam appreciatively. “I gotta write that one down.”

Jamie uses the wedding magazine as scratch paper, and writes down what Liam said. “I’ve already turned in my ‘Lines Men Will Use to Get You Into Bed” article, but I can put that somewhere.”

Liam notices the wedding magazine. “Who’s getting married?”

“Oh,” I say, trying not to be obvious about grabbing the magazine out of Jamie’s hand. “Just my friend Kate. Dawn and I are bridesmaids.” I roll up the magazine, and try to force it into my purse.

“Really?” Liam says, seemingly charmed by this information. “I love weddings.”

What the hell does that mean?

Men are impossible to read. Make peace with it.

“Do you get a plus one?” Drew asks me. “Because I’m sure Liam would like to . . .”

“Halftime’s over!” Dawn says. “Everybody quiet!”

I silently thank Dawn for the save, as Drew actually quiets down and watches the game.

Liam and I spend the next few hours talking during commercial breaks, which is the first time we’ve ever really done that. I learned that before he went to business school in Boston, he studied literature and writing in college back in Dublin. He ran track in the Olympics, coming in sixth and eighth for a few races, then second place in the five thousand meter. He spent several years living all over the world putting together film financing, but bought a house here last year, hoping to settle down. No girlfriend as of four months ago (I can thank Dawn for getting that information out of him). Two brothers, one in Ireland, one in Boston. Likes Cuban cigars, Tennessee Whiskey, and playing soccer every Saturday morning with a group of guys who are all expatriates from Europe.

Favorite book:
Ulysses
. (Okay, but he’s so cute, how can I hold that against him?)

All in all, good, solid boyfriend material.

Which, oddly enough, makes me sad.

Why? Because I have no self-confidence when it comes to guys like him. Particularly not when my last boyfriend has acted in a way that has made me feel old, and chubby, and completely worthless.

After the game, we continue talking. Once I have calmed down, and stopped thinking about him so much as “out-of-my-league guy,” it becomes effortless to talk to him. He seems to really be engaged in everything I’m saying. Our conversation ebbs and flows, we talk about everything from Guinness brewing techniques to Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.” Of course, several times during the evening, I think about leaning in to kiss him. But for the first time since I met him, I’m starting to think that if I took a chance and leaned in, he might kiss me back.

And just as Liam is hinting that he might want to bring me to see “Shrew” this weekend at the Taper, my iPhone rings.

I ignore it. Four rings, and it goes to voice mail.

Liam doesn’t ignore it completely. I can tell he’s made a mental note of the fact that I just got a call at eleven o’clock at night.

And before I can offer up some excuse, the phone rings again.

Jamie, who has been flirting with the waitress, watches me as I pull the phone out of my purse. “That’s not Mom, is it?” he asks me, sounding irked.

Before I can answer, he saves me with Liam. “Because she just called me, and I didn’t pick up. You know she’s just calling to argue about Thanksgiving.”

I check the caller ID. “You know what? It is,” I lie. “I’m sure she’ll just leave a message and go to bed.” I hop off my seat as I say to Liam, “I need to use the ladies’ room. Can you order me another drink? I’ll be right back.”

Liam says, “Of course,” and rubs my arm as I grab my purse, and take my leave.

I walk quickly across the crowded bar, then around the corner, and into a long hallway leading toward the ladies’ room.