Page 20 of Revelry

“Just life stuff. You wouldn’t be interested.”And I don’t really want to tell you. It’s embarrassing enough.

“Try me.”

“Okay, well, I found my boyfriend of five years eating out our hot roommate.”

“Fucker,” he snaps, and the animosity in his tone startles me.

“He did fuck her, actually. Oh, did I mention she was a stripper?”

There’s silence from the other end. “You lived with a stripper?”

“Uh huh, a fact I learned only after he let her move in without consulting me.” I lie back on the table and stare at the grassy field around me, hating that he’s so easy to talk to about this. Processing those events, I find that the memory of Brad’s betrayal doesn’t sting quite as much as it once did. It’s hard to hold onto something that’s already dead. I just wish it hadn’t ended that way. I wasn’t in love with him anymore; he wasn’t in love with me. It had taken a while for me to figure that out, but what we’d had once upon a time deserved better than that. I deserved better.

“Why weren’t you there to veto that shit?” Coop asks, pulling me from my reverie.

“Because I spent the weekend at the hospital, seeing my grandmother through chemo.”

“Jesus Christ, your ex is really a douche.” He exhales loudly, as if he’s blowing out cigarette smoke. “I thought I had shit bad?”

“Nope, I’m pretty sure my life out-shits yours.” I sigh.Like this day wasn’t depressing enough. “So did you need me or something?”

“Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I’m starting to see that I do,” he whispers, and then practically shouts into the receiver, “I mean, food! The guys wanted Chinese food.”

I wait a beat, mostly just to get the hearing back in my ear after he deafened me, but also because I’m not really sure what to make of that. “And you couldn’t just order in?”

“No, they don’t do delivery.”

“A Chinese restaurant that doesn’t deliver?”

“Nope, they don’t. So we want Beef and Black Bean, Chicken and Cashew, Garlic Prawns, Honey Chicken, Spring Rolls.”

“Wait, let me get a pen.” I jump down off the table and walk back to my car, pulling out a Biro with practically no ink left and jot down the order on the back of an old receipt.

“Is that Ali?” Zed asks from the background.

Cooper must cover the phone with his hands because the sound is muffled when he says, “Yes, it’s Ali. Who the fuck else would I be talking to?”

“Tell her to get me like three boxes of fortune cookies. Oh and Dim Sim.”

Cooper sighs. “Did you get that?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“We need a Sweet and Sour Pork, three orders of Special Fried Rice, and get whatever you want.”

“Sure, because apparently the list you’ve given me isn’t quite big enough to feed an entire army, but it’ll do four boys in a band.”

“We’re gonna be here ’til late, so you may as well hang out and have a few drinks with us.”

“Yeah, okay,” I say, shoving the pen behind my ear and tucking the order into the glove box so I don’t lose it.

“Oh and, Ali,” Coop says, before I can hang up. “I booked your flight.”

“You what?” I ask, incredulous.

“See you in half an hour.”

“Cooper.” He hangs up the phone and I shout into the receiver. “Motherfucker!” I cringe and smile apologetically when the soccer mums all turn to glare at me.

---