Page 29 of Come Back To Me

David flushed. “I forgot to introduce you, Yara.” He turned his back on the girls and mouthed.“That’s the beanie girl from the Market.”

I tried to look amused.

“The other one’s her best friend, I think,” David said under his breath. I looked at Ferdinand, who raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

“But why are they here?”

“Petra is an artist,” he said. “She used to be in a band. I thought it would be nice for her to be around other artists.” He leaned toward me. “She just went through a bad breakup.”

I wanted to tell him that I knew, but instead, I chose to not be predictable. Ferdinand thought I was another one of David’s jealous girlfriends and I wasn’t.

“Okay,” I said, walking toward the booth with a smile.

“Hi, Petra,” I said it loud enough for everyone to hear.

Ferdinand the unbeliever laughed behind me as I scooted into the booth determined to not be that girl. The same girl as the ones he’d had before. My new resolve lasted approximately ten minutes.

Petra was one of those girls who didn’t even know she was flirting with your boyfriend while she was flirting with your boyfriend. It was sort of delicious to watch her if you weren’t on the shit end of it all. She was mostly composed of sex and casual advances. When she took a sip of her beer, for instance, she licked her lips like the gods’ own ambrosia had dripped on them. And when she had to think about something she bit her goddamn bottom lip and eye-fucked the air in front of her. This was her norm. I imagined she grew up with a slut for a mother and a completely absent father, and this was the only way she knew how to talk to men. I was wedged in-between her and David, but sometimes they talked around me because artists had so much in common. When she spoke, her pillow lips moved sensually and in rhythm with her doe-eyed blinking.

Ferdinand, who was sitting across from me and next to her friend, Beatriz, was watching her with just as much rapt attention as I was. It was hard not to, honestly. If I were a guy I would have had a boner. Brick arrived ten minutes after us with twin sisters in tow. And then the LA couple arrived, their LA-ness shining off of them so hard I wished I’d brought my sunglasses. The wife was wearing neon pink pants. Everything else was monogrammed in Louis Vuitton. The big shot music guy was wearing tan chinos and had a lot of chest hair peeking through his white button-down. Not the nice kind that David had, the unruly kind that needed a trim and a good conditioner. We all crowded into a booth and the big shot ordered drinks all around. I rubbed David’s dick under the table to distract him from Petra, while the guy’s wife talked about their recent vacation to Italy. None of us had been to Italy so we all nodded and sipped, nodded and sipped. Finally the boys started talking shop and Petra and I took each other in.

“So, how long have you and David been together?” she asked.

I translated her question to: how easy would it be for me to steal your boyfriend?

“Two years,” I said.

“That’s a long time.”

“It feels more like two months.” I nodded. “But that’s how it is when you have a good thing, yeah?”

She looked away and took a sip of her drink. “I wouldn’t know.”

Oh yeah. A breakup. I remembered the day in the tea shop when she spilled her guts to a British stranger.

“How have you been doing with that?”

She shrugged.

“Do you and David live together?”

“Practically,” I said. “Though we keep our separate places.”

She tilted her head to the side. “Funny, two years together and you still haven’t moved in.”

“People don’t need to live together to be together,” I said. “We like our space.”

She smiled. It was a condescending smile, not sweet or friendly. I spoke girl like a fucking boss, you know?

“When I’m in love I can’t stand to be apart from the person. He’s like a drug. Pure addiction.” She looked up at the ceiling like she was having an orgasm and lightly touched her neck. I wondered what it was like to be that kind of addicted to a human being. I looked over at David who was watching Petra with a glazed look in his eyes. I removed my hand from his crotch, annoyed.

David gave me a disappointed look and turned back to Mr. LA.

“It must be a whole thing to date a musician,” she said, softly. “Being on the other end of all that passion and creativity. Being someone’s muse.”

My eyes needed to roll, they asked to roll, but I kept them focused on Petra.Steady, girls.I wanted to tell her that I’d evaluated her and knew what ran through her psychological veins.

You want to be someone’s what-if,I told her in my mind. Be beautiful enough and important enough to inspire someone who had actual talent. It was more of a glamorous job than being the artist.

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