Chapter 3
Natalie watched in disbelief as Angus sank down to one knee. “Gabriella Alvarez,” he said, “I love you more than anyone in the world. No offense, Mom and Dad!” Nat glanced around and saw Angus’s parents, the Futon King and Queen themselves, emerging from a corner of the crowd, right next to Gabby’s parents, all with anticipatory looks on their faces. Angus opened the box to reveal a ring, and Gabby wobbled in her heels with shock. “From the moment I met you, I knew you’d be my future wife. Well, if you want to be! Do you want to be?”
Gabby’s hands flew up to her mouth. Natalie’s cheeks burned in secondhand embarrassment for her friend. Oh God. She must be feeling mortified. She was a planner—when she and Nat went on vacation together, Gabby always drew up an itinerary and spent hours researching. A surprise proposal was probably one of her greatest fears (along with heights). She would’ve wanted to pick out the ring. She would definitely think that the pinkish diamond in Angus’s hand was ugly as fuck. Also, they’d only been dating for a year! They didn’t even live together. What the hell was Angus thinking?
“Yes,” Gabby blurted, and people erupted in cheers.
Natalie could barely hear for the ringing in her ears. Amid her disbelief, a theory presented itself. Despite being strong-willed, Gabby had a people-pleasing streak, never wanting to create fuss or drama. Angus had to know that just as well as Natalie did. So he’d ambushed her in front of all her nearest and dearest. Natalie worried that Gabby didn’t want to let anyone down. And in trying not to make a scene, she was making a Jupiter-sized mistake.
If Gabby truly wanted to marry Angus, Natalie would support her. Of course she would. But she knew what Gabby looked like when she was besotted. She’d seen it with Gabby’s college boyfriend, Tony. Anytime someone said the name “Tony,” Gabby would burst out into an idiotic grin, which was a bit problematic during the weeks that their English class read Beloved. She’d developed a severe case of mentionitis. (Oh, you were just on the phone with your mom? Tony called his mom the other day!) She’d let out great, heaving sobs when he’d broken her heart. Gabby had displayed none of these signs about Angus.
Natalie turned to Rob, who looked surprised, though not stunned. “Did you know? That he was going to do this?”
“No.” He pursed his lips. “Well, he has been referring to her as his ‘future wife’ for a while now. And he’s mentioned proposing, though never with a specific timeline. And he was strangely insistent on me coming tonight. But I assumed he just wanted me to finally meet her.”
So, Natalie was the only one to be truly blindsided. Not that she expected Angus to have asked for her blessing. Still, it was normal to give someone’s best friend in the whole world a little heads-up, consult them about ring styles or proposal preferences, wasn’t it?
“Sometimes when Angus gets an idea, he likes to run with it,” Rob was continuing, and the only thing Natalie could think, all-caps in her mind, was RED FLAG, RED FLAG, RED FLAG.
Gabby finally emerged from the hug pile made up of her and Angus’s families, her eyes finding Natalie’s across the room, and Natalie felt grateful that even in this moment of insanity, they looked for each other. Gabby jerked her head in the direction of the bathroom, and Natalie nodded.
They met outside the women’s room, a single-person restroom with a drunk girl staggering out of it. Gabby pulled Nat inside, where it smelled vaguely of shit, despite the hibiscus-scented candle working overtime on the ledge above the sink.
The door swung closed behind them. Stunned silence for a moment, then Gabby hit Natalie’s arm. “Why did you let me wear such a low-cut dress?”
“I didn’t have any idea that this was happening.”
“Oh my God,” Gabby said, gawking at the ring on her finger. “I’m engaged. I’m an engaged woman. This is insane. Is it insane?”
“It’s…well, it’s definitely unexpected.”
“If I’d known he was going to do a surprise proposal, I would’ve told him absolutely not to,” Gabby continued, dazed, and finally Natalie felt like she was standing on solid ground. She’d known that Gabby didn’t want this.
“Okay.” She took Gabby by the shoulders. “You can just play along for tonight, and then talk to him tomorrow. Everyone will understand if you change your mind after sleeping on it…”
Gabby blinked. “What?”
“I mean, if he took you by surprise.”
