Everyone Called Me His Girl, but He Said It Was Nothing novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: What Am I to You
At his mother's birthday dinner Rhea hears Gavin tell the table not to call her the future Mrs. Ames, then asks him in the car what she is to him, and gets out into the rain.
Adele Ames turned sixty-one that night, and her family took over the back room of a restaurant on the East Side to say so.
I sat at the long table beside my boyfriend, Gavin Ames.
His cousin Teddy had been drinking since the appetizers.
Teddy came around the table with a wineglass in his hand and a grin on his face.
"So, future Mrs. Ames," he said to me, "when is my cousin finally making it official?"
Everyone laughed.
"I mean it," Teddy said.
"We've been calling her that for years."
"Don't keep her waiting forever, Gavin," someone said down the table.
I stopped with my fork halfway to my mouth.
Normally I jumped in with a line.
He was slammed at work, I'd say, or we were in no rush, or I'd laugh and ask who wanted more bread.
Five years of that.
Tonight I didn't feel like helping.
Gavin was peeling a shrimp with his sleeves rolled to the elbow.
He looked up and caught me watching him, and he smiled.
"Stop calling her that," he said.
Teddy's grin slipped.
My heart gave one hard knock.
Then Gavin set the peeled shrimp on my plate.
"Keep it up and she might actually believe you."
The table went quiet.
I looked down at the shrimp and nearly laughed.
So that was the answer.
Five years in, and I was the only person in the room who'd been foolish enough to think we had a future.
Gavin's uncle Merritt cleared his throat first.
"Gavin's always had a lousy sense of humor," he said.
"Don't mind him, Rhea."
Teddy put his hand on his chest.
"Future Mrs.," he started, then caught himself.
"Rhea. Sorry. Bad joke."
"It's fine," I said.
I sounded fine.
I even stood up and served Adele her steamed sea bass myself, because rich food at night made her stomach flare.
I had asked the bakery to cut the sugar in her cake by a third.
I had driven across town that afternoon to buy her white tea, because the tea in her pantry left her with a bitter taste she hated.
I had done all of it for so long that I'd stopped noticing I wasn't an Ames.
I was Gavin's girlfriend.
From the head of the table, Adele looked at me, and then at her son.
Her face gave nothing away.
Heat climbed my neck.
She probably hadn't liked hearing everyone call me her future daughter-in-law any more than I liked hearing it now.
I lost my appetite.
The rest of the dinner went by without me.
Gavin kept on exactly as before.
He ladled soup into my bowl and waved away the waiter with the wine.
When a cousin passed me a dish of chili prawns, Gavin slid it out of reach.
"She can't have that, especially this late," he said.
A man laughed.
"You won't let us say future Mrs. Ames, but nobody takes better care of her than you."
Gavin only smiled.
Those small things had always been enough to settle me.
I had used them to explain everything else.
He loved me, but work was hard, and his family was complicated, and the timing wasn't right.
A man who remembered what I couldn't eat had surely thought about our future.
Sitting there, I finally saw that one thing didn't prove the other.
Knowing what I couldn't eat was not the same as wanting to marry me.
Dinner ended close to eleven.
Gavin had been drinking, so the driver took us home.
I sat beside him in the back and watched the streetlights slide past the window.
Gavin answered two messages from work.
Then he noticed me.
"Still thinking about dinner?"
I didn't answer.
He put his phone down and reached for my hand.
"Teddy was joking," he said.
"Why take them so seriously?"
Any other night, that and a squeeze of my fingers would have been enough.
I pulled my hand away.
He looked genuinely surprised.
"What's wrong?"
"What should they call me, then?"
"What?"
"If they can't call me the future Mrs. Ames, what should they call me?"
He hesitated.
"Rhea."
"I don't mean my name," I said.
"What am I to you?"
He frowned.
"My girlfriend."
"And after that?"
The car went quiet.
Gavin looked at me.
"There isn't an after that, Rhea," he said slowly.
"I never said there would be."
I told the driver to pull over.
"It's midnight," Gavin said.
"Where are you going to go?"
I stepped out onto the wet curb with my purse and my coat.
He lowered the window.
"Don't be dramatic."
"You'll come back by morning."
Then he added, "And anyway, you live in my apartment."
I shut the door.
My phone buzzed against my hip before the car had pulled away.
It was Adele.
"Rhea, dear, don't forget my tea at seven."
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