“I think he might still have feelings for me.”

“You’re kind of like, my first.”

A relatively easy deflection and a relatively genuine laugh –a glance from far away maybe sees a couple in a moment. He was bored, her shoes uncomfortable and she wants to make this work. She wants to fit this. And secretly she’s always taken pleasure in a little lying, her preferred poison of pranking.

So she takes a second to be part of what she thinks is a real couple and she feels proud of him for securing the basketball game. It’s the kind of opportunity he would have killed for. She thinks of all the cocktail parties she spent alone, making small talk with these men, trying to ignore their wandering eyes while he was off securing friendships that never fully materialized. She wonders now how she never before sensed the desperation in his handshake.

"What the hell, have you dated like every guy here?”

“So none of them?”

It takes her exactly one glass of wine to realize how sad it is that he doesn’t know her enough to guess what’s true; Sadder still to realize how he might not really want to know.

“Well it was before I knew you, so, it's fine."

She wasn’t hoping for jealousy. She was waiting for him to discover that he just didn’t know. That he had never even asked. That she could answer that question any way she wanted and deep down it wouldn’t matter. The honest answer started at the beginning, only Drake, during the separation.

The footsteps on the stairs. The ex, in their bed. Smirking.

She rationalizes that “none of them” referred to all the other men at the party, odd acquaintances from her last cocktail party era, and decides to assume he meant the same. It was an attempt to push him a little that seemed only to disgust him a little –a prank in disguise, to cover her tracks a little.

She is playing at ridiculous but she doesn’t want to be stuck being what he wants rather than what she is. Ok yes, she got involved with a man who was separated from his wife. Retrospectively a very stupid decision but she was young and he was persistent and she believed that love. She doesn’t want him to see her now as tainted. She already had to suffer her own punishment. So she keeps going, keeps pushing and turns her past into a joke –something they can laugh at together, since that's what he seems to need.

Because he loves his pranks. And although she knows that she is sometimes helpful she also gets the feeling he is condescendingly accepting her help, that she isn’t quite doing anything right. She feels like he is doing her a favor, which might be fair since she views pranking as a favor to him half the time. The other times it's a strategic defense.

A cell phone hand off. Sombreros. Giggling.

So here she is kind of pulling her own prank and the second he walks away she knows it doesn’t quite fit right. He seems surprised and the laugh seems genuine but her execution is a little off, the idea too desperate, too based in her own history and insecurities to be legitimate. He never laughs with her the way he laughs with her.

So when he walks away she can’t even tell if he thinks they just had a little moment or if they are just one step farther apart.

Across the party she can see the ex -the wife -smirking, while giving him the once over as he crosses the party to the basketball court. They make eye contact but this time she can’t hold it. She doesn't want to know that person anymore. She finishes her glass of wine and tries to disappear into the crowd, looking for one of the friendly male faces to distract her for awhile.