Chapter 12 Fancy Cute
Chapter 12
Fancy Cute
E ven though Chloe wanted space from me, post-emergency, with a weekly brunch on the calendar and a group chat that rarely went silent, I wasn’t sure how I could fully give her what she wanted. My previous habit of participating just enough on the text thread to let people know I was alive and definitely Chloe’s girlfriend and not someone involved in a long con of a shenanigan was tougher to manage now that people addressed me directly and asked me specific questions about brunch ideas and wanted my opinion on the latest season of Selling Sunset , for example. I managed to skip out on a brunch, citing nonexistent preexisting plans with friends, and did my best to reduce my number of responses on the thread in general. If I couldn’t fully disappear from Chloe’s life until the wedding events began, I could at least make myself as invisible as possible.
Since I knew that Greg and Marisol had definitely been managing the lion’s share of party planning, I offered to fully handle the invitations. The custom order conveniently arrived on a Friday night when the group chat had turned to talk of a last-minute drinks-and-dinner hangout, and even though I’d been eyeing the stack of cards and envelopes next to the long list of invitees, feeling like my guilt might have made me bite off more than my poor penmanship could chew, this was a convenient get-out-of-plans card to play. Now I had no reason not to order in a bunch of garbage food that no one else could watch me consume, crank up my favorite Broadway playlist, and get this task accomplished.
But the group chat was more powerful than I’d realized.
Do you need help, Clementine? Nina texted.
From CJ: Yeah, if you don’t need to write notes or anything, my penmanship is really good.
My penmanship (are we calling it “penmanship” now?) isn’t great but I’ll find a way to help , Ari texted.
I wasn’t sure there was a way to tell an Oscar winner—or anyone else in this group—not to come over. So I found myself holding off texting my address while hoping Chloe, desperate not to spend any extra time with me these days, would jump in to steer this world back to normal.
I am dealing with a collie who got skunked, but will come by afterward if I’m fit for human consumption. For the record, my penmanship is also great. I’ll have a Penmanship-Off with you, CJ!
I wondered if there was an actual skunked collie or if this was Chloe’s way of getting out of it. The only good news in this whole situation was that Phoebe and Bianca had already declared their intentions to stay home with Olivia for a family night in, and so while my condo was about to be invaded by most of my fake girlfriend’s best friends—at least my boss currently evaluating my merit for a semi-major promotion plus her definitely suspicious wife would not be in tow. The smallest of victories.
CJ and Sofia arrived first. I’d run a broom around, doing my best to get up the cat fur that seemed to cover more surfaces than Small Jesse Pinkman’s size would make possible, as well as the catnip that I kept only in my crafting room and yet somehow trickled out like drug-laced glitter. Initially I’d also lit a candle because I worried my condo had its own scent that I’d become nose-blind to, but the Boy Smells candle had a shockingly sexy aroma for a friend hangout, so I’d blown it out almost immediately.
“Hey, Clementine,” CJ greeted me with a warm smile, so warm in fact I almost felt at ease. Even after the hospital, CJ and Sofia were the least familiar to me; it might have been awkward hanging around my boss, but at least I knew Phoebe well, and by extension Bianca a little. Nina had similarly at least once been a coworker, and Ari’s outward confidence and strong eye contact made it easy to forget that we didn’t actually know each other very well. CJ and Sofia, though, were all but strangers, and their quieter demeanors didn’t help matters. I doubted that great conversation about chicken sandwiches was going to come into play again tonight. I’d googled Sofia once I’d found out that she was apparently the same Sofia Hernández whose paintings I saw all over Instagram, bright and bold portraits and still lifes, and while I supposed that helped me get to know her—or of her, at least—better, the knowledge hardly put me at ease.
Especially now that she was in my home. Why couldn’t Chloe have had a less intimidating friend group? Some queer folks with less expensive haircuts and more regular jobs. Accountants. Paralegals. Project managers. No, here it was all Oscar winners and TV writers and award-winning artists. And tonight they were all going to be in my home .
“Hi,” I said, suddenly panicked that some of my wall art was from Etsy but the greater majority was from Target, and would Sofia think I had bad taste or was a poor supporter of the arts? Also how queer did queer people’s apartments have to look? And I’d forgotten about the show tunes playlist blasting from my speakers, as well as my own appearance, which was just Sweatpants City. How had I managed to light and unlight a sexy candle and yet not even look in a mirror?
“Your place is great,” CJ said, glancing around, as Sofia leaned in to look at a print hanging over my bookcase.
