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“This is so impossibly domestic,” Glenn said with a smile. “Who’d have thought I’d end up in your new flat in Edinburgh–”
“Hardly bandbox new, is it?” I interrupted, laying his plate in front of him. Only lasagne and a green salad, nothing too complicated but thank goodness his health kick only extended as far as cutting out coke and booze, rather than red meat, white meat, fish, dairy, ad infinitum.
When I’d checked up on his dietary requirements before doing this week’s grocery shop, he’d expressed appreciation that I’d think to check, but told me not to worry about it. “I live in a land surrounded by vegans who knit their own tofu, Afton,” he’d said. “I can hardly expect to have a one hundred percent healthy diet now I’m coming back to the Land of Heart Disease, Cancer and Strokes. Cook whatever you like, I’ll eat it. Just, er...don’t deep fry anything, please.”
“Don’t get used to it,” I cautioned, returning to the circular dining table near one of the balconies, with my own plate. “I’m willing to cook to welcome a guest, that’s all.”
“Oh, I don’t expect you to see to all the domestic duties,” Glenn assured me, digging straight in, probably grateful for the upgrade from airline food, no matter how passable he’d said it was. “I cook too, you know. It’s difficult not to become a bit obsessed with the ingredients of everything you eat, living in LA. I know it’s done with the aim of being super-healthy, but there’s something wrong about any kind of obsession, if you ask me.”
“Or addiction?” I ventured, not chancing eye contact, instead, choosing to concentrate on eating with delicacy and decorum. If I hadn’t had a guest, I’d have just grabbed the fork, used the side of it to slice through as many layers of lasagne as possible, and shoved it in my face, praying I didn’t spill any down my front. Napkins? Who needed napkins?
“Quite so.”
“Ooh, hark at you going all posh,” I said. “Give it a few days, you’ll be speaking Embra like a native again, with any luck. Don’t want the guests at your show to think you’ve gone all Hollywood. Speaking of which, how’s that going?”
“Mostly written. Well, I have a first draft,” he added with a shrug, leaning one forearm on the table as he used his fork with the other hand. Despite his casual posture, he still looked a little out of place, which was hardly surprising.
He’d slept for a few hours, and when I’d gone to wake him with a mug of coffee, I’d cautiously knocked on my own bedroom door.
Instead of telling me to come in, Glenn had come to the door himself. Thankfully dressed in casual joggers and a worn t-shirt. I hadn’t minded one bit that my bedroom was now officially, if temporarily, ‘his’. Stepping inside would be trespassing. He’d asked if he could have a shower while I cooked dinner, I’d told him he didn’t have to ask because as far as I was concerned, he was a house guest, not a prisoner.
And now, sitting across the dining table from me, he definitely looked refreshed. Rested and clean. But...as if he didn’t quite belong.
It was probably just a matter of time; one couldn’t expect him to put down roots on the very first evening we’d spent together in two decades although, of course, putting down roots was the very last thing he should consider doing. It wasn’t like he was coming back to Scotland to live. Only for a few weeks, after which he’d be returning to LA to wrap up the final few months of his show. I had yet to ask him what he planned to do after that, if he had anything else lined up. I suspected an extended holiday somewhere exotic would be called for; wasn’t that the standard procedure when a showbizzy person walked away, or was fired from, a long-term job? Either that or rehab, and Glenn had done his stint there. Several times over, in fact.
“It’s been a while since I’ve written an all-new routine,” Glenn went on. “Of course I did the odd gig here and there on weekends, or when I had time off from the show, but I could recycle. It wasn’t likely that someone at a gig in Las Vegas would fly to Seattle to see my routine again and complain that dude’s reusing material. I haven’t written anything new in nearly a year and that was only a ten-minute set. This is nearly an hour, and...well, it has to be more Scottish.”
“Definitely don’t want people thinking you’ve gone all Hollywood, then,” I said, bordering on teasing him. I wasn’t yet entirely at ease in his company although believed myself to be completely safe. Neither of us had settled down, yet. That would take longer than a few hours and one shared meal.
Strange, how I could be perfectly okay with having him to stay in my home, trust him one hundred percent, but still feel...itchy, almost. Ants in my pants, as the saying went.
“How is it?” I asked, and when he looked up to check what I meant, pointed with my cutlery at his plate. “The lasagne.”
“Not bad.”
