A/N: Hope you enjoy reading this girls' night as much as I enjoyed writing it!
"First things first, do you have the power to bring back the Roasted Red Pepper Philadelphia?"
Karen had been the ice-breaker since Day 1 of their friendship-à-trois and years later, a meeting turned into cocktails and then countless hours spent talking, laughing, snorting, dreaming together the utter familiarity of her first move had the same comfort of the threadbare childhood blanket that still felt like home wrapped around her shoulders.
"Or more importantly, let's get that disgusting chocolate cheese cream off the shelves, shall we?"
"Eek, you're right that's definitely priority number 1. It's deceivably dense like pudding and at the beginning you feel like you're enjoying some hard-earned chocolate but then..."
"The cheese aftertaste is just vomit-inducing."
They had been already seated at their restaurant of choice and she had been arranging their bags comfortably in their "bag-seat" when Karen and Julia had gone off their usual post-new-client tangent. Two customers jokingly ready to take over the companies with their marked preferences.
"How is it that I systematically have to repeat that I don't actually decide for my clients?"
She would never openly vocalize how entertaining and hilarious she found those tirades behind her annoyed front. And yet they pursued because they knew. Friendship was all about knowing without the effort of always sharing.
"You have to repeat it because it's not believable."
Julia interrupted her moment and continued the conversation while actively perusing the menu with the attentive eye of the picky eater that she had always been.
"Right, you just don't scare them enough. Be more like me, I use the fear of death to get patients to stay off fries all the time."
That certainly had to be one of the most intriguing perks and tragedies of being a cardio-thoracic surgeon. Fear of death actually worked. But Karen could not get off easily like that. Not when she happened to be the greatest fries enthusiast she had ever met.
"It clearly doesn't work on you."
"Excuse me, I don't remember ever being on an O.R. table recently."
"Not even with Broody Max, the travelling research fellow?"
Karen looked to her menu in response. YES. She had always known something had happened there but the details had been scarce. Not anymore. She would transform Julia's assist into a simple goal.
"Oooh, Broody Max. You never told us what happened with him."
"Not even with Broody Max. Martha, the person in charge of sterilizing the O.R.s would have my head."
"But outside the OR?"
"I will say that not all the places in the hospital are so well-controlled."
The air of confidence that emanated from Karen whenever she decided to fess up to something had always mesmerized her. She owned her actions with glee and always a little bit of pride.
She and Julia shared a look before chorally stating the obvious.
"We knew it."
A feline smirk was the only response Karen gave before taking control of the conversation.
"Enough about me, let's put the spotlight back where it deserves to be: on Emma."
They both stared at her with the expectant eyes of who is pre-tasting the treat that was sure to be served. She had promised after all. But point blank she did not know where to start to explain to them what exactly had happened during the last three days. She made a weak attempt at buying some time.
"What happened to our dinners being spotlight-sharing events?"
"When Emma is right, she's right, let's share."
Karen turned to Julia and addressed her.
"Did you finish the code you were working on last week?"
"Not yet."
"Was the number of approaches attempted on you by the over-reaching neighbor this week lower, equal or greater than the number of times you've been asked to move to California?"
"I'd say lower. Either his imagination only goes so far or someone in Palo Alto is really intent on me being a less virtual presence there."
"Were any of them successful?"
"Nope. Ethan, poor boy, has no chance and I still value my fair skin and the changing of seasons over a bigger office."
Julia moving to San Francisco was one of her and Karen's recurring nightmares. The three of them knew that career opportunities were always a threat to their physical unit. It was a drawback of their shared success and of the world recognizing just how uncommon the members of their close-knit group were. Julia's indispensability and her substantial aversion to the Californian mono-season had been enough to preserve the equilibrium but there would come a time in which her bosses would be able to find the magic conditions to lure her away from Chicago. Until that time, they made a recurring joke of it.
