5. Liliana #3
We’re still in that stage where we can’t sit across from each other without one of us reaching over the bread basket to touch the other.
He has my hand trapped under his on the table, his thumb running slow circles over my knuckles, and he keeps leaning into my space to murmur things in my ear that have nothing to do with the menu.
“You’re not listening to the specials,” I tell him, laughing, trying to read the little card and failing.
“I don’t care about the specials.” He smirks, a single finger tracing lazily down the bare line of my spine where the dress dips low, and leans in until his mouth brushes my ear. “Can’t help it. This dress looks so good on you, baby. It’s extremely distracting and it’s a real problem for me.”
His breath tickles and heat rushes straight to my face. I slap his hand away, scandalized, and shoot him the sternest look I can manage while blushing this hard.
“Stop it. I told you, we’re meeting my college best friend tonight. The most important interview of your life.” I narrow my eyes. “Behave for once, Everett.”
He chuckles and lifts both hands in surrender, the picture of innocence, that grin not going anywhere. “Yes, ma’am. Best behavior. Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a scout.”
“I’ll be one tonight. For you.”
And right on cue, she sweeps in the way Hallie always sweeps in, breathless and glowing and already apologizing for being late, and I’m up out of my seat to hug her, giddy, my two favorite people about to become one crowd.
“Okay, okay, let me look at him.” Hallie holds me by the shoulders, then turns to Tristan with a huge grin. “So this is the famous Tristan. She really does not shut up about y…”
She stops.
It’s the smallest thing. Her smile freezes for half a breath, and across the table Tristan goes still in the exact same instant, the two of them just looking at each other, and a current of recognition I don’t understand passes between them and is gone almost before I catch it.
“Wait…” Hallie recovers first, pressing a hand to her chest, laughing a little too brightly. “No. No way. Tristan Everett?”
“Uh… Hallie, right? Hallie Wilder, if I’m right.” He tilts his head, and a slow, amused smile spreads over his face. “Huh. Small world.”
I look between them. “You two know each other?”
“Well… barely.” Tristan leans back, easy, unbothered, his hand still wrapped around mine. “This was years ago. My mother decided I was going to die alone with my guitar, so she set me up on this blind date. Very against my will.”
“He was a nightmare,” Hallie says. “Sorry, but you were.”
“I was a nightmare,” he agrees cheerfully. “We went out for, what… a week? Less?”
“Barely a week.”
“Yeah. There’s that, and then I left the country for a while, and that was the end of the great romance.” He grins, then seems to catch himself, and turns to me, his easy humor softening into an expression more careful. “Hey. This isn’t weird for you, is it? I don’t want it to be weird.”
He glances back at Hallie, quick and good-natured. “No offense to you. It really was nothing, just one of those small-world things, right? Funny, more than anything.”
For a beat, Hallie doesn’t answer.
She holds his gaze, and her smile stays fixed in place, stretched a fraction too wide, and I watch her look at him being so genuinely, guilelessly unbothered, so clearly unable to see her as anything but a punchline from a past life, and a shadow moves behind her eyes that I can’t read.
Then she laughs, quick and bright, and it’s gone.
“Weird? God, no.” She flaps a hand and reaches for her wine.
“Oh, you know me, Lil. I go on a thousand pointless little dates, I can barely tell you half their names. They all blur together.” She takes a sip, perfectly breezy again.
“No offense taken, Everett. Honestly, I’d forgotten all about it until you walked in here looking like that. ”
“See, that’s the appropriate response.” Tristan points at her, delighted. “Total indifference. I respect it.”
“Don’t get excited, it’s not a compliment.”
I laugh, and the last little knot of nerves in my chest dissolves, because this is going even better than I hoped. They’re joking already. They fit.
And I believed them. Of course I believed them.
Why on earth wouldn’t I? They were so light about it, so unbothered, two people who’d bumped into each other once in a past life and drifted off in opposite directions. It was so obviously nothing that within a month I’d stopped thinking about it, and within a year I’d forgotten it entirely.
And every year after only proved them right.
Hallie and Tristan never once sought each other out, never texted, never met except when I was there in the middle of it, the two of them orbiting my life politely and separately, friendly the way you’re friendly with your best friend’s husband, nothing more.
So I let it go completely. I filed the whole thing under coincidence, a funny small-world story we told at dinner parties, and I never thought about it again.
Until now.
Until Hallie is standing beside me in a matching dress with her hair gone gold, singing every word of a love song about herself, while my husband performs it to a sold-out arena.
Tristan assured me the song was nothing. He held my face and swore it was old and buried and going away, so I believed him, and I let it go.
But now here it is, and to my ears, to the whole screaming world, it sounds like exactly one thing.
An aching, tender love song about a first love he never got over.
The one he looked me in the eye and swore was nothing.
Worse, of all the women in the world it could be about, the whole world is about to realize it’s her.
Hallie. My best friend.