“Only ‘not bad’?” I raised my eyebrows in pretend shock at his casual attitude toward my slaving over a hot stove.
“We can’t have you going all Hollywood, can we?” Glenn’s eyes sparkled as he spoke, perhaps testing the water. To see what brand of humour would be appropriate here. Anything to break the ice would have been welcome. “Now there’s a thing. Why did you never come over?”
“To the States? You know I lived there for most of the year, at one point.” At one point being an inventive way of saying when I was married, and my ex-husband’s work demanded it. Somehow, we’d juggled zipping back and forth across the Atlantic when I got an acting job in the UK but I’d got enough work in New York to make that only occasionally necessary. One would have thought having a husband with connections in the industry would make it easier to land roles, but Joseph’s were mainly in comedy; sitcoms and improv. I liked to think I’d have found work with or without him.
“No, I mean LA,” Glenn said, before taking another forkful of lasagne and resting his cutlery against the edge of his plate. Pausing the conversation for a few seconds, he chewed slowly, and I watched the motion of his jaw. Definitely leaner now, more angular than before, and dusted with a five o’clock shadow. I couldn’t help looking. I was only human.
In fact, it would be rude not to look at the person with whom I’m dining.
“Unless you did come over, and I never got to hear about it. Entirely possible, given the size of the population, but we no doubt have people in common, and I have met your husband after all,” Glenn added with a sly smile.
“Ex-husband, if you please.”
He reached for his mug of coffee; in lieu of wine to accompany dinner he’d gone back to caffeine. A minor addiction, compared to the others in which he’d indulged, and one for which he could be forgiven. No-one was a complete angel. “Yes. Ex.” And he set the mug down again, looking at me intently. “I was sorry to hear about that, by the way. The split, I mean.”
I rolled my shoulders in a parody of a shrug, poking at the salad with my fork. “That’s life.”
“What happened?”
“Jesus, Glenn. You don’t pull any punches, do you?” The butterflies in the pit of my stomach morphed into creatures a bit more nauseating, but perhaps that was a good thing. Talking about Joseph would give me something other than my past with Glenn to focus on. Of course, this unease was always going to happen, until we settled into a daily routine and Glenn’s show took him out of the house more often, but for now, explaining the circumstances of my divorce? An unwelcome distraction, but I’d allow it. “He was unfaithful,” I confessed, laying the cutlery down and wringing my hands together in my lap. Confessed, as if I’d been the one to commit the sin. But in my darker moments I’d fretted in case the shame was partially mine. If I’d failed him as a spouse. I still did, from time to time. Wondering if there was any way the breakup could have been avoided. If the infidelity could have been prevented.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean–”
“It’s okay. It’s natural to be curious.”
“I was nosey. Sorry, I crossed a line.”
“Well. It’s over now. Dealt with. Look around you.” I scanned the room as if seeing it for the first time, imagining how it looked through a visitor’s – a guest’s – eyes, keeping my hands clasped to avoid fidgeting, or the clattering of cutlery, or visible tremors. “I got this place out of it.”
“So it’s not all bad?” he ventured, lifting his eyebrows as if waiting for me to confirm, yes, it’s okay to make a joke at this stage.
“He didn’t put up much of a fight, to be honest.”
“No?”
“Well, he couldn’t, could he? He was the one at fault, and he wanted the divorce to be over with as soon as possible. So did I, really.”
“So...” With one hand, Glenn stroked his jaw, looking contemplative and hesitant all at once. “Neither of you wanted to...?”
“What?”
“I’m being nosey again.”
“I think we’ve established that.” And I managed a brief, if watery, smile.
“You didn’t want to stay with him?”
“I did, yes,” I confirmed, in a long, breathy sigh. An admission that made me sound tired, and I supposed I was. But I didn’t mind talking to Glenn about it. He’d been through a divorce too, though his reasons may very well have been different to mine.
We undeniably had a shared history but also a shared background. Perhaps discussing the demise of our respective marriages would give the conversation a you and me against the world atmosphere. No longer lovers, finding it awkward to cultivate a friendship, hell, maybe we could be allies?
“He was in Vancouver, I was in New York, and he called to...” Without planning the move, I rested my chin on the heel of my hand, curled fingers pressed against my lips while I considered how to continue. “He, uh, told me what he’d done, and that was that.”
“You make it seem very matter-of-fact.”
