Elise sighs, giving me that look that makes her normally very cute face look sort of like a sarcastic basset hound. “I’m glad, I guess. Not to beat a dead horse,” —too late— “but you really can do better. Kevin is just so . . . meh. There’s no spark, no fire between you two. It’s like you’re friends who fuck.”
I duck my chin, not wanting her to read on my face the woeful lack of fucking that has been happening, but I’m too transparent.
“Wait . . . you two do fuck, right?” Elise asks, flabbergasted. “I figured that was why you were staying with him. I was sure he must be great in the sack or you’d have dumped his boring ass a long time ago.”
I bite my lip, not wanting to get into this with her . . . again. But one of Elise’s greatest strengths is also one of her most annoying traits as well. She’s like a dog with a bone and isn’t going to let this go.
“Look, he’s fine,” I finally reply, trying to figure out how much I need to feed Elise before she gives me a measure of peace. “He’s handsome, treats me well, and when we have sex, it’s good . . . I guess. I don’t believe in some Prince Charming who is going to sweep me off my feet to a castle where we’ll have romantic candlelit dinners, brilliant conversation, and bed-breaking sexcapades. I just want someone to share the good and bad times with, some companionship.”
Elise holds back as long as she can before she explodes, her snort and guffaw of derision getting even more looks in our direction. “Then get a fucking Golden Retriever and a rabbit. The buzzing kind that uses rechargeable batteries.”
One of the ladies at the next table huffs, seemingly aghast at Elise’s outburst, and they stand to move toward the bar on the other side of the restaurant, far away from us. “Well, if this is the sort of trash that passes for dinner conversation,” the older one says as she sticks her nose far enough into the air I wonder if it’s going to be clipped by the ceiling fans, “no wonder the country’s going to hell under these Millennials!”
She storms off before Elise or I can respond, but the second lady pauses slightly and talks out of the side of her mouth. “Sweetie, you do deserve more than fine.”
With a wink, she scurries off after her friend, leaving behind a grinning Elise. “See? Even snooty old biddies know that you deserve more than meh.”
“I know. We’ve had this conversation on more than one occasion, so can we drop it?” I plead between clenched teeth before calming slightly. “I want to celebrate and catch up, not argue about my love life.”
Always needing the last word, Elise drops her voice, muttering under her breath. “What love life?”
“That’s low.”
Elise holds her hands up, and I know I’ve at least gotten a temporary reprieve. “Okay then, if we’re sticking to work, I got a new scoop that I’m running with. I’m writing a piece about a certain famous someone who got caught sending dick pics to a social media princess. Don’t ask me who because I can’t divulge that yet. But it’ll be all there in black and white by next week’s column.”
Elise is an investigative journalist, a rather fantastic one whose talents are largely being wasted on celebrity news gossip for the tabloid paper she writes for. I can’t even call it a paper, really. With the downfall of actual print news, most of her stuff ends up in cyberspace, where it’s digested, Tweeted, hashtagged, and churned out for the two-minute attention span types to gloat over for a moment before they move on to . . . well, whatever the next sound bite happens to be.
Every once in awhile, she’ll get to do something much more newsworthy, but mostly it’s fact-checking and ass-covering before the paper publishes stories celebrities would rather see disappear. I know what burns her ass even more is when she has to cover the stories where some downward-trending celebrity manufactures a scandal just to get some social media buzz going before their latest attempt at rejuvenating a career that peaked about five years ago.
This one at least sounds halfway interesting, and frankly, better than my love life, so I laugh. “Why would he send a dick pic to someone on social media? Wouldn’t he assume she’d post it? What a dumbass!”
“No, it’s usually close-ups and they’re posted anonymously,” Elise says with a snort. “Of course, she knows because she sees the user name on their direct message, but she cuts it out so that it’s posted to her page as an anonymous flash of flesh. Look.”
She pulls out her phone, clicking around to open an app, one I didn’t design but damn sure wish I had. It’s got one hell of a sweet interface, and Elise is using it to organize her web pages better than anything the normal apps have. It takes Elise only a moment to find the page she wants.