Chapter 3 A Company Party #3
My problem is that I never do this anymore.
And when I did do it, I did it at bars and frat parties, or in the back of someone’s van on the way to a rave, or on a bus hired for a bachelorette night in Vegas.
By the time I was thirty, I was already with Nick, and sober, and since then I haven’t dated much at all.
Occasional patchouli entrepreneurs notwithstanding, I don’t really know how to date as sober Laura.
This feels different. He feels different. This can’t be right, can it?
I hand back his phone, and he pockets it.
“Well…” he says. He glances over, and I’m pretty sure he notices Vivi watching us.
“Well!” I respond cheerfully. “So what do you think of—” I begin.
“So I’ll give you a call?”
I nod. “Great. Yeah.”
He nods once, and then walks away, and I can feel myself melting into the paving stones from embarrassment.
Why was I so completely out of my depth? Was he shy, or was I…? What was I? Vivi has indeed been watching the whole thing, because she has the nerve to wave at me cheerfully as I walk back toward her.
“That looked like it went well!”
I make a small groaning noise. He didn’t even talk to me. I couldn’t even talk to him.
“I think he’s shy,” I say finally. “I hope so, anyway. It’s either that or we have no chemistry at all.”
“He’s probably shy. Come on. There’s dancing. Maybe you can ask him to dance.”
“I guess.”
Vivi pulls me, a little dazed, back toward the main courtyard where we watch the dance floor for a minute or two.
The DJ has switched to playing pop hits, and a few couples are attempting a corporate version of getting down to the beat.
I love dancing, but I am always amazed by people who can do it at work events like this.
It’s like dancing at a wedding where everyone on the guest list has the power to fire you.
Brant catches my gaze and tips a glass toward me, and I only then wonder if I’ve already gotten in trouble in terms of that committee assignment and his questions about not dating anyone in the company. Should I not have said yes to Ollie?
Well, it’s certainly not anything serious, if Ollie and I can barely manage to speak to each other. I figure that I will give Ollie and me a date or two and find out if it’s even a real issue before I come clean to my manager.
“Let’s get you a drink,” Vivi says.
“I could use a ginger ale.”
“We’ll get in the line with the server who looks like a hot Viking.”
“As a former bartender, I want to remind you that you are not allowed to flirt with servers at work, young lady.”
Vivi grins. “I would never. I have a strict ogling-only policy.”
We get into one of the long double-lines for drinks. I notice that Brant has insinuated himself into a group of people from the legal department and looks like he is telling another one of his cynical jokes.
“You okay?” Vivi asks, leaning toward me.
“Yeah, it’s just… I don’t know.” I shake my head. I think of Nick, back home on my sofa, and how much easier it would be to crawl into his arms and forget about dating, even if I knew he’d be disappearing again within a few days.
“You don’t know about what?”
“Dating, or…” I keep thinking about staring into Ollie’s eyes.
How handsome he was and how it felt like we had nothing to talk about.
He was a stranger to me. A warm, kind stranger.
When I met Nick, it felt like we understood each other instantly, but that may just have been because we were on a dance floor and I knew I wanted to have sex with him, and then ten minutes later we were backstage in a tiny club doing exactly that.
“So you had no chemistry with Ollie?” she asks.
That isn’t exactly it, I think. I’m just worried that the chemistry was entirely one-sided and he was just being polite.
“Well, maybe it’s what I need right now,” I say, trying to sound flip. “I mean, I had tons of chemistry with Nick, so maybe I need a boring, safe tax attorney who I will have literally nothing to talk to about with.”
I’m mostly kidding, but Vivi winces, and I know—even before I turn around—that she has spotted Ollie near us.
Sure enough, I turn to see Mr. Tax Attorney standing not three feet away in the other line.
His gaze meets mine, his expression flashing with something like hurt, then blankness.
My eyes close for a second, trying to block out what I’ve just done, and then I open them and force myself to step toward him.
“I’m sorry,” I begin.
“It’s okay.” He shrugs, his mouth twisted slightly into an unreadable line. “Not a problem.”
He nods once more, then turns and walks out of the line to get away from me. When I glance back at Vivi, her expression mirrors mine.
“I don’t think he’s calling me.”
“No,” she agrees. “Probably not.”
Something inside my chest twinges. Apparently, my obsession with Nick is still managing to mess me up. When a nice guy shows interest, I immediately find a way to ruin it.
What am I doing? After a moment, I smile apologetically at Vivi and then step out of the line to go find Ollie.
It feels like there’s more to say. I can’t have had a secret crush on this guy for two years, just to have things end so quickly, especially when I didn’t even mean what I said.
I was just trying to prepare myself for when he didn’t call, or disappeared, or ended up wanting someone younger.
When I spot him, he is on the dance floor, dancing with a woman who I’m pretty sure is Katy, the attorney that Vivi is friends with, the one who used to go to college with Ollie’s wife.
I’ve seen Ollie and Katy chatting on the elevator once or twice, and she is very pretty, but that’s not the part that makes my heart sink.
It turns out that Ollie is a very good dancer.
Ridiculously good. He is dipping her and spinning her around in what looks like a polished routine, but I know that it can’t be.
It’s not like he would have made a special request to the DJ to play this 1990s R & B song, and he definitely couldn’t have choreographed this ahead of time.
He just knows how to dance, and I don’t mean that he can move well.
I mean he moves like a professional dancer.
And on top of that, there’s a chivalry to his dancing, a willingness to let his partner shine.
I feel the sharp regret that comes from a realization made too late. Ollie is sexy. Extremely so. Katy isn’t as good a dancer as he is, but he’s guiding her through steps smoothly, pulling her close and then back again, landing her after every spin or turn.
