Chapter 14 Two Liars at a Wedding
Chapter 14
Two Liars at a Wedding
I t was late when we—our new grouping, the whole group minus the two brides who were busy with in-town family—got back to the hotel from our dinner at Bibi Ji, and we were all so stuffed with saag and curry and uni biryani and more garlic naan than I’d ever had in my life that only Chloe offered up a tepid suggestion to hit the hotel pool or bar, and instead we all headed off in pairs to our rooms. The realization that I’d somehow managed to tuck away for most of the day hit me with a red-hot flash of panic as Chloe let us in and I stared at the bed, which looked smaller than it had in the daylight.
“Do you want the bathroom first or last?” Chloe asked me in a casual tone, riffling through her suitcase.
I played out the two scenarios, lying down in bed first and waiting for Chloe to join me, or getting into the bed with her already there. I hated both of these!
“Should I sleep on the floor?” I asked, like an idiot. It wasn’t even close to a normal offer and I knew it! “I don’t know, sorry, is that easier somehow?”
“No, it’s weird,” Chloe said. “I’ll take that as a sure, Chloe, you can have the bathroom first .”
She walked off, closing the door behind her, while I pawed through my own bags. I’d brought a faded T-shirt I usually slept in, swag from an action movie I worked the marketing for a million years ago at Paramount, and sweatpants for lounging, so I’d have to sleep in the whole stretchwear look. At home I slept in the T-shirt and underwear only, but that felt more than mildly risqué in this current scenario. By the time I was in the bathroom and in my formal sleepwear attire, I frowned at my reflection and slipped out of my shirt to put my bra back on. Everything was just perkier that way.
The truth was that I hated that I wasn’t more confident with my body when it came to other people. I liked my body, and Will had never made me feel anything less than attractive the entire time we were together, even though I was bigger at the end of our relationship than I’d been at the beginning. He complimented my style when we went out, and in bed he made it known with his eyes and hands and mouth that my body was exactly the body he wanted.
I knew it was something I’d have to confront when I dated again, of course, but there were all the other parts too, like swimsuits in public and thin people not understanding how any of it actually felt.
Not that I had any room to complain around Chloe and her friends. Not in that department, and not about anything else, either. And I knew I wasn’t always that comfortable with Fiona and Hailey, my thin friends who never quite seemed to get it, but I hated how often I thought of them poorly lately, when nothing had changed except the addition of some people who wouldn’t even be in my life after a few more weeks. If Fiona and Hailey understood me better, I knew, things would be easier. But I didn’t know how to bridge that gap. Right now it felt easier to let it keep widening instead.
I opened the bathroom door and tiptoed to the bed, where Chloe was sitting up, calmly scrolling her phone. “The doggie daycare sent me six perfect photos of Fernando plus a video. I am tipping them so well.”
“Oh yeah, Tamarah sent me some good ones of Small Jesse Pinkman earlier,” I said, grabbing my phone to show her. “I can’t believe how much I miss him. Is that weird?”
“You think everything is weird,” Chloe said, but grinned at me. “Missing pets is normal. Will you turn the lights off before you get in bed?”
I tried to flip the switches casually, but somehow missed and looked like I was just swiping randomly at the wall. And since the lights were still on, Chloe absolutely saw it happening.
“Everything OK over there?” she asked with a laugh. “You seem to be still wearing your glasses.”
“I’m good,” I said, successfully flipping the switches and waiting as darkness descended over the room before approaching the bed. It was a big hotel-size king, but still seemed impossibly small to get into. Of course there was the fact that for months now I’d been in my own king-size bed with no one else but Small Jesse Pinkman. And then of course there was the fact that it was a bed and Chloe was not my girlfriend and seriously why had I not considered this horrible possibility but also how horrible is the possibility really when Chloe held me the way she did on the dance floor only one night ago even if clearly nothing will ever happen between us .
“You OK?” Chloe asked.
“No, yeah, of course,” I said, doing my best to slip into the bed like some kind of weightless magical creature. “This is just weird, right? Can we say it’s weird?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Clementine,” she replied in that infuriatingly chill tone of hers. “I share beds with randos all the time.”
A laugh burst out of me. “Oh, I’m a rando now? Cool.”
“Sorry, are you one of those people who loves to share beds with people? Every night since your boring boyfriend left has been the emptiest and the loneliest ever?”
“Oh, god, no,” I said, maybe not fully having realized it until saying it. “I love having the bed to myself, actually. I mean, besides Small Jesse Pinkman of course. Will could be good at helping me stay calm, but a purring kitten is maybe even better equipped for the job.”
