2. Alana
Twelve hoursafter she hugged Ophelia goodbye, Alana and her fresh set of nails (Ophelia had outdone herself yet again) hopped on the subway to head into the office. It was Monday morning, her favorite baristas were working in the coffee shop in the lobby of the office building, and her boss was coming back from his long weekend golfing with his buddies in Scotland, which meant he had brought her presents.
(A Scottish boyfriend? No. Whisky? Probably.)
There were conference calls and inter-department meetings and intra-department meetings, and it was a good thing it was Monday because there was a whole lot of peopling to be done, something Alana only had so much patience for.
Working in information security for Syssla, a multi-billion-dollar company that sold SAAS, wasn’t a job most people expected Alana to have, especially after getting an eyeful of her nails and whatever over-the-top makeup look she had done. But she was a bitch who got the same level of joy from glitter as she did from a well-run risk assessment program.
She had a unicorn job. She knew that. Hell, minus the cybersecurity part and the active EEO policies, it sounded like some historical fiction 1980’s kind of situation. She was paid an extremely competitive rate, one that helped her put a solid dent in paying off her student loans and got some of the best health insurance on the market. She was happy to go into work every day, and liked not only the work she did, but also working for her boss. (That was not to say she liked everyone she worked with, but she didn’t think there was anyone who could say they did. Even people who worked for themselves and by themselves.) Minus the whole uterus situation, all in all, Alana’s life was going pretty well.
Alana’s office was on the sixty-ninth floor, a fact that never stopped being hilarious (although, if she thought about it too deeply, slightly terrifying. Looking out the window gave her vertigo).
The lights in Patrick’s office were still off when Alana got to her office. Work didn’t officially start until nine, but that half an hour before everyone else started trickling in was her favorite time of day. The floor was mostly empty, and she could get a head start on some of the more important tasks of the day before she finished her first coffee or remembered that breakfast was a meal she should be eating.
And today, that treasured half an hour was also a time for her to turn on her playlist of Thinking Music and try to brainstorm ways that she would be able to find herself a guy who would want to marry her for a year.
Green card marriages were too precarious, and it would break her heart if she was the reason that immigration denied someone citizenship. While her job paid her well, it didn’t pay her well enough to bribe someone into marrying her for any amount of time.
She could always just try on the dating apps, but she’d had enough trouble getting regular dates on those. Alana was down for the occasional random fuck just as much as the next girl, but most of those guys who talked a big game to get into her proverbial pants were the same ones who would never actually even go on a date with her in public, let alone marry her. Not even if it was for a year.
She took a sip of coffee. Stressing about a fictional husband wasn’t going to improve her chances of finding one. And there was too much going on at work today to be distracted by plans to procure a husband out of nowhere.
After work. She was meeting up with Matilda in the bookstore on the Lower East Side that also sold pickles, because Matilda was pregnant and was on a quest to find the perfect pickle, and Alana was nothing if not a good friend. (Who also liked books and pickles. It wasn’t such a hardship.) Maybe pickle fumes and the aphrodisiac that was the smell of used books would trigger some sort of stroke of brilliance and husband finding.
Stranger things had been known to happen.
Patrick looked refreshed and slightly sunburnt when he strolled into Alana’s office a few hours later. “Thanks for holding the fort down while I was gone,” he said, depositing a large gift bag on her desk. “The Mrs. appreciated it, too.”
Thirty-five years together, Patrick and Barbara had one of the happiest marriages of anyone Alana knew. Not that it was that difficult, Alana’s parents weren’t able to be civil with each other and hadn’t since well before they finally divorced when she was in high school.
“I’m glad you had fun,” Alana said, peeking into the bag. “Oooh, tell Barbara she outdid herself, as usual, and makes me ashamed of my gift-giving skills.”
Patrick laughed. “She’s a champion at it.”
Alana nodded in agreement.
“That being said, now that I’ve bribed you with alcohol, fancy chocolate, and whatever else the Mrs. decided she needed to buy you when I wasn’t paying attention, there’s a long list of shit we need to cover before the meeting with the BI team.”
Alana grabbed her tablet. “Ready when you are.”
Matilda was waiting for Alana as soon as she got off the subway at Grand Street. “I was going to wait to have an intervention until we were in the pickle bookstore but I’m cold as hell and also I have to pee like it’s nobody’s business. What do you mean, you’re going to get married? To a man??”
“Hi to you, too,” Alana responded. “You really could have waited until after you went to the bathroom, you know.”
“Nah, this distracts me.” She pointed to Alana, something that maybe would have been slightly more threatening if she wasn’t all of five foot nothing and looked like a pixie had swallowed a bowling ball. “Talk. Explain this whole marriage thing.”
“Ophelia or Shannon?”
Matilda showed her nails.
“I just lied to my doctor about being married so he could give me an official referral for a hysterectomy. It’s not a big deal.”