"And when it comes to me, I have practically spent the last week in the O.R. at the side of the table. Voilà, ma chère, all done. Instead, to my right here, we have someone who dumped her longtime boyfriend, picked up a guy and won Kraft Foods. So the floor is all yours."
She nodded. It was time to mold her life into something resembling a proper shape.
"Order?"
"You know the rule."
"Save the best for last. Ok. Fine..."
She actually had no doubt on the topic she would start with but the waiter arrived to take their order so as to give her choice a moment of tense delay. When he was gone, not before eyeing the three of them a handful of seconds more than what she considered to be proper, she continued.
"So Tom."
"Tom it is."
"How could he do that to you?"
She loved that Julia's question hadn't been the customary "What happened?". She had relayed the gist of her break-up via email and they weren't pressing for the exact scene to be replayed in front of them. They were puzzled and genuinely incensed which was exactly the support she was looking for.
"I don't know."
Never an answer had been more truthful. She couldn't wrap her head around how her Tom had turned into the kind of man she had always steered away from. Into the kind of man who had been her expertly-designed match until her star started to burn a little brighter than his.
The waiter brought their bottle of wine and started pouring. Normally her wine glass would remain untouched, to Karen's outraged rant that her taste buds should be taught to appreciate wine and Julia's mere shrug. For some reason, wine just wasn't her type of alcohol. That night, in a complete turnaround, she asked for it to be filled more. To the credit of both her friends, nobody said a peep.
"I really don't. It's not like he didn't know that we were going after Kraft. He was one of the few people I told outside the office and he still accused me of sleeping with my boss from NY. My married boss from NY."
It aggravated her, that it had been at such a delicate and potentially key period of her professional path. She gulped the wine, hoping to calm down. Julia waited for her to pose the glass before intervening.
"He is such an encoding error."
"And an anencephalic waste of organic material."
The discipline-specific insults had been born out of Julia's attitude to reduce real-life situations to logical fallacies in computer programs. Karen had been delighted to open her treasure-chest of Latin-inspired, obnoxiously long words and she in turn had finally found use for the visual matrixes in her marketing classes. Not one of their men had been spared from having a mostly incomprehensible moniker.
"It's our fault."
"What?"
"Julia is right. Our vetting process was clearly faulty and not thorough enough."
"Inability to cope with the success of the better half is difficult to detect in reality but that's no excuse. We have been too benevolent towards Tom. He fooled us and you do know what that means. We can be painstakingly deadly in our revenge."
"Oooh, yes, Emma. Please let us. I've got a new and oversized refrigerator full of experimental drugs."
"And I have been wanting to give someone's digital identity a malignant brush for way too long. Tom is the perfect candidate. Did you have something in particular in mind? Should I make him into a staunch Tea-Party supporter? One of those anti-evolution, science is the root of evils people?"
Julia's excitement was contagious and her spirited, devilish side was always such a welcome part of her when there was righteous anger to be somehow dispersed. After the waiter had brought them their dinner, all three of them launched into the definition of the new and worsened Tom.
"He could be a Bieber fan!"
"Or a Real-Housewives watcher!"
"He could belong to the great Church of Scientology!"
At that last comment her broad smile turned into a chuckle and the chuckle paved the way for a liberating bout of laughter. Karen and Julia followed her lead, and they managed to attract the attention of the tables around them with their unrestrained indulgence in their would-be punishments.
She grabbed the napkin to dry the tears from her eyes and recover her breath.
"As entertaining as the prospect is, I'll give him a chance to miss me and realize just how mistaken he was in not wanting to share my success."
"What are you going to do when he realizes and comes begging forgiveness?"
Karen asked.
"And he will, no doubt about it."
Julia added as the immediate afterthought.
"If he comes begging forgiveness, I'll let him talk and enunciate all the reasons for which he was wrong, I'll let him apologize and I'll let him beg. And then I'll impolitely invite him to never again darken my life. He had his second chance after our huge fight two months ago. Too bad he wasted it so ingloriously. He should have known that nobody gets a third chance from me."