“Don’t worry, I’d never forget Small Jesse Pinkman, and his myriad of talents.” Chloe snorted. “I dated this girl who always tried to touch my feet with hers in the middle of the night. She thought it was romantic. Sorry, I don’t think anything with feet is romantic.”
“Not your kink,” I said, “got it.”
Chloe snorted harder. It might have been an actual laugh. “People treat me like I’m a freak for being happy being alone. But I love sleeping through the night not worrying if my feet are going to be randomly touched.”
“You understand that it’s not a binary thing, right?” I asked. “It’s not be single or have your feet touched against your will , you know.”
“That has not been my experience,” she said, but I could tell from her tone that perhaps I’d won this round.
“I never had to worry about that with Will,” I said. “Unexpected foot-touching.”
“Yeah, and you still left him,” she said.
“That makes it sound easy,” I said, even though ultimately in so many ways, it had been. “I did have to blow up my life to—I don’t know. Go after what I’m actually looking for. I lost my guaranteed future. My friends, I’m sure, think I made a huge mistake and maybe I’m realizing they didn’t know me very well either.”
“Tell me, Clementine,” Chloe said, “what is this thing you’re looking for? Besides that it’s gayer?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, even though when I talked to Will it had been so clear. “There’s this whole expected life, I guess, the things society says you’re supposed to do to be a valid person, and so much of that just isn’t on my list. I want to find someone outside of that.”
“Even though you admit it’s good to have a whole bed to yourself.”
“Well, sure,” I said. “Right now it’s very easy to want that.”
“Oh, fuck you ,” Chloe said, but her words were tinged with such sweetness.
“In my head,” I said softly, “it doesn’t feel like an either-or. This thing I want. I want to fall in love and have it be forever. And just because I want it on my own terms—I don’t know. It’s like everyone else is doing this one thing because that’s what people do. I guess this is the part I have a hard time spelling out. Why didn’t I want everything Will wanted if I was in all-the-way for him?”
“Well, it’s been, what, eleven weeks or something and you’re already getting ready for the girl you’re going to fall in love with next?” Chloe’s smirk was apparent even through the darkness. “How ‘in all-the-way’ were you actually?”
I thought about digging in and finding the words to describe what sometimes felt like the indescribable: how I’d pick up clues of the life Will thought we’d have together and feel this heart-jabbing stab that it wasn’t only that we didn’t want the same things but that maybe somehow after all these years we didn’t even know each other well enough to realize it. What had all those years been built on? And if what my heart sought out felt so natural to me, why did the relationships other people had so often make me chafe when envisioning myself in them? Why did all of this feel like an ill-fitting garment?
“I’m going to sleep,” Chloe said. “I’m getting tired and I like picking on you when I have more mental energy.”
“OK,” I said, hoping it sounded breezy and not wait is this yet another existential crisis?
“Don’t touch my feet during the night,” she said.
I cracked up more than I probably normally would, so relieved to have anywhere to put my thoughts other than the steaming stew of worry bubbling over in my brain. “No problem. Enthusiastic foot consent only.”
We spent the next day in Santa Barbara almost identically to the first. The friend group minus Nina and Ari met for brunch at a beachside restaurant, and afterward roamed the nearby beach while cartoonishly beautiful things happened like trios of dolphins turning flips in the air right before our eyes.
“It’s like a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper,” CJ said in a reverent tone, which struck me as the funniest thing I’d heard in ages. It did not escape my notice that, around these people, there were so many new funniest things ever.
“It’s so gorgeous here,” Phoebe said, and we all concurred. It was so gorgeous in fact that I was barely thinking of the fact that Phoebe held my future’s fate in her hands and I’d ended up on a destination wedding vacation with her.
“My family assumes I must see the ocean all the time,” Sofia said. “But I don’t know about the rest of you, I never make it out to the beach.”
“You never make it past Western,” CJ said, and we all laughed for a second and then were silent, each of us clearly doing the geographical math. I couldn’t remember the last time, this trip excluded, I’d left my little pocket of Eastside Los Angeles either.
“Santa Barbara sounded so random when Nina and Ari told us,” Chloe said. “But I get it now that we’re here.”
“You’ve been here before,” I said. “Or you wouldn’t have such big thoughts about the peppers, probably.”
Chloe elbowed me. “Yeah, back in my dirtbag younger years. One time we got here to stay with my friend Jenn’s friend and her girlfriend, but the friend had left the girlfriend like two nights before we got here, the girlfriend forgot we were coming, and she just kept weeping and trying to drag the futon back in from the yard.”