“I mean, just the thought of lying to a literal medical professional makes me break into hives. I feel like if I actually did, I’d go into anaphylactic shock.”
“I don’t think that’s how bodies work, but you never know.” Alana held the door open for Matilda. “You know, I don’t know how much pickle I expected to smell, but this wasn’t it.”
“Same. Lemme go find a bathroom, a pickle, and a book, and then we’re circling right back to this whole marriage thing,” Matilda said. “Maybe we should ask Ben about the legalities of you lying about getting married.”
“Well, I wouldn’t lie, I’d actually get married.” To who? Who the fuck knew? Not Alana, that was for damn sure.
“Gross,” Matilda responded. “Wouldn’t that be a crime?”
“It’s not like we’re doing it for immigration purposes,” Alana said. “So I don’t think so.”
Matilda pursed her lips.
“Go piss, girl,” Alana said. “You can overthink all of my life choices after your bladder is empty.”
Matilda patted her stomach. “It’s a good thing I love this small peanut person,” she said, “because pregnancy is a fucking scam.”
“I’m so excited to never have to experience that,” Alana said with a grin.
“Holy shit, same. I’m doing this for all of us.”
“And we thank you for your sacrifice or whatever.”
“Any luck with the husband hunting situation?” Shannon asked later that night after both of them got home from their respective outings.
“No. I was too busy putting out fires and attaching emails I’d already sent to people with the sentence ‘as per my previous email (please see attached)’.” Alana sprawled on the couch. “Which, by the way, feels like it should be a Panic! At The Disco song about the evils of capitalism or whatever.”
Shannon snickered. “Nothing brings me more joy than imagining Baby Alana going through her little emo stage. Didn’t Green Day also do the parentheses in song titles?”
“I was such a good emo baby. And yeah, pretty sure I did. And the fact that you know that means you probably also had an emo baby phase.”
“Nope, just means I worked a freelance gig as a music journalist for like, twelve seconds, back when I thought I should try to write deeply serious things for a living.”
Alana waved her hand. “Details, details. But yeah. Wrote approximately twelve thousand emails and had Patrick tell me about his vacation instead of trying to figure out where I was going to find a husband.”
“Can’t you find someone to just pretend to be your husband? Like, hire an actor or something? Why does it have to be a real ass husband?”
“Paperwork,” Alana answered glumly. “They gave me shit for putting you as my emergency contact. I told them said husband was traveling for business and so I wanted to put someone local just in case.”
“Why don’t you just ask any of the guys?” Shannon flicked on the TV and began their nightly ritual of scrolling through the streaming services to find something to have on in the background while they both scrolled through social media. “I’m sure none of them would mind.”
“Who wouldn’t mind?” Alana asked. “JP’s a medium celebrity now. Like, he has fan pages and shit. They’d find out if we got married and it would get so weird so quick.”
“People I went to high school have messaged me once they found out I’m friends with him,” Shannon said. “Honestly, I’d say it’s not as bad as when the bullies from my high school try to rope me into whatever MLM thing they’re sinking their money into, but half the time, they’re asking for his information so they can get him to join their essential oiling lipstick workout whatever.”
Alana laughed. “I’m glad that I went to high school with someone who’s famous now, because nobody hits me up about JP. And it’s not like I’m going to be texting Cas to ask him if he wants to get married, either. I haven’t talked to him in like, four years.”
“Too bad you didn’t have any sort of marriage contract as kids,” Shannon mused. “I would say I would use that, but I’m not sure how that trope would fit in with my books.”
“Something to ponder in between dressing actors,” Alana replied. “Anyway. Back to our man friends. So, not JP. Not Deacon, because he is grossly in love with Matilda, and I don’t want to get in the way of that.”
Shannon sighed. “He really has to get it together.”
“For real. But then again, so does she. So, he’s out. Oliver is dating that girl that we all hate, and even if he would say yes, she’d throw a shit fit, Cal is already married to Jamie, and Ben has too much going on in his life now to add me as a complication.”
“And not Hudson because you guys hate each other.”
“We don’t hate each other,” Alana protested. “He just…” she trailed off. “He’s just really judgey.”
“You keep saying that, but I have never experienced that,” Shannon replied. “And none of the other girls have, either. We’ve talked.”
“You’ve talked about me and Hudson?” There was no her and Hudson. Never was, never would be.
“Of course. I mean, not recently, because you seemed to have mellowed out when it came to the other person, but a few years ago, things were weird.”
Well, because there was that one time where we all went on that camping trip in Connecticut and Hudson and I had the world’s greatest sex against a tree on the hiking trail and then never spoke about it again and it’s because he regrets it and this is my very normal way of getting back at him, Alana didn’t say.
Alana shrugged. “Maybe I’ve matured, and I just don’t let him bother me as much anymore. But I would never ask him to get married.”
“Even though there’s the highest probability of him saying yes.”
Alana laughed so hard she nearly fell off the couch.