“It was and it wasn’t,” I finally managed to say. “The deed was done, and me, thinking he’d confessed because he felt guilty, asked during the fallout if there was anything I could say or do to save the marriage, and...he said no. I didn’t want to get divorced; I mean, who does, right? It feels like such a failure. You couldn’t even get that right, Afton. But once I realised his heart wasn’t in it, I figured, why try flogging a dead horse? Just get out. Move on.”
“You always were very practically-minded,” Glenn said. “What I mean is, doing what needs to be done.”
“Even if sometimes it’s not what I really want?” I replied, probably just fast enough for it to be described as snapping. “He didn’t want to stay in the marriage, so what was I supposed to do, make him stay?” And I shrugged, as if none of it really mattered, but the way the conversation headed made something in the pit of my stomach twist. There was something oh so familiar about putting up with the breakup of a serious relationship while the other party made a go of things in another country.
Of course, Joseph hadn’t stayed in Vancouver; he’d only been working there for a couple of weeks. Plus, because we were married and allegedly grown-ups, there had been a lot of legal red tape from which to untangle ourselves. He’d had to come home to New York whether he liked it or not, and risk me killing him.
I hadn’t, despite my overwhelming urge to make him feel the same pain I did. Slowly. Before feeding his body parts through a woodchipper.
In the end I’d decided seeing me accept things and make an effort to move on would be the best thing.
But I hadn’t wanted to get divorced. Every step of the way I’d wondered what I would do if he turned around and said, “Afton, I made a huge mistake, let’s work on things and stay together.”
Could you really bring yourself to stay with a man who’d put his penis inside another woman? I asked myself and my God, how bizarre that moment was, to contemplate the logistics of my ex-husband’s infidelity while sitting across the dinner table from a man who’d hurt me just as badly without, as far as I knew, ever being unfaithful.
It had taken actual, physical betrayal for Joseph to hurt me as badly as Glenn had with what I guessed could be termed abandonment. No wonder I was fucked up when it came to relationships.
“Being practical about it, sorting things out legally, gave me something to do. A way to channel my anger,” I admitted, while Glenn paused in his enjoyment of his meal and kept his eyes fixed on my face, no doubt watching for any change in expression. I could have acted my way out of it, but why bother? In truth it was a relief to speak to someone who had been through the same experience though maybe for different reasons, someone I’d known for years. Because even though there was a massive gap in our communication which destroyed any possible claim of it being a ‘relationship’ there still existed the simple fact: I trusted Glenn. And I didn’t even feel like I was being interviewed.
Maybe that was a trick he played on all his guests. Make them feel like they were at home chatting to an old friend.
And yet...we were at home. And he was an old...acquaintance. Of sorts.
“Can I ask you something?”
And I burst out laughing at the absurdity of a chat show host being cautious of making enquiries. “Sure, go ahead,” I said, waving off his concerns with a brief handwave.
He clasped his hands together in the parody of a prayer position, elbows on the table, the tension in his hands, wrists and forearms visible. He steepled his fingers, interlocked them, wrung his hands, fidgeted relentlessly before speaking again. “Was there ever a moment in the midst of it all when you thought, if he gave me one word, I’d call all of this off?”
Was he enquiring about my divorce, or his?
And good God, wasn’t this a heavy subject to discuss over dinner, our first proper face-to-face conversation in two decades? And not screaming at the top of our lungs, throwing stuff, breaking shit out of desperation to express our anger and hurt like people who had never grown out of the temper tantrum stage of emotional development?
“Probably.” I nodded. “Actually, yes. I’d look at him, or divorce paperwork or...God, this will sound sad, but wedding photos, and think, is this all a massive mistake? Am I overreacting? I often considered the possibility that Joseph was saying he wanted to leave and separate as a test, to see if I’d be willing to fight for him, but...” I scowled, and anger flickered in the pit of my stomach. “I hate being in relationships where there’s subtext. Say what you mean, mean what you say. And...” I hesitated, wanting and not wanting to give voice to the thoughts that jostled for prominence in case doing so hit too close to the bone.
“And...?” Glenn prompted, still not making any moves to continue with his meal. Almost as if listening to me were his priority. A nice feeling. An unusual one, these days.
“It’s very strange, speaking about this to you of all people,” I confessed, adding what I hoped was a lighthearted laugh. Even hinting at our relationship history made me shift uncomfortably in my seat. No, it wasn’t our history together that was the problem here, but our history apart. Alluding to our previous partnership could be fun, a bit of a joke, casual nostalgia.