Phoebe raised her eyebrows. “Why was the futon in the yard?”
“I guess when she got dumped she put all her stuff on the lawn to be dramatic, I don’t know. Jenn got the lawn futon. All they could find for me to sleep on was some leftover child’s mattress. Whenever people are like, oh wow, Santa Barbara, what a beautiful part of the state, I’m like, yeah, for me to sleep on a four-foot-long mattress while a woman I don’t know weeps.”
“You have a lot of very specific experiences you nonetheless hold to be universal,” I said as the group of us reached the shoreline and walked in, just up to our ankles.
“Is this about foot girl?” Chloe asked.
“Well, it’s not not about foot girl.”
“Who’s foot girl? ” CJ asked.
“I’m never telling you anything again,” Chloe said with a sigh, which was funny given she was the one who’d first uttered the phrase foot girl and I let her know that. “You sound like a lawyer.”
I noticed that CJ, Sofia, Bianca, and Phoebe were exchanging looks, the universal is this couple being normal snippy or are we already somehow in the middle of someone else’s fight expressions.
“I bet my parents would be super proud if I were a lawyer,” I said, hoping my tone would let everyone know everything was fine and dandy. It was, wasn’t it? “Though could that outdo Greg?”
“He is saving lives , Clementine,” Chloe said, and pulled me further into the cool water. “Sometimes I feel like I’m having a normal conversation and everyone thinks I’m about to attack.”
“You even sometimes think you’re having a normal conversation?” I asked with mock innocence, and we both laughed. Standing in the sunshine in the Pacific Ocean with a person I kind of adored , I realized, life felt really good.
Adored like a friend, of course. I mean, a friend whose laugh filled me with joy and whose jawline stirred feelings somewhere lower than my gut, but that was all just being bisexual and having a hot friend. That much had to be true.
The wedding party had an afternoon spa appointment, and I’d planned to spend that time in the borrowed caftan reading a book on our hotel room’s tiny private patio, but a text from Ari to the group chat showed up while the six of us were hanging around the hotel bar, around the time I’d planned to wander off. Clementine, I know you’re technically not part of the wedding party but I wanted to make sure you were still going to show up. See y’all soon. Then a follow-up text from Nina: Gender-affirming manicures only!
“What does that even mean?” I asked without thinking, and then felt very much like a baby gay for asking what was probably an exceedingly obvious question in front of all of these very-much-not-baby gays.
Chloe laughed, though. “I think that’s because before Phoebe and Bianca’s wedding, we went to like this super heterosexual nail salon, and they couldn’t make sense of the idea of two brides.”
“You’re forgetting that Phoebe kept commanding, just do me like a man , which didn’t help to clear up any confusion,” Bianca said.
We headed out of the hotel, down the block to the spa. As much as I would have liked a moment or two alone with a book, I couldn’t deny it was nice being included in this part too. It was like, if I squinted a little, I was an actual part of these people’s lives. I wondered if this was how the Talented Mr. Ripley felt. Minus the fake name and the murder and the fact that he was in it alone and I had Chloe. So, probably different. And better . I had it better than the Talented Mr. Ripley! That was something, maybe.
“I love the thought of Nina and Ari prepping the employees at this place,” Phoebe said with a laugh.
“ If someone says ‘do me like a man,’ they just mean they don’t want any nail polish but their cuticles should still be attended to! ” Chloe intoned like an overzealous coach, and we were still cracking up as we walked into the serene and understated spa. Nina and Ari were already there, hanging out in robes on a fancy chaise and drinking champagne, like a cartoon of affluent people having a spa day. There was also another group of friends—a slightly younger set of four people who had the complicated haircuts and intentionally mismatched patterns of people who were of both LA’s Eastside as well as the Internet.
Ari ran through introductions, even though it sounded like her group of friends and this one had already met at a few various occasions. It was a relief, I thought, that I’d been pulled into a group like this one, people my own age and older, with haircuts that didn’t make my long bob look too boring. When I was dating for real, I wondered if there would be a way I could suss out someone’s friend group ahead of time—though that seemed slightly inappropriate somehow, and also it was weird to realize how soon that time was coming. In a couple weeks, it’d all be behind us.
Considering that I wasn’t a real part of the wedding party, I’d planned to take advantage of a free mani and pedi, but Ari talked me into a bunch of treatments she swore by. Since the skin of celebrities was—apparently, if Ari was any example—blemish-free and gleaming with some kind of inner light, I found it physically impossible to say no. Was it bad form to be here under such false circumstances and then have a team of experts buffing and scrubbing and moisturizing my every pore? I genuinely didn’t want to find out; I’d never glowed before.
