“Great! Well, my name’s Jimmy and I’ll be taking care of you guys today. Can I start you out with something to drink?”

Carolyn bit her lip and looked at me with a face full of concern. Though we had gotten into plenty of arguments over her ex in the months we’d been together, and while certain reminders of her past still bothered me most days, I would have been fine then if I only had the server’s name to contend with. But then there was Carolyn’s fearful veneer to go with it, staring at me as though she expected me to be riled, and maybe even hoped for it. I sighed and asked for a Grand Marnier neat while Carolyn ordered a soda. I was already tense from walking the length of Michigan Avenue, but by assuming that something as simple as meeting a man named Jimmy would incite within me the petulance of an irritable child, Carolyn caused my tension to grow.

“Jimmy,” I said with disgust.

“Stratton, please don’t.”

“Carolyn, I don’t give a shit that the server’s name is Jimmy,” I said, which might have been true at first, but hearing the name roll off my tongue made me realize I was wrong. I suddenly did care.

I glared across the table, and seeing Carolyn sit cross-legged in a dainty way as though emulating how she believed a lady was supposed to sit suddenly brought to mind crisp images of her ex-boyfriend, a tattoo-covered, thugged-out douche bag with a pencil ’stache, banging my girlfriend in every square foot of their filthy little apartment. We had never once talked about her past sex life—and by this I mean the actual details of it (not that I didn’t want to know, because some part of me—the masochistic side, perhaps—truly did want to know)—or her relationships before me, but in my mind the images I saw were as real as the cold and the wind outside. So vivid that I could almost hear the way Carolyn must have moaned beneath him. I couldn’t shake the damn things away, and they kept coming, the two of them going at it in bed, in the shower, on the floor. Why did her past even matter? What about my own? Surely hers couldn’t be as bad as mine. But it didn’t matter, and that was the worst part. I could have slept with a thousand women instead of just twenty-one and I’m certain these same thoughts would still drive me insane.

“Are you okay?” Carolyn asked.

“Yes.”

She reached across the table and placed her hand atop mine. “Hey,” she said, and shook my hand until I looked at her. “What’s the matter?”