Page 5 of The Best Worst Thing

Eagle Scout Hot

Mari! Open up!” Minutes later, Nicole was banging on the front door of a downtown Manhattan Beach apartment, tears streaming down her face. “Mari, please!”

The door flung open. Mariana—a doe-eyed brunette a few years older than Nicole—was standing there in a lime-green pencil skirt, her heels in her hands and her face panicked.

“Nic? What’s wrong? I just got home. Did I miss your call?”

“No, it’s … It’s Gabe.”

“Gabe? What happened? Is he okay?”

“Yeah. No. I …” Nicole, shaking, took a deep breath. “He’s cheating on me. He fucked the dog walker. And god knows who else.”

“Holy shit, Nicole. Oh my god.” Mari dropped an arm around Nicole’s trembling body and pushed open the door. “Come in, okay? Come inside.”

Nicole whimpered. Mari led her to a blush pink sectional where Nicole spent the next hour curled up in a ball, falling apart.

She snotted onto a cashmere throw blanket.

She clutched onto a brass objet d’art. She disappeared into the cracks of the cushions.

And then, finally, she rolled over and stared at Mari, who’d been sitting at her feet the entire time, saying all the right things.

“Is this my fault?” Nicole said.

“What? No!”

Nicole shrunk back into the sofa, sifting through the supercut of her story with Gabe.

Their last few years, coming into focus: The forced smiles.

The late-night fights. The fact that, sometimes, when they got home from dinner or a date or a goddamn trip to Paris, the two of them would step into that big, beautiful house, and Nicole would, at once, fall completely and involuntarily silent.

“We stopped having sex,” she said. “Every time he tried, I pushed him away. I never thought about what that felt like for him. I was so tired. I was so sad.”

“Nicole, stop it. You dedicated your body to science for two years. Like, nonstop poking and prodding. He could have jerked off in the shower. He could have watched porn. This is not your fault. You did not do this.”

Nicole grimaced as Mari walked over to a Lucite bar cart and pulled two oversize wineglasses off the top shelf.

“You want a drink?” Mari said.

Nicole nodded. She hadn’t had a sip of alcohol in twenty-six months, not since she first started fertility treatment. And while she wasn’t ready to admit it—or even think about it, really—those days were over, weren’t they? Those days were long gone.

“Wine okay?”

Nicole had barely begun to shrug when Mari reached for a handle of tequila instead. She poured them each three fingers, then slid back onto the sofa with their glasses and told Nicole to drink up.

The two of them were drunk.

Delightfully, distractedly drunk.

Mari was twirling around on her string-lit terrace, telling Nicole that everything was going to be okay, that she was too good for Gabe, all the usual reassurances, when she came to a halt. Her eyes lit up.

“You know who we should go see?”

Nicole rolled over on her lounge chair and took another swig. “Who?”

“Logan Milgram.”

Nicole’s body jolted. “Wh-what? Why?”

“Oh, come on. You know he had a thing for you.”

“No way. We were just friends.”

Mari glanced at her sidelong. “Yeah, no. I saw the way he looked at you. I sat right outside his office. He was like a little puppy dog, staring at you every time you walked by. Any dumb reason he could come up with to stroll over to your desk, he’d do it.

He’d ask you for staples. I had staples.

Darnell had staples. The mailroom had staples. ”

“No, really. We were just friends, okay? We just had the same sense of humor, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh.”

Nicole glared at a smirking Mari, then lay there for a minute and watched the slightly spinning sun settle into a thick, peachy twilight. Very intently.

“Besides,” Nicole said. “I bet he’s, like, married by now.”

“Nope. Still single. Trust me, I’d know. Every few months, he pops up on one of my apps and I kind of want to die. But objectively, he’s as odd and funny and cute as ever.”

“You think he’s cute? Since when? You never told me that.”

“Well, he’s not my type,” Mari said, taking a swig from her glass, then sinking into the lounge chair next to Nicole.

“You know I don’t do men with golden retriever energy.

Also, he was my boss. And you and I were both married.

But yeah, he definitely has something going for him. He’s got a look, for sure.”

Nicole’s face was starting to warm. Although that was probably the alcohol, right?

“He’s just a blond guy in his mid-to-late thirties. How is that a look?”

“I’m serious!” Mari said. “He’s, like, summer camp hot, you know? Eagle Scout hot.”

Nicole laughed while Mari rolled onto her elbows and cited several more ways her old boss could, for lack of a better term, get it.

The two of them went back and forth like this for a while, drunkenly debating whether Logan was too quirky to date, why he never seemed to bring anyone to work parties, whether grown men who ate Frosted Flakes were even fuckable.

And then Nicole buried her face into the green-and-white, cabana-striped cushion of the chaise and squawked.

“Was that a yes?” Mari said. “I’ve got his number right here.”

“If you fucking call him, I swear to god …”

But Mari was already pacing around her patio, typing furiously into her phone, ignoring Nicole’s increasingly dramatic protests.

“I found his address. He’s still right by us—in Hermosa.” Mari held up a map on her glowing screen. “Come on, let’s go. Let’s go get Gabe out of your system!”

“No.”

“Puh-leeeease? It’ll be fun! You never have fun!”

“Not happening.”

Mari sat down next to Nicole and exhaled. Very emphatically. “Nic, I love you. And I’m a bit drunk. So I’m just going to tell it to you straight. Your life is about to get so complicated. Not just with Gabe either. Like, I don’t even know what would happen if the transfer—”

“Oh, that’s not going to work. Our doctors said no chance.”

“Wait, what?”

“I can’t even go there right now,” Nicole said, reaching for her drink. She took a giant gulp as Mari stared at her. “It’s just over, okay?”

Nicole was doing everything she could to forget about the transfer. Her future. The fact that now, she’d probably never get to be a mother. How suddenly, she didn’t even have a plan. Sure, the old plan had been complete and utter bullshit. But at least she’d had one. Now, she had nothing.

“Okay,” Mari said. “Then, if that’s really over, don’t you just want to do something for yourself?”

Nicole’s face twisted. It was one thing for her to delight in the highly specific retellings of Mari’s awful first dates and absurd five-week flings.

But to sit here and actually consider having one of her own?

That was crazy. This morning, she’d been at a fertility clinic twenty-seven hundred miles away, texting her husband pictures of their crappy little embryos.

“It’s been, like, two hours …”

“So? Who gives a shit? Haven’t you spent enough time doing what everyone else thinks is best for you? Isn’t there a tiny part of you that just wants to know what else is out there? Whether there was anything to that spark?”

“I’m still married …”

For a minute, neither of them said a word.

And then, something very strange happened. Nicole stood up, threw back the last of her tequila, and let her hair down.

“Fuck it,” she said. “Let’s go.”