Still looking up at him with starstruck eyes, Liv suggests with a voice that’s gone slightly husky, “Can we just get married tomorrow at the courthouse?”
Tony smiles and dips in for another kiss before standing back up. “Nope. I’ve been imagining you in a white dress for far too long now for you to take that away from me.”
Now I do chuckle when Liv sticks out her bottom lip in a pout. Then Tony says something that changes her expression to horror.
“Want me to pick one out for you?”
“What?” she says in shock. “No! You can’t see the dress until I’m walking down the aisle.” She gets up from her chair and starts pushing him toward the living room. “You shouldn’t even be in here. Go. It’s bad luck to see the dress beforehand. Go! Shoo!”
Laughing, Tony steals another quick kiss and leaves the dining room. Liv turns back to me and rolls her eyes.
“I need a break before my brain leaks out of my ears. I’m gonna make some of my dip. Do you want some?”
“You know I do.”
I get up to follow her into the kitchen. She goes to the cabinet and starts pulling the makings for her to-die-for dip. It’s a simple recipe of cream cheese, no bean chili, and Velveeta cheese, but no one makes it like Liv does. Believe me, I’ve tried. I help her by pulling out a pan and setting it on the counter, along with the cutting board and cheese slicer.
“Guess who I saw the other day at Roxy’s?” Liv asks, dumping the cream cheese in the pan and smoothing it out.
Roxy’s is a small pub we sometimes go to after work. It’s where her and Tony met two years ago; the owner is a good friend of theirs. Liv introduced me to the quaint little place right after I started working at Silver Technologies. It’s the only bar type establishment I feel comfortable in. It’s not that I don’t like drinking or have anything against other’s drinking, I just don’t care for the whole party scene. I prefer to sit back and relax while I drink, and maybe shoot some pool on occasion without being harassed by guys offering to buy me drinks, or getting grabby with their hands.
“Who?” I ask, drying my hands after washing them.
When she doesn’t answer right away, I look over at her. She’s biting her lip, contemplating on whether she should tell me.
“Liv…”
“Grant,” she blurts, and then watches me closely for my reaction.
Although I still feel a little pinch of pain in my stomach at the mention of his name, I’m over what he did. It took some time to get past the betrayal, and I’ll never forgive him for it, but I think what hurt the most was when it happened. I was already in so much pain from losing my mom, and then to find out Grant was cheating on me, I thought I was dying because the pain hurt so much. It literally felt like I was suffocating. I had no friends at the time, so there was no one to turn to. I had a few friends I had managed to keep in contact with after my dad died, but we drifted apart when my mom got sick, and I had to quit school to work at the hardware store and care for her in my spare time. Grant was the only one I made sure I had time for. I thought at the time he was the love of my life.
I give Liv a reassuring smile. “It’s fine, Liv. You know I’m over what he did to me. It was a long time ago.”
Liv’s never officially met Grant, and has only seen him in person once. After we became friends and one too many drinks at her house one night, I told her about Grant and what he did. Her disgust for him was immediate. She grabbed my hand and we both stumbled to her desk in her spare room, where she sat me down in front of her computer and made me pull up his Facebook page. I was drunk enough to do it, but I wasn’t drunk enough to let her plaster cheater memes all over his timeline, something she was adamant on doing.
And then there was the time we were out shopping eight months ago. We had just walked out of a department store and there was Grant across the street, caging a girl against a car. On closer inspection, I realized it was the same girl he cheated on me with. Liv knew right away something was wrong. When she followed my line of sight and saw Grant, she recognized him immediately. I barely managed to hold her back from going to confront him. That was the first time I had seen him since I walked in on him screwing another woman. The pain in my chest hurt, don’t get me wrong, but I was surprised to find it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. I knew right then that we wouldn’t have lasted anyway.
Liv must sense I’m telling the truth because seconds later, the worry in her expression disappears and is replaced by relief.
“Anyway. Tony and I were talking to Patrick when he came in with that tramp; the same one he was with that day we went shopping. I talked Patrick into letting me make his drink.” She smiles deviously at me.
“Oh, God.” I drop the cheese slicer on the counter and turn to face her. “What did you do?”
“Oh, nothing,” she says, going back to smooshing the cream cheese in the pan. Her eyes slide to me when she says slyly, “Except I may have put some castor oil in his drink.”
My eyes go wide right before I bend over the counter with laughter. She joins me, and by the time we are done, our eyes are dripping with tears from laughing so hard.
“I freaking love you,” I tell her, wiping my eyes.
She shrugs, her smile still in place.
“You don’t fuck with my friends, even if we weren’t friends at the time.”
“Remind me to never piss you off,” I say, still chuckling. “Where in the world did you get castor oil?”
Liv grabs the open can of no bean chili and pours it on top of the cream cheese.
“Patrick has arthritis, and he swears rubbing it on his joints when it flares up helps relieve the pain. He had some underneath the bar.”