“Sorry, that’s just from Target,” I said, and she burst into laughter.
“Everyone does this to me,” she said, turning to smile warmly at me. “Artists like Target too. Where else would I buy tampons?”
“Oh, god, I was afraid everyone else was like a Diva Cup person,” I said, and then we were all laughing so hard I barely heard the doorbell ring. I let Nina and Ari in and watched as they too explored my front room and attached kitchen, all the while feeling weirdly relieved about the tampons thing, even as an Academy Award–winner was peering at my bookshelves. I knew it was connected to this feeling that my place somehow wasn’t queer enough, as if being queer was something beyond who you were attracted to and loved and had sex with and everything in those buckets. Like did my art and my tables look heterosexual? Except my queerness wasn’t the scam here, just my relationship, so what was I so afraid of? Besides everything, really.
Though, also, regardless of any of that, it was super weird that a famous person was here, and weirder yet that polite society deemed it impolite to comment on that fact.
“Oh my god,” Ari said in a tone that made me worry I should have indeed been worried about inviting everyone over, but then I realized she’d just noticed that Small Jesse Pinkman was curled up on the top level of his cat tree. Everyone crowded around her and for at least the moment I felt settled about these near-strangers in my home. Maybe there was some lying going on, but not about who I was or how I lived.
I tried to figuratively exhale.
CJ organized a big Taiwanese delivery order from Pine surely at least the communication part would be more intuitive from the beginning. Chloe, though, had only confused me so far.
And also, I reminded myself, we weren’t actually dating.
Chloe sent a Dana Scully gif, her first in a while, Scully saying Sure, fine, whatever . I tapped a heart on it and wished things felt like they had before, which didn’t make any sense because we weren’t any less together than we were before her surgery. We were not together at all, and that was fine. More than fine! Chloe didn’t want me, didn’t want a girlfriend at all, and it didn’t make sense that I’d have actual feelings for her. I, a queer woman, could like another queer woman without it being romantic or sexual. We were friends . Chloe, I realized, was my first new friend in a very long time. I’d hardly meant for that to happen, but now that it had I realized I’d miss her when this was all said and done.
Right now, I felt like I missed her already.
As the wedding trip to Santa Barbara grew closer, I did my best to train Tamarah more and more on the ins and outs of my job so that she could cover as much as possible. It was true that I’d only be gone for three days, but I knew that if any requests came in she was smart enough to handle them, and I wanted to empower her to actually do that. I’d gotten thrown into the deep end of the business at my first job when my boss would toss off to me tasks she didn’t want to do, stuff way above my pay grade. It wasn’t great management, but I’d been so nervous about doing everything right that somehow I did, and felt myself leveling up on my own. My goal was to do that for Tamarah, without that whole sink-or-swim thing. I imagined how much better I could have done right away if I’d felt supported and also not terrified.
Of course I hoped that if my pitch to Phoebe went well I’d get to promote Tamarah full-time to my new department, but right now I was afraid to even share a hint of that with Tamarah. Phoebe had sent an Outlook meeting request to me, for a little over a week after the wedding, and if it didn’t go well, no one would have to know except me. Well, and Phoebe, but I assumed she’d witnessed hundreds, if not thousands of unsuccessful business pitches throughout her career. Before long, mine would have to blend in with the others.
It hit me at some point way past the point of walking back this meeting or at least pushing it down the road that I’d never imagined myself as someone putting together business pitches or proposing leading an entire team. When I’d started at BME, I’d been just a little cog turning in a medium-size wheel, but when the wheel grew, the cog grew with the wheel. I knew that people like my brother loved to lead—I couldn’t even tell if he was in charge of all his home inspections, but he never missed an opportunity to paint that picture. It wasn’t all bombastic weird stuff, though, I knew. People like Phoebe loved to lead, too, I could see it in her eyes and hear in her tone when she addressed us in meetings. Phoebe was built for a job like this.
Sometimes I wondered if I’d gotten to my mid-thirties and was just figuring out what on earth I was built for. I’d never seen myself as ambitious, but I did like the idea of emulating someone like Phoebe, who not only had found success in this nontoxic environment, but still had time for her wife and her daughter and her friends. If I was going to go after this other life I wanted, enough to—well, blow up my previous life—I needed a career that had enough space in it for all those things I was still looking for, in a person I was still looking for.