But discussing the end of my relationship with Joseph? Too damn many similarities. Maybe that just showed a pattern of behaviour on my part.
Then again, two bad breakups by the age of thirty-eight showed I’d lived a little. I’d been willing to take a chance on being hurt for the sake of something greater.
“If you have to fight to stay in a relationship, should you even be in it?” I asked. Fuck it, the divorce was my truth and he’d asked. “I’m not saying marriage should always be easy but it’s a bit hard to stay married when the other person’s heart isn’t in it...and when their dick is in someone else.”
Glenn snorted in amusement, before looking down at his plate again, appearing almost shy, or perhaps regretful that he’d shown any amusement at the sad tale I’d related.
“I guess what I’m saying is, it’s a two-way street and you can fight for your marriage all you like, but if the other person doesn’t want you any more, you’re not their spouse; you’re a stalker.”
“Huh, tell me about it,” he groaned, before taking another bite of pasta.
“What do you mean?” I blurted out, before a second later reasoning, well, he asked about my marriage; it’s only fair I should be free to ask about his.
Whether or not I truly wanted to know.
“I was in a similar situation with Lorraine,” Glenn said once he’d chewed, swallowed, thought about whatever he was about to say.
I sent up a silent prayer of thanksgiving that I had been blessed with enough self-control to prevent myself visibly reacting to Glenn’s first in-person naming of his ex-wife. Naming someone made them more real and my present jitters made no sense. I had no right to feel resentful, but I did. It drew a line under my teenage self’s relationship with Glenn and while I acknowledged that made me a massive hypocrite, it didn’t change my feelings.
I’d moved on too...but, I reasoned, it had been Glenn’s fault we’d ever split in the first place, so if he felt uncomfortable at my speaking Joseph’s name, it was his own fault. My marriage to another man would never have existed were it not for Glenn’s addiction issues.
What next, Afton? I asked myself. You blame Glenn Peterson for the fact you’re now a divorced woman? Stop living in the fucking past; your life now is down to choices you made. No-one else.
Sometimes, my inner school ma’am could be a real bitch...but she spoke the truth. So I sat up straight, gave Glenn my full attention in the here and now. “How so?”
He rolled his shoulders, either in a shrug, or to ease tension. “She woke up one day and decided she didn’t want to be married to me any more.”
“What? But...” I bit my lip to cut off the rest of what I’d been about to say. But has she seen you? You’re Glenn Peterson. “Why?” I made no apology for being nosey; his earlier questions had set the tone. He was the professional interviewer (using a loose definition of the word ‘professional’, knowing him as I did). Let him lead the way.
“You know when there’s a growing distance in a relationship?” he asked, and my brow tightened into a frown.
No. No, I didn’t know. Both times in my life when I’d experienced a serious breakup, there had been no warning. Or in Glenn’s case, very little. The relationship hadn’t been healthy, but we’d been...I guess the correct term would be codependent. We’d fed into each other’s problems so deeply, what reason did I have to foresee this time, this fight, would lead to the end?
“Yes...?” I said, cautiously, nodding to indicate he should continue.
“It wasn’t like we spent a lot of time apart; we both lived in LA and with my show being in a studio, I had a set workplace, and she mostly worked nearby.”
“What did she do?” Maybe at some point I’d be able to bring myself to say her name, but not yet. It didn’t have to make sense; it was just the way I felt.
“Interior decorating. I thought at first that spending so much time in other people’s houses led to dissatisfaction in our own, but...” He sighed. “Who knows? You can’t read people’s minds or predict the future.”
“No, but if you know someone well enough to live with them, marry them even, there should be some kind of security there. The knowledge that they’ll actually speak up if there’s a problem.” I had no idea if I was speaking about Glenn and Lorraine or Joseph and me. “I mean, before it’s too late. Was there somebody else? Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I just said that. Shit. Shit.”
“Don’t worry about it. And no. No, I don’t think there was. At least when things first started to go wrong. We spent more and more time apart, and when we did end up in the same room, we fought, and I’d like to be dignified and say we fell out of love, but when she came to me and said she didn’t see the point in us staying married when it was becoming ever more plain that we didn’t even like each other, well, I couldn’t deny it. At times we couldn’t stand each other.”
“But why? What went wrong?”