"Hear, hear!"
The glasses clinked for the end of her relationship with a man that did not deserve anything but her sneer. Two bites were all she was allowed before being prompted on continuing the tale she had started to spun.
"Let's go back to the story. So, to quench the rage..."
"I went to that bar near the gym, you know the one."
"Why didn't you call us?"
Karen had always been adamant on them being a support system that existed for whatever circumstance.
"Because... I don't know. I just wanted to put him out of my mind."
"We wouldn't have stopped you."
"I know but..."
Julia came to her aide.
"You just needed to get laid."
"Yes I did."
"And..."
"And, I saw Isabel there."
She was met with clueless faces. Indeed, without the clear indication of the woman in question, she wouldn't have been able to place her either merely by her name.
"Isabel who?"
"You remember the girl that subbed at the gym when Elle had her baby?"
"The one that wanted me to get a heart-tattoo to symbolize the fact that I work with hearts?"
Julia had to stop herself from spluttering wine all over the table.
"Seriously?"
"I'm not even kidding. It was that one time Emma was sick and you had to run out to get to the video-conference with your Californian bosses. She approached me and asked if I wanted it. I can't believe I didn't tell you girls."
"Well, you didn't."
"She would have suggested you get a computer tattooed somewhere."
"Sure, that would have shot up to the very top of my list of priorities."
"I was alone with her one time, but she never suggested anything in detail. I guess that advertising is too abstract a concept."
"It is."
"Well, anyway, she was with this man and he piqued my interest."
The four eyes in front of her sparkled with approval and curiosity.
"You took the date away from Instructor Tattoo?"
"I did."
"Did she realize it?"
"Or did she shrug and offer a discount for a couples' tattoo?"
"She did realize it. I wasn't exactly subtle."
"I would have paid to watch that."
"He should so thank you."
"He really should. Anyway, we have been having sex ever since."
"Ever since, huh? What has it been, a grand total of two days?"
Karen asked, while signaling for a new bottle of wine.
"Yes, two nights. And today after my triumph."
"Really? He already got you ditching work celebrations?"
Julia this time, from her other side but the mischievous tone was one and the same.
"I didn't ditch anything. I took a late lunch."
"Fair enough."
"So what are your plans with lawyer guy?"
"I'm partial to the word counselor myself."
Both nodded, and Karen added her own elocution of the word, letter by letter.
"It does roll off the tongue much better."
"I know."
"What's his name, anyway?"
"Your message didn't say. We only know him as Larry-Paulesque-bar-lawyer."
They were right. That had been the only indication she had given them in the email she had been writing while Will had woken up in her bed for the first time.
"Will Gardner."
"And where does he work?"
"He has his own law firm: Lockhart/Gardner."
"Is that Lockhart as in Diane Lockhart?"
Leave it to Julia to immediately pick up a detail that it had taken her a Google search to remember.
"Yes."
"She's was at the Emily's List luncheon in Chicago. I love the prospect of having her as the next State Supreme Court Judge"
"I know and me too."
"I don't think we actually ever met her personally."
Karen interjected and confirmed what she had immediately believed. She had seen Diane Lockhart from afar but never actually talked to her.
"No, we didn't. But I'll probably meet her now."
She realized her mistake from the instantaneous and contemporaneous double question.
"What?"
"So this is not just a rebound hookup?"
She had scared herself with how easily the idea had flown right out of her mouth. She wasn't looking to blowing whatever she had with Will out of proportion but the fact that he had been partner for a long time with a woman that she and her friends respected had won him quite a lot of points. Plus, she had no immediate intention of truncating their arrangement. It wasn't out of the realm of possibilities for her to meet Ms. Lockhart. She wasn't over-reacting. Was she?
"Well..."
"That good, eh?"