Sometimes in quiet moments lately—or in this one when I was trying to focus on updating the cover tab in an Excel worksheet detailing an integrated media plan—I thought about how impossible it seemed to come by that balance, but how guaranteed it would be here. If my presentation didn’t go well, if eventually Phoebe trimmed me back entirely and replaced me with a series of robots, I wasn’t sure where I’d end up and still be happy.
“Clementine?”
I looked up to see Tamarah standing in my doorway, and from her tone I had a feeling this wasn’t the first time she’d said my name. “Sorry, way too focused on this Gravity of Honor plan. Which I’m about to send you to proof. We should also spend some time talking about potential revisions based on—yes, hypothetical client feedback, but also, since I’m going to be out part of next week, I want to make sure you’re overprepared.”
“Going all in is my favorite,” she said, walking in and taking a seat across from me. I loved how comfortable she was; it had taken me far longer at my first assistant gig to do anything but hover uncomfortably near the doorway of my boss’s office. “Have you thought any more about expanding the department? If I’m allowed to ask. I also might have seen something in your Outlook, so I’ll admit I know it must be at least a possibility.”
“Yes,” I said, because she had full access to my work calendar and it made sense she’d seen the meeting in my upcoming schedule. There was no actual reason to hide from the truth, even if I didn’t want to get her hopes up. Expanding the department would be such a good opportunity for Tamarah to really shine—if it happened. And I liked the thought of her seeing me going after something I wanted. In the future I wanted her to do the same for herself. “And—I mean, we’ll see. I’m sure you can understand it’s not really up to me.”
She nodded thoughtfully in a way that made me realize she probably did think it was mostly up to me.
“The industry’s in a weird place right now,” I said, a little disclaimer so if instead of expanding we imploded, she’d feel warned. “So we’ll see.”
“OK,” she said, a faint line creasing her flawless forehead. I bit back saying anything. Men telling women to smile was terrible, and so probably it wasn’t great to tell your youthful assistant that you semi-regretted some of the brow-furrowing you’d done in your twenties that led to some permanent lines now. Young women should get to frown as much as they wanted; it was annoying your skin held on to the memories. “Yeah, Aubrey said something like that.”
I did my best to look as if my interest had been lightly piqued, instead of on red-alert panic. “Oh?”
“Yeah, I mentioned that I hoped we could expand back here—”
There I really had to hold my expression in check.
“—and she gave me a whole lecture about AI and algorithms and changing technology and for a moment I thought, oh, my mom was right, I should have just become a nurse like my sister. People are going to keep getting sick, and if for some reason they didn’t, it would at least be cause for celebration.”
“Oh, god, does everyone have a sibling with the job their parents respect?” I laughed, and realized it was more than I’d ever said to Tamarah about my personal life. Too much? Sometimes I really did have no idea how to lead.
“Yep, you either have that sibling, or you are that sibling. Not that I’d know about that side of the coin.”
“Nope,” I said, smiling at her, imagining if my first bosses had seemed like actual humans to me. It wouldn’t have been bad at all, I decided. “Not at all. But I don’t think it’s time to become a nurse just yet.”
“Yeah, that’s good.” She laughed. “Considering my aversion to most bodily fluids, I don’t think I’m cut out for it.”
“Trust me, me either.” I shrugged, doing my best not to look like Aubrey’s comments hadn’t gotten to me yet again . “Look, my honest answer is that I have concerns, too, but right now we’re both needed members of this team, and we should focus on that and not gloom-and-doom reports.”
“You’re absolutely right.” She beamed like I’d said exactly the right thing, which would have felt better if I could hang on to the sentiment more for myself, too.
“Thank you,” she continued. “Not to be corny or anything, but I really do feel like I learn so much from you, so, seriously, thank you .”
“Oh,” I said, actually looking around as if she might have said this to someone else. “Sorry, you’re welcome. I learn from you too.”
She raised an eyebrow. “If you mean asking me what social media ‘the youth’ uses, sure.”
“I’m not sure you understand how useful that information is,” I said, and we both laughed. “OK, so we’ll make sure over the next week that you can cover most of what might come up while I’m out of town.”
“I won’t let you down,” she said, heading out of the room and leaving me to wonder if me and my plans would actually let her down, and soon.
The long wedding weekend started even earlier than the trip to Santa Barbara, kicking off with a private party at Johnny’s the night before we were all heading up the coast. It was all friends, no family or colleagues, in lieu of two separate bachelorette parties, and the mood was somehow both noisy and cozy as I walked in, straight from work. (I’d changed in the bathroom before I’d headed over, a pink and cream-colored dress that was a little shiny and luxe, and tall strappy heels I knew I’d regret but made me feel my absolute cutest.)
