“Wait, why can’t it be you? I thought you were seeing somebody?”
She sighed, sitting back. “It’s a somebody I’m not supposed to be seeing, so I’m trying to… be blind,” she huffed. “I think you should go back over there.”
“I’m not going back over there,” I laughed. “I… am going to go upstairs, and get ready for dinner with Derrick, I guess.”
“Where are y’all going?”
“He wants me to come back to the restaurant. To cook for me.”
“Oooh,” Lark gushed. “Can he cook?”
“I have no idea,” I shrugged. “When we met, he didn’t have any… ambition, I guess. Well, no, that’s not quite it. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life to get after it, you know? And I was so certain. Or I thought I was.”
Lark sighed. “We had the same indoctrination, babe. You know I get it.”
“Yeah, but… you and Laken, and even Phoenix, in a lot of ways… y’all split.”
“At risk of damn near being excommunicated,” she reminded me. “Some of the family still doesn’t fuck with us. And my momma is still mad about my naked ring finger and empty womb.”
“I know, but… shit,” I breathed, glaring at my empty glass. “Now… I’m here, you know? And where the hell do I go from here?”
Lark smiled. “You… go to dinner.”
SIX
So… I went to dinner.
As strange as it was to thrust myself into something so far removed from the way I would normally spend Christmas, somehow it just felt… fitting.
Keris and Lark had insisted that I aim at full-blown sexy instead of just showing up in my sweaterdress from earlier – a suggestion I quickly decided was the right choice.
The sound Derrick made when he helped me out of my coat was all the answer I needed.
“You know this don’t make no damn sense, right?” he asked, stepping back to get a good look. “You weren’t supposed to get finer.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”
“Cause you broke my heart – how can I get my misogynistic revenge on you now?”
“Oh, is that what this is?” I laughed as he dropped my coat off at the area behind the hostess stand, then led me on into the restaurant. When he let me know to meet him at Ascension, I hadn’t realized it would actually be closed, and we’d be the only people inside.
“Not at all,” he assured. “I’m fucking around, but… seriously, Kat… I’m glad to see you looking good. Doing good.”
“Thank you – the feeling is mutual,” I told him as I accepted the seat he offered at a booth tucked away near the back. “I’m not sure why I wasn’t expecting to see you again.”
“Because many people with pie in the sky plans don’t ever actually see them through – what you thought was going to happen with me,” he said as he took the seat across from me.
I sighed. “Derrick, it wasn’t that I thought you wouldn’t do anything with your life. I just… I needed somebody who knew what that thing was,” I explained. “Or… I thought I needed that, at least.”
“I won’t front like it didn’t hurt,” he said as he picked up the bottle of wine already waiting on the table, uncorking it before pouring us both glasses. “But… I also won’t pretend not to understand. Honestly… when I see my servers and hostesses have these men around here grinning in their face, I’m quick to tell them “potential doesn’t pay bills”,” he chuckled.
My mouth dropped. “Now, isn’t that a little hypocritical?!”
“Maybe,” he shrugged. “But like I said… many people will sell you a dream that never amounts to anything and stifle you in the process. I don’t want to see that happen to these young ladies… with hindsight, of course.”
“Of course,” I chuckled. “Cause you were not thrilled with me when it happened.”
“I sure as hell wasn’t,” he laughed. “But you know what? I was determined to prove you wrong, and now… here we are.” He grabbed his glass, tipping it in my direction.
I nodded, finally picking up my wine glass – to accept his toast, and take a sip. “Here we are. A restaurant – I would not have expected that from you, I don’t think.”
“Well, it wasn’t the dream at the time,” he said. “I just knew I was going to do something. This was actually something my mother talked about doing a lot – she’s the reason for the sky theme. She loved a good theme,” he said, with a quiet, melancholy sort of chuckle.
“… loved?”
“She passed about a year after we met,” he said. “Right as she was finally gathering up the courage to seek a small business loan. I committed myself to seeing her dream through – put every dime of the insurance policy she left into it. I was doing it for her, so failure wasn’t an option.”
“I thought you said you were trying to prove me wrong.”
“That too,” he teased, shaking his head. “Nah, seriously though – it was all excellent motivation, you know? Now I have this place, and I just opened a lounge over in the Heights.”
“Really?” I grinned. “Derrick, that’s amazing. I’m really proud of you,” I told him, genuinely.
Back when we first met, his big personality – and dick – had been a serious factor in what made him so attractive to me. He was always talking about wanting to do something with a big impact, wanting to have the kind of money that could grant any desire, stuff like that.
But it was… shallow, for lack of better phrasing.
He wanted those things, but had no idea how to get after them, and no desire to “waste away in a regular job”. Which, I understood not wanting to do things you weren’t passionate about, but by the same token…there was entirely too much pressure on me to have a certain life that I couldn’t risk giving up my own potential.
Except… that still ended up being the sacrifice I was expected to make.
So what, ultimately, had I even gained?
“Tell me what’s been up with you,” Derrick said, pulling me from my internal musing. “I wanna know why you’re not wearing that ring.”
My eyes went wide. “Wow. I can’t even have the dinner you promised first?”
“It’s coming,” he chuckled. “Don’t deflect.”
“But I enjoy deflecting.”
“Katari.”
“I’m divorced,” I admitted. “He served the papers at a company Christmas party.”
Derrick’s eyebrows shot up. “Damn. That’s… damn.”
“Yeah. My sentiments exactly.”
“He divorced you?”
I nodded. “Before we got married, we had a plan on when we’d have kids, we agreed on who would take time off, hiring nannies, the whole nine. But then, once we got married… he switched up. Not right off the bat, but some years in… he started trying to pressure me to quit my job, get off birth control, all this stuff that wasn’t the agreement, way before what we’d planned for that. And when I didn’t fold, he filed. Now he’s saying it was never supposed to go that far.”