“Seriously,” Shannon said over Alana’s cackling. “I know you guys are like, incapable of a full human conversation and yet somehow we love both of you, but if you actually just fucking talked to him and asked, you’d find out.”
“We do talk!” Alana protested. And if by talk, needle him by saying vaguely outrageous shit until he reacted, because sometimes it seemed like he was dead inside. It was like poking at earthworms when you were a kid. Except Alana never did that, she didn’t like the fact that they squished.
Shannon rolled her eyes. “You’re a terrible liar. Which also concerns me for your husband situation. How is the doctor going to believe you’re in love with a man if you can’t even look me in the eye and lie about your relationship with Hudson Miller, a man you’re supposedly friends with?”
‘Does this feel like just friends to you?’ Hudson had growled in her ear as he fucked her against a tree. ‘Drowning in your pussy doesn’t seem very just friends to me, Alana, and you know it.’
Nearly three years later and Hudson Miller was still the death of her.
God, life would be so much easier if sex with him hadn’t been earth-shattering. If only he would have been bad, if only he hadn’t fucked her so well that she had not only secretly named all her vibrators after him, but she may or may not have one time called out his name while hooking up with the next guy she had hooked up with for the express purpose of trying to forget him…
But no, he had rearranged her guts and also gifted her the inability to get off thinking about anything that didn’t involve him and his Deserved Its Own Statue In The Louvre cock.
But alas, here she was, horny on a Tuesday night because the mere thought of Hudson Miller had flitted into her head and her vagina.
“Alana?”
Alana startled. “I can lie to a doctor.” She headed to the kitchen to scrounge around for dinner. “I just have to find someone to lie with.”
Shannon giggled.
“And not in a Biblical way!” Alana yelled as she opened the fridge.
“I still think you should ask Hudson,” Shannon said.
“So you can laugh when he says no?”
“No, because he needs health insurance.”
“Doesn’t he have health insurance?” Cheese, crackers, two cucumbers, a handful of cherry tomatoes. Deconstructed charcuterie board for dinner. She was a genius. An extremely lazy and tired genius.
“Yeah, at the coffee shop. That he hates.”
“Didn’t a magazine just publish a piece about his art?” It wasn’t like she actively followed his career or anything. They followed each other on social media because they were in the same friend group, that was all. Sure, he mostly posted about his art and the process of making it and didn’t really interact with that many people’s social media accounts, and it wasn’t like he was watching any of her stories or anything. (Not that she checked.)
And sure, maybe Alana had bought and framed one of his first big pieces, and maybe it was hanging up on the wall in her office at work but that was because she was a supportive friendly acquaintance and also because he was upsettingly talented. And maybe she was a member of his Patreon, used the monthly electronic collage she got as a reward for her work computer background, but had signed up under a pseudonym because she didn’t want things to be weird. Not that it was weird. She would have done that shit for any one of her friends or friendly acquaintances who were as talented as he was. If Deacon suddenly started designing art museum worthy vibrators, she would buy one and display it, too.
Well.
Maybe not at work. She and HR had already tangled over her clothing and shoe choices. Nowhere in the employee manual did it say anything against wearing five-inch glitter stilettos and just because they had forgotten to add it to the manual didn’t mean it was her fault or that she was going to suddenly start wearing boring shoes to the office.
The point was.
“Yeah, but being an artiste does not come with health insurance.”
“But making buckets of money as an artiste means one can afford insurance, shouldn’t it?” He didn’t have his Patreon subscriber count visible, so she had no idea how many people actually paid him per month, but there had been enough conversations about him waffling over whether to hire an assistant to help him pack up the monthly orders instead of just doing it by himself that she wondered.
“I don’t think Hudson’s making buckets of money yet,” Shannon mused. “I mean, he should.”
“Definitely.”
“But private insurance is hella expensive, especially if you have pre-existing conditions.”
“Ohhh.” Alana stopped, deconstructed charcuterie board in hand. “That’s true.” She wasn’t sure of the specifications, and it wasn’t like she was going to ask, but she knew that Hudson had some sort of heart thing as a kid that was mostly fine now, but needed medication to make sure. They’d bumped into each other in the local mom and pop pharmacy more than once, and Alana always looked one step up from a swamp monster. Not that she cared what he thought about her or anything.
Really. She didn’t.
“You should ask him.”
Alana laughed. “He’d never say yes.”
“You won’t know unless you ask.”
“Thank you, School Guidance Counselor Shannon, for your wise words of wisdom.”
Shannon laughed. “You’re just mad that I’m right.”
“You know I’m gonna be throwing that back in your face soon,” Alana said, sitting down at the table. Look at her. Eating dinner at the table like an adult and everything. “When something happens in your life, I’m gonna say that same upside down hanging kitten bullshit to you and then I’m going to laugh.”
“Does warning me in advance take away from the impact?” Shannon asked.
Alana shrugged. “Guess we’ll find out.”