I wasn’t a complete stranger to Hollywood parties; occasionally clients would invite us to premieres, and I’d drag Will along so we could scoop up free drinks and apps within spitting range of sometimes-very-famous but usually just kind-of-famous actors. Will and I perfected holding the most neutral expressions while standing near celebrities, it was a challenge to see which one of us could act more indifferent. There was no guarantee that this double bachelorette party would be the same, but I did glance quickly from face to face as I approached the bar, more than a little curious about who might be here tonight other than the standard friends group, and with my face safely locked into nonchalance.
Since I saw none of the standard friends—nor any celebrities—I made my way to the bar and squeezed into an open spot. I hadn’t been to Johnny’s since the whole shenanigan with Chloe began, but the hot bartender—Sadie?—still smiled at me as if I was a regular.
“Hey,” she greeted me with a grin. “The new usual? There are also custom drinks for the brides.”
“I can’t believe you remember that,” I said.
She shrugged in a manner that was disarming, not dismissive. “Part of the gig.”
“I do kind of want my new usual. Or is that not being appropriately celebratory? How are the custom drinks?”
She slid me a thick piece of paper listing drinks named for Nina and Ari. “They’re good, how about you pick one and I’ll make your usual as well.”
“I haven’t even found my friends yet,” I said. “And I’m just going to roll in double-fisting? Sure.”
“What are you saying about double-fisting?” Chloe popped up next to me. “Sorry I’m late. Am I late? Great Dane.”
“Aren’t those bigger than you?” Sadie asked, pouring my first drink and setting it in front of me. “Oh, sorry, we can discuss details later—it’s a little crazy tonight, if you haven’t noticed—but Chloe told me about your parents’ party, and I can help you figure something out for drinks. Stop by next week to discuss? I can definitely cut you a deal.”
“Yes, thank you,” I said, and turned to Chloe. “Thank you, too.”
She shrugged in a manner that definitely felt dismissive. “Sure. I said I’d help.”
Great. We had basically arrived at the biggest part of our whole scheme, the initial event this whole thing had rested on, and I wasn’t even sure if she wanted me around. I’d skipped out of this past week’s brunch, too, claiming too much family party planning, when in truth I was just trying to give Chloe what she wanted. Or maybe I was hoping she’d protest, that I’d get a series of texts including Scully gifs. But she only sent a thumbs-up emoji, and that had been that.
“I meant to tell you,” Chloe said, and a spark of something that felt like hope lit within me. “I’m all sold out of your cat toys. Every sign. I’ll Venmo you but also can you bring me more?”
“Sure,” I said, fighting my pride over this sales success story with my whatever about Chloe’s vibe. “I have a few on hand, but I can crank out a bunch next week, post-wedding.”
“Perfect. Everyone’s out on the back patio,” Chloe told me, as if we weren’t on the same group chat, as Sadie poured my second drink. “Do you dance? I feel like my friends are not always a dancing crowd. CJ and Sofia, maybe.”
“How’s the music? Have your friends said?” Sadie asked. “Some minor DJ drama this week. Apparently the one we initially booked is actually—”
“Ari’s ex?” Chloe laughed. “How do you book anything in this town without accidentally getting someone’s ex though?”
“My thoughts exactly.” Sadie pushed both drinks toward me and handed Chloe a La Croix. “Enjoy. The drinks, the music—”
“The double-fisting,” Chloe said with a laugh. “C’mon, Clementine.”
I followed her through the crowded bar to the patio, which glittered with twinkle lights. A small DJ booth and dance floor were at the edge, with chairs and small tables filling the rest of the space. When our friends waved us over to a few tables they’d shoved together, for a brief moment I forgot about everything except how lucky I was to be in this beautiful place surrounded by these beautiful people.
“Congratulations,” I said to Nina and Ari, who despite the entire establishmentful of people here to celebrate them, looked fairly camped out at this table. Ari was wearing an incredibly cut navy suit over a low V-neck T-shirt, while Nina wore a boldly patterned dress in pinks and oranges, threaded through with a sparkly gold thread. On their own they were beautiful, but together they were somehow even more spectacular. “You both look amazing.”
“You too,” Nina said. “Where did you get this dress? No, we can talk about shopping later, and we will, but I feel like Ari and I should circulate, right? Now that everyone’s here, you two can take our spots and we’ll be back.”