The song ends, and he whispers something to Katy and turns to go, just as Vivi leans toward me.
“What the hell was that?” Vivi hands me a ginger ale, her eyes on Ollie.
“West Coast Swing,” says a woman next to us. We both glance over at her. “He teaches it in the evenings. He used to be a top-ten national competitor or something.” She shrugs. “He works in my department. We’re all obsessed with him.”
“I mean, why wouldn’t you be?” Vivi says, to cover for my shock.
I glance back at Ollie, who is moving back through the crowds toward the line where people can get drinks, clearly having decided to return only when he was sure not to run into me again.
I shake my head. “I thought swing dancing was something you did to like, the Brian Setzer Orchestra.”
“Not that style,” the woman says. “West Coast is the slower version. They do it to pop songs a lot of the time. You should look up his videos online. He’s amazing.”
I think about walking up and asking him to dance, but now I’m too intimidated.
“Can we go home?”
Vivi nods once.
She and I share a taxi back to our neighborhood in Brooklyn.
She lives only a few blocks from me in Cobble Hill, and we spend the whole ride on our phones, looking up West Coast Swing videos on YouTube.
Apparently if you look up “Oliver MacCormack dancer,” you can find over twenty videos of him, most of them from six or seven years ago, dancing at competitions and doing what are known as ‘Jack & Jill’ dances, improvisational dances where two random dancers are partnered together, given a surprise song, and have to make up a dance on the spot.
Ollie is exceptional at the improvised dances, and his videos have hundreds of ‘likes.’ When he’s matched with a partner who knows what she’s doing, he is the most elegant man I’ve ever seen.
Somehow his dancing matches with his nice suits and carefully styled hair: all charm, desire, and restraint.
Right as the taxi pulls up to my place, Vivi gives me a quick hug and says cheerfully, “Well, maybe he’ll still call you.” I can tell she doesn’t believe it any more than I do.
I take the elevator up to my apartment, my heart sinking with every floor.
Though it’s only eight-thirty, Nick has already fallen asleep on the sofa with Hannah.
I stand there watching them as they lean against each other in front of the muted television, an empty bowl for popcorn precariously balanced nearby.
Hannah is in her pajamas, and Nick looks as handsome as ever, with his dark curly hair and perennial five o’clock-shadow.
He’s in a grey t-shirt and dark jeans, and his old, scuffed cowboy boots lean against one side of the sofa.
Two years ago, if I’d found them like this, I would have let Nick crash here for the night. I would have hoped that it was the beginning of something different, a new phase in which he returned to our lives as a real father and husband.
Now I carefully slide Hannah into my arms and carry her back to her bedroom, slipping her under the covers as she stirs awake. She is almost too big to carry, but not quite yet. I can still manage it. When she is settled, I tiptoe away to close her bedroom door as quietly as I can.
“Is Daddy gone?” Hannah’s voice stops me just as I’m slipping out.
“He’s going back to his hotel now,” I say. “He’ll be back in the morning.”
“How long is he staying?” Her voice sounds small.
I hesitate, not wanting to get it wrong. With Nick, you always end up getting it wrong. “I’m not sure, sweetie, but I know he’s staying for as long as he can. We’ll talk to him about it more tomorrow.”
When I return to the living room, I lean over and shake Nick’s knee until he opens his eyes.
“Hey, I’m back,” I say. “You can go back to your hotel now.”
He sleepily blinks at me and then rises, glancing at my dress again. I watch as he slips on his boots and worn leather jacket and gives me a lopsided, tired smile.
“I’ll call in the morning,” he says in his sexy, gravelly voice. “I’ll come by and see you both tomorrow.”
“Sure.”
“Did you have fun?” he asks pointedly.
A moment of regret passes my eyes, because tonight was a disaster. I know he catches my disappointed expression because he grins.
“You look good, Laur.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
As he walks past me, I sense that he is stepping a little closer than is absolutely necessary, close enough that I can feel the heat of his body moving past. I put some distance between us as I hold open the door for him.
“Goodnight,” he says with his lopsided smile.
“Goodnight, Nick.”
Once I’ve closed the door and locked it, I walk to my bedroom and imagine a conversation with my mother. She passed away a couple of years ago, but I sometimes talk to her anyway. Not for help or advice... I just like to remind myself how much worse she would have handled things.
“Hey,” I say in my head. “If you’d been there tonight, you would have tried to undress Ollie on the dance floor and then gotten trashed and hit on your boss. And after you ended up getting fired, you would have come home and slept with Nick.”
“It would have been fun, though,” she says back to me.
These silent conversations always make me feel both better and worse.
I feel better, because at least I’m not as bad as she was.
She’s the low bar that makes me feel like I’m doing okay at life.
But I’m still so angry at her, and that always hurts, now that she’s not alive to hold up her end of an argument.
It’s like Abby said to me a week after the funeral. “Mom could at least have slipped in one apology at the end, right? Just on her dying breath, like, ‘Hey, sorry I sucked as a parent. Your therapy costs are my fault.’” Abby imitated a dying groan as she said it.
We never got that apology from my mother, even after the years we spent taking care of her hospital bills and sending her money whenever she was about to lose her housing. We never got an apology for the time we spent taking care of her, instead of her taking care of us.
I’m not repeating her mistakes. That’s something. But I still managed to ruin my chance with a great guy. A nice, well-dressed, sexy, stupidly handsome man. I lie down, put on headphones, and punish myself by watching another one of Ollie’s videos. As I do, a text comes in from my sister Abby.
How was the guy?
I consider her message for a long moment and then write back: I think I messed up.