The meal was spectacular as usual, despite my inherent clumsiness when it comes to martini glasses and the utterly fickle nature of gravity. Thankfully we’d gotten the friendly waiter instead of the older, ham-handed woman who reminds me a bit of my mother. He didn’t seem to mind when, during a more heated spell of conversation, I stretched my hands to illustrate how many women in the city wouldn’t mind committing a few carnal acts with my boyfriend and subsequently knocked the glass on the floor. At least, the waiter didn’t mind. Tom made several clucking noises and then a few lewd eye movements focusing primarily on the waiter’s ass as he bent down to sop up the mess I’d made.
Typical Tom.
The conversation lapsed sometime around nine as our bodies fully realized the extent of the self-induced food coma. Tom was furiously texting some boy he was dating and I was lost in the thoughts about how much gym time I’d need to work off the all the cream in the crème brulee ramekin before me.
“You know that’s rude, right?” Tom said without looking up from his phone.
“What?”
“Being melancholy at the dinner table, for one. Major faux paus. You’re thinking about the elliptical again, aren’t you?” His Blackberry beeped again and I laughed.
“What about texting at the dinner table?”
“That’s only rude on a date,” he winked, but he did put the phone away. He then leaned into the table and put his arms up, fingers together in a psychiatrist’s steeple. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“Do about what?” I asked, oblivious, still doing leg reps in my mind.
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “About your man. You can’t be serious about thinking he’s cheating on you.”
I didn’t have an answer for that one. At least not a good one. I started to do a current relationship checklist tally in my mind. I’d been dating Aidan for two years. I’d met his parents and he met mine, we’d just spent a weekend in Atlantic City last month, and the sex was still explosive. I have the key to his apartment. We hadn’t had any serious conversations about where the relationship was headed, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Why did I think I was losing him?
Tom was reading the look on my face. “You’re still stuck on the ‘let’s talk about us’ bit.”
“Well, it’s been awhile. How long is too long before you’re supposed to stop talking dating and start meaning forever?”
“You’re such a cliché,” he grinned, then relaxed his arms, stretched, and took a forkful of his lemon layer cake. “I don’t know why you don’t just say something. Make some dinner reservations and surprise him or something, like a slow romantic evening, rose petals on the bed, the whole bit. Then after you’ve wined him and dined him and fucked him, sneak attack him with ‘Where’s my ring, bastard?’”
I giggled. “You know, you have a point.”
It turned out this was the advice changed my life forever.
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