Our groups had spread out a bit—Nina and Ari had rented out the entire spa, and we were taking advantage of the luxurious space. So I found myself completely alone, waiting my turn for a pre-facial scrub, when Nina and Ari dropped onto the sofa on either side of me.
“We’re really glad you came today,” Nina said, beaming at me.
“So glad,” Ari echoed, shoving her hair back from her face.
“It was really nice to invite me,” I said, undeserving of this special attention from the brides. “And completely unnecessary! Way above and beyond.”
“If you and Chlo had started dating any sooner …” Nina said, and Ari nodded emphatically.
“We feel weird that you’re not more included,” she said, and my stomach lurched a little. There was only one person who should feel weird about the entire scenario, and it was me. Well, two people, but I was pretty sure Chloe didn’t feel weird about any of this. Was Chloe capable of feeling any weirdness? Though of course she would have been included no matter what. Here I was, though, an imposter both figuratively and literally soaking up expensive spa treatments.
“It hasn’t been very long,” I said as casually as my conscience could manage, as casually as I could cut myself off without tossing in a and it’s complete bullshit!
“In earth time, no,” Nina said. “In sapphic time, it’s been ages. So, anyway, this is just our cheesy way of saying we’re really happy that you’re here, and that you’re a part of today, and that if you’d literally started dating any sooner you’d officially be part of the wedding party, too.”
Before I knew what was happening, they crowded in from both sides, and I wondered if this was the guiltiest anyone had ever felt while buried in a group hug.
The afternoon went on much longer than I think any of us had anticipated, and we had to rush back to the hotel so we’d have enough time to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. I was a little buzzed on champagne and conversation, which helped a little to dampen the way that group hug had exacerbated my existing guilt.
A little.
“I’m starting to feel really weird about all of this,” I said as I pulled together my outfit from various sections of my suitcase and the closet. “Like we went into this whole thing, like, power to the single people. But now we’re just two liars at a wedding.”
“Oh my god, two liars at a wedding, great theme, I love it,” Chloe said, cackling as she disappeared into the bathroom, returning only moments later in a perfectly cut black and gold jumpsuit. The gold threads were metallic in the light, and I’d never seen her look so glamorous. “What?”
“You just—you look amazing. Should we have coordinated outfits?”
“No, that’s weird, of course not. Did you think that was some secret part of gay culture?”
I stepped into the bathroom and pulled the door closed behind me. “No, sometimes you just see those perfectly coordinated couples, you know?” I called.
“Yeah, gross. I hope you and boring man weren’t like that.”
“His name was Will—no, it’s still Will, he’s not dead. And, no. Will worked in tech—oh my god , Will works in tech , again, he’s not dead, anyway. He’s a hoodie and jeans guy.”
“Oh yeah, I do vaguely remember him. Didn’t he wear a hoodie to one of the holiday parties?”
“Yeah, he said that was his formal hoodie,” I said. “I didn’t know you met him at the party. It’s … I don’t know. I’m surprised you never mentioned it.”
“I didn’t meet him,” she said. “But you and I talked for a long time, and later on I saw you with him. Not a big deal.”
I guessed that it wasn’t, though something about the memory felt dangerous in retrospect. A domino poised to knock over everything I’d set up. But we were tight on time, so instead of playing back that night or the greatest hits of getting up the nerve to end my relationship, I shimmied into my dress. It wasn’t metallic, but it was a dark floral pattern that looked a little nighttime and, I hoped, a little sophisticated. Normally I felt way too twee to even strive for elegance, but the occasion seemed to call for it.
My skin glowed all over from the spa—now that I knew that celebrities got treatments like full-body facials, I understood a little more why we appeared like mere mortals next to them—but I still applied my basic makeup, and then finished up with my fancy-occasion-only LoveSeen lashes and my boldest berry-colored lipstick. Chloe’s face when I stepped out of the bathroom was enough confirmation for me that I’d nailed the look.
“You’re such a good fake girlfriend,” Chloe said. “You look amazing.”
“Seriously, Chloe,” I said. “Right now I don’t feel like I’m righteously pulling one over on mainstream society or whatever. I just feel like we’re lying to your best friends.”
Chloe flashed a grin at me. “That’s because we are lying to my best friends. And it’s for everyone’s own good!”
“That,” I said, “cannot possibly be true.”