“Yeah, we gotta make the rounds,” Ari said, standing up and offering her arm to Nina as she did the same. “I feel like this is us until we’re back from our trip in a couple of weeks, leaving y’all to it while we mingle. So this is my blanket apology if we don’t spend enough quality time together until then.”
“It was the same at our wedding,” Phoebe said with a wave of her hand, and Bianca snorted.
“Well, not exactly. Those of you who were there will remember it was not exactly this elaborate an affair,” she said, though she smiled at Phoebe like she wouldn’t have had it any other way. I wondered with a pang if it was hypocritical to not want the whole thing—not the ceremony, not the piece of paper, not the babies and not the backyard—and still want someone to look at me just like that for the rest of my life.
“I mainly remember that I rented a tux and thought I looked dapper as fuck,” Chloe said, “and then one of Phoebe’s aunts thought I was the ring bearer.”
“To be fair,” Nina said, laughing as hard as the rest of us were, “didn’t you rent a tuxedo from the little boys’ section?”
“It’s not my fault that tuxedo shops don’t have small lesbian sections!” Chloe said, and hugged Nina and then Ari before taking a seat.
I did my best to convey some kind of warm greeting with my expression, but Ari pulled me into a hug, and then Nina did the same. And I couldn’t help it; I loved this, the big messy group of people who welcomed me, sometimes with literal open arms. I squeezed into the spot next to Chloe, and laughed as CJ gestured to my two drinks.
“Sadie kind of made me.”
“Wait, I just noticed,” Nina said, instead of actually leaving. “You have two drinks and one is the custom Ari drink, and then one is just something else random?”
“Again, Sadie made me, I didn’t say, please, not the Nina cocktail ,” I said.
“Really?” Ari asked with a grin. “You sounded very comfortable saying please, not the Nina cocktail just now.”
“I was standing there, that’s exactly what she said,” Chloe said.
“This is character assassination,” I said, as Nina and Ari finally managed to head off, at least as far as the next table. “Do you feel like you’re sharing them with the whole world?” I asked, then worried it was way too strange of a question.
“Only nights like tonight,” CJ said. “And the other Oscar season.”
“Yeah,” Chloe said, and chugged a bit of her seltzer. “Normally it’s the way it always is. One of our friends is just kind of famous. It doesn’t really affect much.”
“It’s so LA,” I said, and everyone nodded in agreement and held out their glasses or cans to clink together. To LA indeed.
The substitute DJ was good, we all agreed, and once I’d had one and a half drinks, I followed CJ, Sofia, and Chloe to the dance floor. Part of me felt as off-kilter and on the defense as I had early on with Chloe, when it felt like all the knowledge and power was in her hands and I’d unwittingly tied myself to a potentially disastrous situation. Bosses and celebrities and other shocks lurking behind corners. No, I still had no idea what Chloe was thinking, but the truth was that it didn’t feel as nerve-wracking this time around. Under the twinkle lights, moving to the music in a crowd of people that included CJ and Sofia, I didn’t feel like I was flailing on my own. At the very worst, I was flailing alongside others.
Still, though, maybe it was the drink-and-a-half or maybe it was the mood of the charged dance floor, I turned a bit from my newish friends and made it clear with my eyes and with a sway of my hips that I was dancing with Chloe. I was never on a dance floor purely to dance in a group. Saddle me, I thought, with a fake girlfriend, and I at least deserved to dance with said fake girlfriend.
Chloe, to her credit, pulled me in closer, her hand on my hip, her movements mirroring mine. Even though I’d asked for this, beckoned her even, in a flash of heat I realized that I’d never danced with another woman, not like this. I hadn’t danced with anyone in over a decade besides Will, not like this. There were so many new firsts again.
How long, I wondered, Chloe’s touch sending warmth through my body, would it be until I had something like this for real? Our lips inches away from each other’s, our hands pulling our bodies closer. Why couldn’t I have gotten rescued all those weeks ago by someone who actually wanted me? How would I feel at this moment, if it wasn’t just for show?
“You’re very good,” Chloe said, pulling me closer still. “Promise me that we’re going to burn down that dance floor at the actual wedding reception.”
I moved with her, felt the press of her body against mine, wondered if it had just been a very long time since anyone had touched me or if I wanted to know how it would feel for specifically Chloe to touch me more.
“Hey,” I said sharply, mostly to distract myself from the disastrous possibility that it was the second of those two options. “I feel like I have no idea what’s going on.”
She furrowed her eyebrows, though still managed to keep dancing. “About what?”
