CHAPTER TWENTY #2
Despite the fact that they’re allegedly dying to make some couple friends, they barely let us get a word in edgewise for a solid half hour, regaling us with the story of their brand—that is, relationship. It’s all lifestyle this and authenticity that until Heather pulls me aside for girl talk.
“Now,” she says, as somber as if she were delivering a bleak diagnosis. “I can’t help but notice you’ve got an empty left finger.”
“Ah,” I say, glancing at my perfectly normal hand. “Yeah, but the doctors say it should be just fine.”
“Ha! You’re funny.” She beams an impossibly white-toothed smile at me, nary a laugh line on her face.
“Really, though. Just because he hasn’t popped the question yet doesn’t mean he won’t.
” She places a sympathetic hand on my arm.
“There are loads of ways to nudge him along, you know. I did a series on our Insta. Dropping Engagement Ring Hints, Giving My Boyfriend an Ultimatum, things like that.” She’s tapping through her phone but pauses to throw me a sly look.
“Of course, we already had our proposal scheduled, but content is content.”
I glance at Grant, who’s frowning on the receiving end of a monologue. I think Nicholas is trying to convince him to start a podcast.
“I was thinking of framing him for embezzlement and blackmailing him into proposing. Do you think that would work?”
“Uh-huh,” she says, not listening. “I’ll tag you. What’s your handle?”
I tell her it’s @futuremrsnathanbakerhopefully. When she can’t find it, I say it must have gotten flagged again for being too adorable.
“Jealous people love reporting my account,” I say. “You know how it is.”
“Don’t I ever,” she says, shaking her head in solidarity. “Anyway, don’t worry too much about Nathan. A man who looks at you like that has already been caught. You just need to reel him in.”
Involuntarily, I look over at the man being compared to a doomed fish.
My eyes meet his with a start, but he doesn’t look away.
There’s a fleeting softness in his gaze that makes the ground under my feet feel crooked.
But then he widens his eyes in a telepathic HELP ME as Nicholas continues talking at him, and the urge to laugh evens things out again.
Still, even after we manage to cut ourselves loose of the Fiorellos, Heather’s words have their claws in me.
A man who looks at you like that. I only caught his gaze for a moment, but it was enough to throw off my center of gravity.
Now I’m hopelessly torn between avoiding eye contact and stealing glances at him to chase that feeling.
I insist on filling the rest of the afternoon with the most platonic of the romantic activities Lovers’ Weekend has to offer: badminton, a plein air painting lesson, a perfunctory lap of the pond via paddleboat.
All the while, I’m doing my best to keep myself in check.
He’s not real. He’s not real, he’s not real, he’s not real.
Except somewhere along the line, that refrain has transformed from a reminder to a lament.
I watch him breathing in the fresh air, closing his eyes against the sun, laughing at his truly terrible painting of the gardens—the most at ease I’ve ever seen him, and it’s all a lie.
He isn’t real, and he doesn’t even know it.
I can’t decide which would be worse: the cruelty of telling him or the betrayal of keeping the secret.
I feel guilty, and devastated, and furious that I’ve let myself care so much.
My only option is to build a strong wall of crankiness to fortify myself.
Ten minutes into a one-sided game of Guess How Long That Couple Will Last (one year is my most generous prediction), Grant’s quiet contentment is sliding toward irritation.
This is better. It all feels less painful if he’s not having a good time and doesn’t seem particularly fond of me.
We walk up from the pond side by side with a healthy distance between us—far enough from each other to settle my nerves a bit but close enough to resume our act in case Martin reappears.
“What if it’s not even him?” I ask, looking around. The property is dotted with pairs of people, all smiles and linked arms and heads leaning on shoulders and strolling. So much damn strolling. “Are we definitely sure it’s one person alone? I feel like there’s nothing but psychopaths here.”
“They’re not psychopaths. They’re couples,” Grant says.
“Same thing.”
“Wow,” he says flatly, brushing past me. “Cynicism. Refreshing.”
“Look at them, Grant,” I say, hastening to keep up. “It’s not natural for people to be that obsessed with each other. It’s like they come here just to pat themselves on the back for being better than everyone else. I hate even pretending to be like them. It’s all so gross and annoying.”
He turns to face me and I stop short, inches from walking straight into his chest and trying very hard not to look flustered.
“Honestly, Roxie, you are being a little annoying right now.”
My mouth drops open. “You are!” It’s about a centimeter shy of I know you are but what am I, but desperate times call for desperate comebacks.
He levels a dry look at me, his voice low. “You’re miserable. I get it. I can’t say I’m having the best time either. But do you have to grumble about it every second of every minute, or do you think you could stop to breathe once in a while?”
“You’re one to talk!” I hiss at him. “You did nothing but complain our entire first week here.”
“About murderers,” he whispers harshly, his eyes searing mine, his head dipping closer to my level. “All you’re doing is mocking people for enjoying themselves.”
“For being insufferable!”
“For being happy,” he bites, cutting off my next retort like a ribbon in the air. “I don’t know what your problem is, but it’s your problem. If anyone here has a superiority complex, it’s you. Grow up.”
I feel like I’ve been slapped.
“Fuck you, Grant.”
I push past him and move numbly toward the patio, my mind full of static. For the first time I can remember, I just want to go home. I don’t want to do this anymore. I barely remember why we’re even here.
Then I look up, and there’s Martin. Smack in the middle of the patio, having an animated conversation with a beaming Heather and Nicholas, who stand tangled up in each other’s arms like they’re posing for a JCPenney photo shoot.
I whip around, startled as Grant nearly walks into me this time. His expression looks slightly wilted, a new crinkle in his brow, but I don’t have time to decode this one. He opens his mouth to speak and I cut him off.
“Martin,” I mumble, jerking my head in his direction. “We have to do something.”
