Page 22 of Party Favors

Maybe dating was something I needed to make time for in my real life. If I wanted to get over my crush, then I should start trying to meet people.

People who weren’t unrealistically hot and weren’t still hung up on their ex-girlfriend.

What kind of woman would Max date? I found myself intensely curious.

“Do you have a picture of her?” I asked, knowing it was entirely inappropriate for me to be asking. He had every right to shut me down and tell me I was being too invasive.

Instead he looked adorably confused. “A picture of who? My cousin?”

“No, your ex-girlfriend.” I knew I was being weird and that it was an odd request. I wondered if he’d ask me the reason why.

It was partly due to my insatiable curiosity, but mostly because I wanted to prove my theory about the kind of woman he’d be in a relationship with.

He frowned slightly. “Probably. Hold on.”

Max scrolled through his phone and then turned it toward me. There was a picture of him with a dark-haired woman, both of them smiling at the camera.

She looked like someone had given an illustration AI one instruction—to create an image of the most beautiful woman on the planet.

My good mood evaporated as my suspicion was confirmed. It was replaced by a sinking feeling because I knew that a man who dated a woman who looked like that would never, ever date someone like me.

Max Colby was completely out of my league.

I’d understood this since he’d sat down, but the picture took away any tiny sliver of hope I might have held on to.

“Why did you break up?” I asked.

He put his phone down on the table. “There were a lot of reasons. At some point I realized she had become a selfish person. It got worse the longer we were together, but she was my college sweetheart and I kept thinking she’d go back to the person she used to be, the woman I’d first fallen in love with. It never happened and I’m upset with myself that I tolerated it for so long. For the last year or so, we weren’t even living in the same country. I think we stayed together long after the relationship actually ended because it was familiar. Comfortable.”

“How old are you?” I asked him.

“Twenty-five.”

I heard the question in his voice, as he wondered why I’d asked him that. Depending on when he’d met her, he had been with her anywhere from three to seven years.

That was a long time either way. It showed he could obviously commit to a long-term relationship, and in my experience, that wasn’t true for most of the men I’d come across so far in New York, who all suffered from Peter Pan syndrome. “So what made you finally end it?”

“She sent me a text clearly meant for another man.”

“Oh no,” I said, feeling so much sympathy for him. Obviously his ex-girlfriend was the stupidest person alive. Who would cheat on Max? “That completely sucks. The lying would be the worst thing for me. My dad used to always lie to my mom and me about everything. We would know he was lying, but we were all supposed to pretend like he was telling the truth. I hated it.”

Something flickered across his face and I wondered if he’d had a similar situation growing up.

“It did indeed suck,” he agreed. He leaned toward me, radiating warmth and some delicious scent that I wanted to bottle up and sell to other single women because I would make a fortune.

Even though he’d put his phone down, I could still see the picture of the two of them together.

I told my overeager hormones to calm down and face reality that this wasn’t going anywhere. Not only because I still had my own emotional hangups from my soon-to-be engaged boss and my emotionally distant father, but because I understood how the world worked. So I said brightly, “Given that you’re new to the city, I’d offer to set you up, but I honestly only have the one friend and I’m pretty sure she’d eat you alive.”

I gestured toward the bar and saw that Vella was kissing someone. I let out a groan.

“What is it?” Max asked, turning that direction.

“My roommate is kissing Otis.” I would recognize that raggedy, oversize hipster beanie anywhere. What was he doing here?

“And that’s bad because?”

“He’s her ex and their relationship was terrible. Their love language seemed to be humiliation and toxicity.”

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