Chapter 3: The Unchaperoned Date
The wine bar was all soft edges and gentle noise. Exposed brick, low candlelight flickering in glass jars, the murmur of a dozen conversations layering over a playlist of acoustic covers. Dee arrived first, choosing a small table near the back. She placed her phone face down on the worn wood.
She’d texted Julian the day after the speakeasy fiasco. Sorry our friends bailed on us. Drinks, just us, no emergencies? He’d replied with a laughing emoji and a time.
This was the plan. The logical next step. Matt’s words in the car—think about why—were a bomb she had deliberately not defused. She’d left the device ticking in a dark corner of her mind. This date with Julian was the heavy blanket she was throwing over it. Smother the fuse.
She saw him come in, scanning the room. He wore a simple grey henley, jeans. He looked like a normal, incredibly handsome guy, not a character from a screen. He spotted her and his face broke into an easy, recognizing smile.
“You’re here,” he said, sliding into the chair opposite. “I half-expected a last-minute text about a hair emergency.”
“I thought about it,” Dee admitted, and they both laughed. It was a real laugh. This was good. This was normal.
They ordered a bottle of red. He asked thoughtful questions about her work, really listening to the answers. He told a funny, self-deprecating story about bombing an audition for a superhero role. “The director said I looked like I was trying to remember where I left my keys, not preparing to lift a tank.”
Dee giggled, sipping her wine. The warmth spread through her chest. He was clever. He was here. He was looking at her.
Then he reached across the table to lightly tap the back of her hand, emphasizing a point about terrible scripts. His skin was warm. Pleasant.
And her mind instantly, treacherously, supplied a comparison. Matt’s hands were longer, the fingers more tapered, a faint scar across one knuckle from a childhood bike accident. The memory of his touch in the car, brushing her hair aside, was so vivid it felt like a brand.
She pulled her hand back to pick up her glass.
“So,” Julian said, leaning back. His eyes were kind, perceptive. “The infamous Matt Bomer.”
The name in his mouth, here, now, felt like a violation. “What about him?”
“Just… context. You’ve known him a long time.”
“Seven years.” She focused on the ruby swirl of wine in her glass.
”Seven years is a long time,” Julian said. He swirled his own glass, watching her. “Creates a certain… density. Hard for anything new to get through.”
“Is that what you think you are?” Dee asked, forcing a teasing lilt. “Something new trying to get through?”
“I think I’m a guy having a drink with a fascinating woman,” he said, his gaze steady. “Who is currently about a thousand miles away.”
The accuracy of it hit her like a splash of cold water. She opened her mouth, an apology or a denial on her lips, but her phone, still face down on the table, buzzed violently. It skittered a half-inch on the wood.
Then it buzzed again. And again. A rapid, insistent sequence.
“You should get that,” Julian said, a faint, understanding smile touching his mouth. “Might be important.”
Flustered, Dee flipped the phone over. Natalie’s name glowed on the screen, followed by a torrent of notifications. The preview text for the first message was a solid block of capital letters.
She tapped the screen, unlocking it. The messages filled the display.
NATALIE: YOU DID NOT TELL ME. YOU DID NOT TELL ME HE KISSED LIKE THAT.
NATALIE: I JUST RAN INTO HIM AT THE CHATEAU MARMONT BAR. WE GOT TO TALKING ABOUT THE OTHER NIGHT.
NATALIE: ONE THING LED TO ANOTHER. DEE. DEE.
NATALIE: HE BACKED ME AGAINST HIS CAR. I AM NOT EXAGGERATING.
NATALIE: HIS MOUTH IS A NATIONAL TREASURE. A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. I AM SEEING GOD.
NATALIE: I AM SO SORRY BUT ALSO YOU NEED TO KNOW. WHY DID YOU NEVER SAY ANYTHING???
The words blurred. The warm amber light of the bar seemed to pulse, narrowing to a pinprick focused on the glowing screen. The noise of the room, the music, the clink of glass, it all drained away into a high, silent whine. A cold, sick sweat broke out instantly at the back of her neck.
“Dee?”
Julian’s voice came from far away. She could feel the blood drain from her face, a chilling emptiness rushing in to replace it. Her fingers had gone numb around the phone.
