Happily Never After

“IS SHE GOOD?” I asked, looking away from the TV and at the objector, who’d tossed a drunk Asha over his shoulder and carried her to bed after she fell asleep on a barstool and nearly toppled to the floor.

Max quietly closed the door to the master bedroom behind him, nodding. “Already snoring.”

I didn’t know what to make of the objector in terms of whether or not he was a good person, but I was having a great time with him. He was down to an untucked dress shirt, no tie, and no shoes, and he’d thrown back drinks with us as if he’d always been a part of our friend group.

Well, technically I didn’t have a “friend group”—Asha was basically my only friend, and the rest of the bridal party had been Stuart’s people, but still.

I glanced back at the movie and rolled my eyes as Cameron Diaz started crying in the back of a car. “This is when she loses her mind and thinks it’s a good idea to give up everything for a man, just because he made liquid form in her tear ducts.”

Max plopped down on the couch beside me and kicked his feet up on the coffee table. “Did Stuart ruin The Holiday for you?”

I turned my head, and he was watching me with amusement in his dark eyes. He really had a nice face, I thought as I said, “God, no. The Holiday ruined The Holiday for me.”

“Not a fan?”

“I hate rom-coms.”

“For real?” he asked with raised eyebrows.

“They’re just so unrealistic, as if written by morons who’ve been injected with lovesick hopefulness and had delusions of romance shot up their asses.” Am I slurring? “They’re actually part of the problem, if you ask me.”

He grabbed the can of nuts from the table beside him, set it on his stomach, then tossed a walnut into his mouth. “What is the problem of which you speak? Love?”

I rolled my eyes and grabbed a nut. “Love isn’t the problem. The problem is the way society promotes it as if it’s the only thing that matters in life when it doesn’t even exist.”

“I’d say, ‘Who hurt you,’ ” he said, leaning his head farther back, throwing a peanut high into the air, then catching it in his mouth. “But seeing as I was recently bitch-slapped by your ex-fiancé, I actually have the answer.”

“Stuart didn’t hurt me.” I bit into a walnut and shook my head, still smoldering with rage over everything that happened, the horrible choices I made. “He pissed me off and made me want to beat him to death on the altar of our Lord, but he did not hurt me.”

That made him quirk an eyebrow. “Come on. It’s okay.”

“Oh, I know,” I said, meeting his doubtful gaze and sitting up straighter. “But it’s true. I absolutely knew he wouldn’t be faithful. I made the mistake of thinking marriage might be a good idea because of logical reasons, but Stu’s cheating neither surprised nor hurt me.”

He stopped chewing. “You expected your fiancé to cheat?”

“Max, I have been cheated on by every single person I’ve ever committed to, beginning with that brace-faced trumpeter—Jack Snook—way back in the eighth grade.”

A pitying look crossed Max’s face, and I held up a hand to stop him from speaking.

“And before you say something nice and placating, like ‘they were idiots,’ please know that I don’t take their idiocy personally. I know they were idiots and it had nothing to do with me.”

He raised his eyebrows in a gesture that encouraged me to continue.

So I did.

“Because it’s a crock, this notion of The One. One person you’re meant to spend your entire life with, happily together until you’re dead? That doesn’t even make sense. It’s a myth, and the reality is that every single human has the potential to cheat if put in the right circumstances.”

“Wow.” He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “You really mean that.”

“I do.” I turned a little on the sofa, for some reason compelled to make him understand. I didn’t know his backstory, but the fact that he ruined weddings for money led me to believe he might actually get me. “I strongly suspect that love is a trick your brain plays on you to encourage procreation. Survival of the species and all that. Serotonin and hormones go to work, and it’s all just propaganda to make us keep trying for magic that doesn’t exist.”

“You can procreate without love. And what about couples who are happily married for fifty years?” He turned his body as well so we were face-to-face on the fancy hotel sofa. “Who’ve never cheated. How do you explain that?”

“Luck, character, and hard work.” I shrugged and said, “My grandparents are like that; happily married for forty-seven years. But the thing of it is, ‘true love’ is just a label we stick on highly functioning partnerships to perpetuate the myth.”

“Continue,” he said, half smiling like he found my theories amusing.

“It’s kind of like finding a good friend or a good roommate—which was what I was shooting for with Stuart. My grandparents like each other, get along well, and have found a way to comfortably live together and build a life. It’s wonderful, but that doesn’t mean it’s ‘true love.’ ”

“What’s the difference?” he asked, rubbing a hand over his chin and giving me really intense eye contact, like he’d never heard anything as interesting as what I was saying.

“The difference is that they each could probably reach the same agreement with someone else if they wanted to. They aren’t soulmates, they’re two compatible people who’ve found a way to make life together work. Which, really, doesn’t mean anything very special at all.”

“Hmm,” he said, his lips pursed, and I couldn’t tell if it was the sound of agreement or dissent. So I pushed forward, on a mission to prove the point I’d been thinking about constantly since the Stuart debacle.

“There are seven point eight billion people in the world,” I said, shaking my head at the absurdity. “How can you ever be sure you’ve found the one ‘true love’ of your life when you haven’t even met one percent of the people on the earth? You could have the exact same relationship with millions of them as you do with your significant other, simply because of compatibility.”

“That’s fair,” he murmured, even though I didn’t think he fully agreed with me. “So then do you include your grandparents in your everyone-has-the-potential-to-cheat scenario?”

“Absolutely,” I said, nodding. “I don’t want to dwell on it because ew, but even Don and Mabel would cheat if presented with the right chemistry and opportunity.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Hmmmm.”

“What does ‘hmmmm’ mean?” A giggle gurgled out of me, the seriousness of our conversation juxtaposed over serious tipsiness. “You don’t agree?”

“Honestly,” he said, his dark eyes narrowed as he looked somewhere past my shoulder, like he was lost in thought. “I have no fucking clue.”