“After your surgery I felt like you didn’t want me around anymore. And tonight you’re all—”
“Well, Clementine, we’ve gotta put on a good show,” she said, throwing back her head and swaying close to me. She smelled like her fancy products and sweat. Unfortunately that was an upsettingly hot combination. “Also when did I say I didn’t want you around? You’re the one bailing on brunch to deal with your family party errands. Which I could have just helped you with afterward instead.”
“You could have just said that,” I said, annoyed that she hadn’t and also at how sexy I found her neck suddenly.
“So could’ve you,” she said, looking back at me and grinning. “You look cute tonight. I mean, you always do. Fancy cute, though.”
“You’re really—” I stopped myself, because what was there to say? Annoying? Frustrating? Hot? “Fancy cute, too.”
Chloe laughed. It was true, though, she was in a floral-patterned jumpsuit that was a little fancier than her standard ones, and she was wearing hot pink suede oxfords I’d never seen before. “Thanks. I don’t think anyone would mistake me for a ring bearer tonight.”
“No chance,” I said.
“Are you still mad at me?” she asked.
“I wasn’t mad,” I said. And I couldn’t think of anything else reasonable to say, and so I left it at that, right as the DJ played a Chappell Roan track that made the entire dance floor cheer. Chloe and I pushed in closer again to CJ and Sofia, and before long it was like we’d become friends with everyone around us.
By the time we took a break, I’d kicked off my shoes like a carefree person I really wasn’t, and Chloe went scrambling through the crowd to find them while CJ and Sofia headed in to get the biggest glasses of water the bar would give us.
“We have to head out,” Phoebe told me as I made it back to our tables. “But we’ll see you tomorrow in Santa Barbara. I know Nina and Ari’ll be busy with a million things, but Bianca and I were thinking the rest of us should meet for lunch at the Julia Child place on our way in. Sound good? We can finish coordinating on the group chat.”
“Sounds good,” I said. Back in the 1990s, Julia Child had proclaimed her love for a taco stand in Santa Barbara, and decades later people still waited in a cartoonishly long line to order. In LA I was thrilled that almost every restaurant I loved took reservations, but vacation was always another story, especially in beachy Santa Barbara where the pace of life was so dialed back to begin with. Standing in line felt like a luxury, not an everyday inconvenience.
Chloe was back almost as soon as Phoebe and Bianca said good night, triumphantly wielding my heels.
“My hero,” I said as she sat down next to me. The sound of the crowd around us created a little pocket of privacy, and I did my best to give her my most serious look. “Remember at the beginning, or the almost-beginning of all of this? You didn’t tell me about Phoebe, and I said I didn’t want to be left in the dark anymore?”
“Is someone else your boss too?” Chloe asked with a laugh.
“You have been making me feel like you don’t want me around,” I said. “And I don’t believe that you don’t know that. Remember this was all your idea. So keep me in the loop with whatever is going on, OK? You made me feel like you didn’t want me around, that it was better if I gave you space. So I did, and now you’re acting like that was a choice I made, and not something you contributed to in any way. This whole thing when I don’t know what you want, I thought you agreed to be open with me.”
Chloe got up and then dropped down right in front of me, and I realized she was helping me step into my heels. “Please don’t laugh. I was trying to be nice, and now I just feel like a shoe salesguy.”
I laughed too and let her buckle the ankle straps gently. “Thank you.”
“Please don’t make me fake break up with you,” she said, taking a seat even closer to me so that no one even in a quieter crowd could have heard her. “Do you want me to admit I’m shit at all of this? I obviously didn’t think my body would reject an actual organ while we were in the middle of this. You’ve had to do way more than I asked and—I don’t know. I wanted to give you a break.”
“Well, yeah, I know.” I nudged her with my elbow. “You said that back when it happened. And I told you I didn’t mind, remember?”
She waved her hand. “I wanted to give you an out. People say they don’t mind all the time.”
“Not me. I’ve been really honest with you, haven’t I?”
She agreed with that while my stomach panged with a reminder that maybe my honesty hadn’t been as all-consuming as I claimed. Chloe couldn’t have suspected how I’d felt dancing with her, how the touch of her hand on my hip seemed to connect directly with every nerve pathway in my body, racing directly toward my center. That wasn’t a lie, I reasoned. That was just my body, and how my body reacted was out of my hands. My brain still knew exactly the terms of our deal, and soon the wedding would be past us and our time would be even more numbered, and I could start my actual new life for actual real.