She saw it all with nauseating clarity. Natalie’s playful smile. Matt’s conflicted blue eyes from the car. The two of them, talking, laughing. The same charged tension he’d had with her, redirected, acted upon. Him leaning in. The shape of his mouth she’d imagined a thousand times, now pressed against her best friend’s.
HE BACKED ME AGAINST HIS CAR.
The image was a physical slash. She made a small, choked sound, entirely involuntary.
“Hey.” Julian’s hand was on the table, near hers, but not touching. His earlier perceptiveness had hardened into sober certainty. “Bad news?”
Dee looked up from the phone. The wine bar, Julian, the entire careful fiction of the evening, snapped back into focus with a brutal, ugly clarity. Her breath shuddered in her chest.
“It’s from Natalie,” she said, her voice stranger than she’d ever heard it. Thin and cracked.
She watched Julian piece it together. His glance at the phone still clutched in her hand, her pale face, the name. His expression softened, not with pity, but with a deep, resigned understanding. He nodded slowly, as if confirming a private theory.
“Ah,” he said, the single word holding a universe of finality. He leaned back and signaled for the check.
He leaned back and signaled for the check.
“You don’t have to—” Dee started, her voice still unsteady.
“Yeah, I do.” Julian’s tone held no room for argument. He looked at her, his gaze direct and without judgment. “This was never a date, Dee. It was an autopsy. And we just found the cause of death.”
The waiter brought the leather folder. Julian placed a black card inside without looking at the total. The finality of the gesture made something in Dee’s chest collapse. He was releasing her. He’d known the entire time.
Her phone screen had gone dark. She tapped it, and Natalie’s ecstatic, oblivious words glowed again, a brutal scroll of proof. Her thumb hovered over the keyboard. The hollow roar in her ears settled into a cold, precise silence.
She typed her reply with mechanical fingers, each tap a suture on a gaping wound. She did not let herself think. She just sent the words out into the digital void, a perfect performance of self-annihilation.
HOW COULD I SAY ANYTHING ABOUT THAT IF I NEVER KISSED HIM, NAT? BUT I AM TRULY HAPPY YOU HIT IT OFF. ENJOY ☺️
She placed the phone back on the table, screen down. The smiley face emoji felt like a smear of blood on the screen.
“You okay to get home?” Julian asked, slipping his card back into his wallet. His movements were efficient, clean. A surgeon closing up.
“I’m fine.” The lie was automatic. She was nothing. She was a hollowed-out shell vibrating with the phantom image of Matt’s mouth on someone else’s skin.
He stood, waiting for her. She gathered her purse, her coat. The wine bar’s warmth now felt cloying, the laughter from other tables intrusive and sharp. They walked to the door in silence, the unsaid words hanging between them like a solid wall.
On the sidewalk, the Los Angeles night air was cool and carried the scent of jasmine from a nearby hedge. Julian turned to her. He didn’t try to hug her.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, his hands in his pockets. “He looked at you the other night the way people look at things they’ve always had and are just realizing they can lose. It was painful to watch.”
He gave her a final, kind nod and walked away, blending into the flow of pedestrians. Dee stood frozen on the pavement. The meaning of his words warred with the evidence on her phone. The bomb in the dark corner of her mind wasn’t ticking anymore.
It had detonated.
She started walking, directionless. Her heels clicked a frantic, unstable rhythm on the concrete. The city lights smeared into watery streaks. She brought a hand to her sternum, pressing hard against the bone, as if she could physically hold the shattered pieces together.
A sudden, violent urge seized her. She yanked her phone out, her breath coming in short gasps. She opened her messages, scrolled past Natalie’s thread, and found his name. The cursor blinked in the empty field, a taunting pulse.
She typed three words: We need to—
Her thumb froze. She deleted them. The truth was a wave, rising and about to crash. She couldn’t send it here, standing on a street corner, unraveling. It required ground. It required looking him in the eye when the last of her pretense fell away.
She shoved the phone back into her pocket, swallowed the metallic taste of grief, and hailed a cab. The only thought solid enough to grasp was the destination: home. To bury the evidence, to scrub the imagined scent of him from her memory, or to finally, recklessly, call out the bomb-thrower himself.