She felt a familiar heat pooling in her cheeks and hopefully they wouldn't tease her mercilessly for the blush that she was certainly sporting. She couldn't deny that on day 3, she had stopped using Will merely to forget Tom. There was something more there. What, precisely, was still hard to say but the experience was too thrilling to be discarded simply as a breakup-induced hookup.
"He is..."
"A love machine?"
All three of them liked their Broadway musicals. And this time the line Julia had selected and sung in a low tone of voice was particularly accurate. Will was, at the very least, talented. Unsurprisingly Karen kept going with the next verse, her mouth forming a teasing "o".
"Oh he makes you dizzy."
Yes, Will had indeed demonstrated that he possessed that ability. She, however, had a mirroring one and she loved to use it to watch him squirm. She didn't drop the Mamma mia! theme and instead sang her part.
"Honey, honey let me feel it, ah-hah"
The three of them laughed again and it filled her with a sense of pride that she could feel like this three days after having been grievously harmed.
"And it's not just that. He's fun and smart and he plays well with my obsession for the perpetual bantering."
"You like him."
Julia sentenced. And there was no point in denying the truth. She did like Will. Maybe a little too much.
"Yes, you do. And it's a problem why?"
"Who said it's a problem?"
Her question was redundant. Her friends could read her tea leaves with easiness.
"Do we look as gullible as most of your customers?"
"You darkened there for a second."
It was possible that she had. When he was just a night-prospect at the bar, the fact that Will had seemed to have an history had made him mysterious, the perfect prospect. Out of that context, history became baggage.
"He's wounded."
"Meaning?"
"I don't know exactly. The night we met he said that friendship is all false advertising."
"He's clearly mistaken."
Karen again. She had always puffed her plumes a bit about the fact that it had been her outspokenness that had brought them together and created the friendship they all relied upon. Julia and herself had always been thankful in that regard.
"I know but it made him interesting, that night. It's actually what attracted me in the first place. That we were both complicated looking for simple."
"And you're wondering how that survives outside the bubble of simple one-night-stand?"
"Exactly."
"What's your hunch?"
"What?"
"It's not like you to over-think something like a one-night stand. After your first night with Tom, you were totally dismissive of the possibility of you two getting together. You had an instinct. What's your instinct now?"
Julia had hit the nail right on its head. There had been an instinct with Tom and she had stupidly ignored it. There had been some magnetic pull with Will but she had also developed a nagging sensation that he was more broken that he let on.
"I think his wound is deeper than mine."
"So what?"
Karen blurted out before she could truly elaborate.
"You're not the nursing type, Emma. You will run at the first sight of you having to mother him or put back the pieces. But give him at least the chance to heal him on his own before moving on."
"You're not usually so positive with my new conquests."
"I'm not saying that he won't be vetted if this thing goes forward, and this time without reserve. But when you had that huge fight with Tom you were devastated while now you can laugh about him three days after the break-up. It could be our incomparable company, it could be you unconsciously being prepared for the break-up, it could be this Will, it could be the most-sold cream cheese in the country but you shouldn't mess with recipe, just in case."
"Karen is right. You're probably right about him but don't over-worry until this hunch has legs. And if it turns out that it does, it's something in his recent past. If he's not a Luddite, his recent past exists somewhere in the digital world and I will find it. And then we can discuss whether the wound is too deep."
Her friends always manipulated her like a puppet and, on evenings like that one, she loved them for it. There would probably be weeks to obsess over what had ailed Will. In the meantime, anxiety over Will for the moment quelled, she moved to the topic she had been wanting to discuss with them ever since she had experienced the epiphany for how to win over Kraft Foods.
"Fine. You're both right. We'll see where it goes with him and revisit the situation. Can I gush now about the awesome ad campaign that got me into the graces of the cheese executives?"
The answer was unanimous.
"Hell, yes!"
She returned home late and tipsy, her lips turned up while she maintained an online conversation with the two people she had left just minutes before, prolonging the fun of the evening. In her warm sense of beatitude, the chilly voice made for a stark contrast.
"I thought I'd bring back your stuff in person."