“What things?” Amanda asks.
“Those typey-typey things. You know, that court reporters use.”
“Oh, good question,” Leigh Anne says, and the others murmur that they don’t know, and then someone ventures a guess, and someone else digs for her phone to look it up, and the conversation deflates until Megan reappears, dragging Sebastian with her.
“Sebastian wants to say hello!” Megan announces brightly, though his expression makes clear that this is patently untrue. He does say hello though, making eye contact with an air of painful duty, his mouth a flat unhappy line. His eyes are as pretty as they looked in the photos Jennifer saw, maybe more so. They’re one of those unreal colors, a green so pale and shimmery you think there must be contacts involved. He should just shave his head, because his patchy hairline mars the effect of those eyes, while baldness would probably augment it. But possibly Megan doesn’t want the effect augmented. Who knows to what uses he puts his powers. Jennifer shakes his hand, giving him a firm grip, a brisk “Nice to meet you.”
“He wants us to be careful not to be too loud,” Megan says. “He just finally managed to get Ben down.”
Sebastian shoots his wife a look, and Jennifer wonders which one of those statements annoyed him. Does he not like her unmasking him as a scold? Or does he not like the implication that he mismanaged Ben’s bedtime? It’s nine, a little late for a child that age, not that Jennifer is one to talk. She’s only just arrived at the party mostly because she lingered at home coaxing Milo into bed, while the teenage babysitter Megan recommended sat on the couch texting furiously. “Well,” Megan says mildly, in response to his look, “I didn’t say the request was unreasonable.”
“No,” Sebastian says. “You didn’t say that.”
“I’m a little drunk,” Megan tells everyone, lifting her glass. Amanda lifts hers, too, and they clink, and Sebastian frowns.
“What are you drinking, anyway?” he asks Megan.
“Vodka!” she says.
“Is that a good idea? Vodka? Why not beer? Why not wine?”
“Oh, sweet,” Megan says. “He’s worried I’ll have a hangover.”
“She sometimes gets carried away with vodka,” he says. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been with her on a martini night . . .”
“What does carried away mean for our mild-mannered Megan?” Amanda asks. “Will she dance on a table?”
“Dancing on tables is apocryphal,” one of the others says. “No one ever dances on a table.”
“Megan might,” Sebastian says grimly, and there’s a brief enigmatic silence.
“Well,” Megan says in a small voice, looking into her drink.
“Just take it slow,” Sebastian says.
“Okay, honey,” she says.
Just as Jennifer thinks he’ll make an exit—turn on his heel is the phrase in her head—he startles her with a flash bomb of a smile. Oh, look what’s in his arsenal! Suddenly all the women are smiling back at him. Even on Jennifer’s face, a traitorous, responsive smile. “Have a good time, ladies,” he says, and then he does indeed go, and they all watch him walk away.
“He doesn’t like me to drink,” Megan says sheepishly. “He thinks I’m embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing to yourself?” Jennifer asks. “Or embarrassing to him?”
“Both I guess,” Megan says. And then, in a rare display of waspishness: “But mostly to him.”
“What’s he afraid you’ll do?” Amanda asks. “Besides dance on the table?”
“Oh, say something stupid,” she says. “He especially hates it when I get facts wrong. Like, I relate something I read on the Internet, but I get part of it mixed up. He hates that.”
“Why?” Amanda asks.
Megan shrugs. She’s starting to look sad now, and Jennifer thinks the conversation should probably be over, even if she has a nagging urge to insist on its continuance. “Some people see their spouses as separate from them,” Megan says. “And some people see their spouses as an extension of them, and that informs their attitudes and behavior.”