Glenn shrugged, with a calmness that belied the truth of how bad the end of a marriage could be, even when it was the right thing to do. “I don’t think I could ever make her happy. Maybe it was my income level, or my job, or...who knows?”
“But if you don’t mind my saying so, and acknowledging that I hardly ever watched your show except when someone else in the room was channel-surfing...”
“Naturally,” Glenn said, with a casual hand wave and a forgiving smile.
“What on Earth is wrong with having your own talk show and the money such a position must bring?”
“I’m nowhere near as rich as you seem to think I am. Fuck, especially after the divorce.” He chuckled, looking surprisingly boyish for a man of nearly fifty. A smile, a genuine one, could make anyone look younger, but Glenn seemed to have cheated the passing of nineteen years in a completely natural way. He’d had no cosmetic surgery beyond dental work and even that wasn’t strictly cosmetic; it had been done to avoid pain or discomfort in the future and to repair any damage done by drug use and being punched in the face while said drugs had been used. Apparently being thrown out of nightclubs and landing on one’s face wasn’t a pain-free activity.
“But seriously,” he continued. “Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. You can’t make someone stay with you and even if you could...would you want to? Knowing they didn’t really want to be there?”
“No.” I shook my head, though the gesture was intended as an agreement. “That’s why I went ahead with the divorce in the end. Maybe I could have wheedled and pleaded, but...” I shuddered. “Where’s the dignity in that? It was just the shock of it, you know? It all came out of the blue.”
“Must have been hard. At least I had some warning. I knew things weren’t right with Lorraine. At one point – okay, several points – she accused me of cheating. Whether she genuinely believed it or not, I don’t know. Maybe she was just looking for an excuse.” He stroked his jaw with one hand, and his eyes lost focus as his fingertips worried at his bottom lip.
“And did you?” My words sounded rather more confrontational than I’d intended but there was no easy way to ask one’s ex-lover if he had cheated on the woman he’d later married.
Glenn’s eyes caught mine and he took his hand away from his mouth. A movement which gratified me, knowing what the body language of covering one’s mouth while answering a serious question meant. His lips formed a moue before he took a deep breath and spoke again. “No. No. I know we haven’t seen each other in years but you know me better than that, don’t you?”
“I used to.” I gave a one-sided shrug, raising my palm while the other hand rested on the edge of the table. “It’s been a while, and often people change. I mean, we both have, clearly. Look at us.”
“You can’t believe I’d be that sort of person or you’d never have invited me to stay here for a few weeks. Especially, er...given your history. If you believed I was that sort of man, the sort to cheat, I mean...you’d never have let me across the threshold.”
“Maybe I’m reserving judgement until I decide whether I want to poison you over dinner.”
“In that case I’m definitely not letting you do all the cooking.”
The conversation suspended, I pushed the salad around my plate for a second or two, trying to figure out how to phrase what I would say next. Even whether or not I should say it at all.
My fork clattering back down onto the plate, I took a deep breath and frowning, enquired of Glenn, “Did she hurt you?”
His gaze met mine again and there was a momentary pause before he gave a quick nod. Just one bob of his head before he uttered the word, “Yes.”
And my heart sank. Uncertainty about what I’d wanted to hear made speech impossible. Did I really, truly, want him to hurt? Yes, in a way. So that he could experience the merest smidgeon of what I had. Petty of me, maybe, but there it was. He’d hurt me and even though it had been so long ago, I hadn’t forgotten the intensity of it. The desire to lash out, to make someone else feel pain so that my own wouldn’t be so isolating.
I shook my head, smiling at my petty, teenage self. Those were the thoughts of a young woman who hadn’t fully emotionally matured yet. Rejoicing in someone else’s pain just because they had once hurt me?
Oh, for goodness’ sake, Afton. How old are you? Grow up.
But...I also resented any pain his broken marriage had caused because it meant someone else had had the power over him for which I had once longed. No-one could truly, truly hurt you unless you loved them, and Glenn loving another woman after me drew a thick, indelible line under the fact he’d moved on.
Massively hypocritical of me of course, but nobody ever claimed that hurt was ever logical.
“You get over it,” Glenn said, breaking the silence with four quiet words. “Eventually.”
“Do you?”
“Sure. Work. Friends.” He shrugged. “You realise it’s not the end of the world. Life goes on.”
“Plenty more fish in the sea, and all that?” I suggested, matching his smile with one of my own.