Grant frowns. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Just do something,” I force through gritted teeth.
Our strategizing quickly devolves into a spat of hissed and snapped barbs.
“He’s not even looking at us. What am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t care.”
“Why is it my job to figure it out?”
“Grant, I swear to God—”
And then, with a muttered for fuck’s sake, he suddenly grabs my fisted hand in both of his and drops to his knee.
“REBECCA. GWENDOLYN. VAUGHN.” His voice booms through the air, bouncing off the inn’s stone walls and drawing a sudden hush and a few gasps from the patio. I do my best to paint my face in shock and press my free hand over my mouth.
“Gwendolyn?” I hiss through my fingers. It’s working, though. Everyone on the patio, Martin included, is glued to our little scene.
Grant’s voice drops to a level only the two of us can hear, with a wry glare that could hopefully pass for a smile from a distance. “Will you—please—make me the happiest man alive, and stab me in the temple with a fork when we get to dinner?”
“YES!” I shriek, my fingernails carving divots in my palm as a cheer goes up from the patio. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!”
· · ·
ACCORDING TO WENDY and Paul, an on-site engagement is cause for a celebratory family-style dinner.
It is apparently not cause for Heather to cede attention for even a single moment.
Soon after we gathered in the candlelit dining room, she began by frowning at my hand and asking with deep concern where my ring was.
She then interrupted our cover story (it’s still being polished up in New York; Nathan was simply too lovestruck to wait) to launch into the story of how Nicholas proposed.
Which led to Nicholas giving an overview of the ring’s value and cut and carat and zodiac sign.
Which led to them both compiling a laundry list of their fine jewelry brand deals.
In short, it’s The Heather and Nicholas Show.
And that suits me fine, since I’m not in the mood to talk.
Grant and I sit stiffly side by side, fresh out of the will to press Martin’s buttons.
It’s not as if Heather and Nicholas are doing a better job.
Forty-five minutes of blathering, and Martin is unruffled as always, enjoying his roast chicken and listening contentedly.
After a while, though, Wendy seems eager to redirect the group’s attention as she tops up everyone’s wine.
“How about another toast for the new fiancés?”
Grant and I adopt grateful smiles as we all raise our glasses.
“And to couples in general,” adds Heather, beaming that big plastic smile around the room.
“You know, Nicholas and I were delighted to hear about this weekend because you never see events for couples anymore! It’s Singles’ This, Singles’ That.
It’s like the world wants people to be alone.
” She gives a tinkling laugh and swirls her rosé.
“What a joy to look around this room and be reminded that we’re not the only ones still in love. ”
“Which is not to say we don’t welcome our single friends,” Wendy chimes in with a gracious nod toward Martin. He waves her off with a chipper grin.
“Oh, never mind me,” he says. “It’s been a lovely stay. It’s just as wonderful to be surrounded by love as I expect it would be to be in it!”
Yeah. He’s definitely going to try to murder someone tonight.
“Mmm.” Heather swallows her wine, nodding toward Martin.
“And happy to have you here, of course. There’s something so dignified about a man living and writing in noble solitude, isn’t there?
But”—she chews a bite of roasted potato, tilting her head in thought—“it’s the ladies that are such a pity.
It isn’t natural for us to be alone. Yet you’ve got all these single women parading around their so-called independence like it isn’t the saddest thing in the world. ”
I try to remind myself that Heather is just a plot device, literally designed to be an asshole and therefore not worth my actual anger. It doesn’t work. I hate her anyway.
Before I can decide which to throw at her—a vicious clapback or a pitcher of water—Nicholas chimes in.
“A man wants to be needed,” he says plainly, cutting his chicken. “All that I don’t need a man nonsense … Such a turnoff.”
Well, that settles it. These are the worst people I’ve ever met. And I say that knowing that there’s an actual serial killer at the table with us.
“Quite right,” says Heather, rubbing Nicholas’s shoulder. She raises her glass with a patronizing smile and says, “She who ‘needs no one’”—this she puts in air quotes—“will never find anyone.”
With every word out of their smirking mouths, I can feel the shell of my character cracking.
“Maybe it’s more of an honor to be chosen by someone who doesn’t need you, but wants you anyway,” a different voice says.
The room falls quiet as heads turn Grant’s way, but he keeps his focus on the Fiorellos. “Someone who doesn’t sit around waiting for permission to live her life—that’s a person with stories to tell. I’d consider myself lucky to be the one she wanted to tell them to.”
The silence that follows is stunned on my part, aghast on the Fiorellos’, and holds a mix of approval and confusion from the rest of the table. Grant stutters as he catches himself.
“I … I am lucky, I mean,” he adds. “To be dating someone like that.”
Martin holds up his glass. “Engaged, you mean!”
“Right,” Grant says, his voice laced with self-conscious laughter.
As the table eases into a calmer flow of conversation—the Fiorellos having been properly silenced, eating their dinner with prim faces—Grant drops his head toward mine.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. And I don’t think he means for whatever just happened.
“Thank you,” I say. And I don’t mean for the apology.
It’s Rebecca and Nathan who are here tonight, not us. And right now, it feels good to be Rebecca and Nathan. My world won’t collapse if I admit that much. And so, just playing the part, I lean into his warm chest, and he rubs my back gently before settling his arm around me.
But as dinner continues in a pleasant murmur around us and I sink into the ease and comfort of being like this, of feeling his fingers absentmindedly stroking my arm, the pretense slips away.
We’ve been in this together about two weeks, a near-constant adrenaline rush with alternating horrors and thrills. But this is new. This is the first time I’ve really felt peaceful. Content. Supported.
And it makes me realize that what I have here—what I really have, under the lies and the aliases, even under the stupid feelings—is a friend.
I don’t know whether that thought warms or breaks my heart.