“You know me.” He grinned, and it reminded me of one of the looks he’d shoot to the camera after dropping a double entendre into a guest interview. “I’m almost a shark.”
“You have to keep moving to stay alive?”
“Touche.” He pointed at me with his fork. “What about you, though? How did you get over your divorce?”
Part of me wanted to snap back what makes you think I ever did but the truth was, he wouldn’t be here right now if I hadn’t. Not that I expected or wanted anything romantic to happen between us, but if I’d still been caught up on Joseph in that initial, heartbroken, desperate-to-feel-better kind of way that had marred the initial weeks and months after his infidelity, I’d probably not even have bothered replying to Glenn’s initial email. Or if I had, for the sake of politeness (and curiosity on my part about what on Earth he wanted) I’d have wished him well and gone back to whatever had occupied me before his first contact.
When I loved, I loved completely, and after Joseph had decided he didn’t want to be married to me any more and would rather stick his dick in that tart Taryn who’d worked on set in Vancouver, I’d forced myself to be pragmatic about it. There was no point in chasing after a man who didn’t want me any more and even if the day came and Joseph realised what a mistake he’d made, it would be like trying to see yourself in a broken mirror. You could mend it, sure enough, but your vision would be eternally spoiled by the cracks. They’d never go away.
I didn’t expect any marriage to be perfect, but the whole ‘forsaking all others’ thing? Yeah. That mattered.
The shrug I gave was a lie. A total lie. But it gave me a further moment or two to compose my answer. “Time, I guess,” I theorised out loud. “It’s a cliche, but...I knew we were done. I’m not saying it was easy, but I knew what I had to do and just...did it.”
Glenn raised his eyebrows. “And what was that?”
“Came back to Scotland. Ran away, basically. Which some people might say was cowardly, but I had to lick my wounds. Sure, I emerged once I’d gotten over the initial shock and started to feel angry. That’s when I flew back to America to start the divorce. In a way I wanted to do it before I changed my mind, which friends pointed out might have been a sign I was rushing into things, but what could I do, really? If someone doesn’t want you, they don’t want you.” I caught his eye, and something in the atmosphere made my spine ripple in discomfort. Not entirely sure we were talking about Joseph any more, I turned back to my meal. Or tried to. I didn’t feel hungry, but forced a bit of food down to avoid nausea or embarrassing stomach rumbles.
Good God, this situation was awkward. Although, given what I’d said about my broken marriage, I was clearly the sort of person to do things that were difficult just to see if I could cope. Initiate a divorce I didn’t truly want? Check. Invite an ex-lover to stay just to see if I could handle being under the same roof? Check.
“You know...” Glenn tapped the side of his plate with his fork, as if trying to work up the courage to say something. Contemplating exactly how he would phrase it.
And I found the courage to look up again, saw him bite the corner of his lip. But a dimple in his cheek illustrated how difficult it was for him to hold back a smile. Unusual, given the mood.
“I’m not sure how to say this, and it might be wildly inappropriate, given our history...”
Oh fuck. I didn’t know exactly why I felt sick, but sick I most definitely felt. Any reference to our shared past, while all but inevitable, forced me to confront feelings – including pain – I wasn’t ready for. Sure, I’d made Glenn welcome in my home, but I hadn’t thought we’d just jump straight in to hey d’y’remember when on the first night.
“Although,” he continued, “it’s only because of our history that I’m saying this at all–”
“You’re not making much sense,” I interrupted. “And you’re not saying anything, really.”
“No, but...you can kick me under the table if you like.” Without raising his head fully, he grinned, and though his smile made my stomach flip-flop, strangely, it also comforted me. If Glenn was smiling, then he wasn’t about to say anything too serious or difficult to deal with. “You know when I was interviewing Joseph?”
Oh. Oh, that. “Yes...?” With caution, I drew the word out into more syllables than I’d previously known were possible.
“And the only mention of you was in regard to ‘so you recently got married’ or what have you, tell me about her, oh we’re from the same town, but how’s she finding life in the States, yadda yadda yadda?”
I narrowed my eyes. “Right?”
“All the time he was talking about you, I was thinking...” At that point Glenn leaned back, kept a hold of his cutlery and smiled down at it, though unseeing. His eyes had glazed over as if the table and meal in front of him weren’t really there, and he’d lost himself in the past. “I was thinking,” he said, that grin spreading across his face making him look both evil and tempting all at once. Maybe those were the same thing. “I’ve had your missus.”