“He did. And definitely for the first few seconds, I was like, ‘Oh, hell no!’ But then I looked over at that table in the corner that you were saying I was gonna dance on, and I realized…I’m not a person who gets wild and crazy. I want to settle down! Even if the ring is absolutely hideous. We can fix that.”
“Are you sure? You haven’t even had a chance to live together. What if he has some weird habit that he does in the privacy of his own home, like cutting his toenails in the kitchen sink—”
“He cuts them over a trash can, I’ve seen it.”
“That’s just one of many examples.”
“My parents would never want me to live with someone before getting engaged. You know how Catholic they are. I think it’s really thoughtful of him to remember me saying that and to not be freaked out by it. A lot of guys wouldn’t be so respectful.”
“Oh. Right. That’s…great.”
Gabby stared at Natalie. Natalie stared back. “So”—Gabby smiled, a bit uncertain—“are you going to congratulate me or what?”
This was happening all wrong. Your best friend was supposed to meet the man of her dreams, and you were supposed to be so happy that you cried tears of joy. But the tears threatening Natalie’s composure now were decidedly NOT of the joy variety.
It was too soon. She and Gabby hadn’t yet had enough time to be the most important people in each other’s lives. Would Gabby start referring to Angus as her best friend now? Would he always be there whenever the two of them tried to hang out, redirecting the conversation in his exhausting way, offering Natalie terrible, unsolicited advice on her love life and career?
Now Gabby would talk to Angus first about everything. The moments when she came home from the office buzzing with fury about how a senior advertising partner had treated her or alight with excitement over a successful pitch and needed to talk it all through, the moments when Gabby figured out the solution, the sheer force of her talent so exciting that Natalie would get goose bumps, those moments would go to Angus. Gabby would still tell Nat about them, but they’d be the leftovers, the reheated version. She and Natalie would always be catching up instead of figuring things out together.
Nat’s brain was frozen and fuzzy for one more second. Then she exhaled. “Oh, duh, congratulations! This is—whew!—so exciting!”
“Thank you!” Gabby threw her arms around Natalie, and they held each other tight. “You’ll be my maid of honor, of course.”
“Of course.”
“My sister might be mad, so watch your back in case she tries to push you down the stairs, but you know she’d be a disaster. And I promise I’ll be a chill bride.”
A pause, then they both cackled, because if Gabby got this neurotic about dancing on a table, Natalie could not imagine how she would survive wedding planning without having an aneurysm. “Okay,” Gabby continued. “I’ll do my best to be as chill as possible.” She straightened her shoulders, pulled her dress up to a more respectable level, and opened the door. “Now back out there to my fiancé!”
Natalie beelined straight to the bar and ordered a shot of tequila. Rob was still there, sipping on a whiskey, his face furrowed in concentration.
They let the alcohol burn their throats for a moment. Then Natalie asked, “So, what do you think of all this?”
“If she’s actually as amazing as he says—”
“She is.”
“Then I think it’s good. As long as he’s happy.”
“Mm.” They sipped their drinks in silence for a moment, until Natalie couldn’t stop herself. “It’s just so quick, right? You should be ending your twenty-fifth birthday puking on the subway, not getting engaged.”
He gave her a sideways glance. “I’m not sure you should aspire to puke on the subway.”
“I’m obviously not aspiring.”
“Sounds unpleasant, not to mention inconsiderate to the MTA workers—”
Natalie swatted his arm. “Bad example, okay?” Rob looked down at where she’d touched. Had she hit him harder than intended? “I just mean that now’s the time to be trying things, figuring out what we want.”
In the center of the room, Angus was picking Gabby up and squeezing as Gabby wiggled, tugging the hem of her dress down so she didn’t expose herself to the roomful of well-wishers. As Natalie watched, a partygoer jostled past, unintentionally pushing her into Rob. She collided with his chest, and he startled, his arms coming up to steady her, gripping her shoulders. Their area of the bar had grown crowded, everyone grabbing another round of drinks to celebrate, and for a moment, Natalie didn’t have the space to move backward, the two of them thrown together, suddenly still in the midst of chaos. The shouting and laughing and Daft Punk’s new single blasting on the speakers for the third time already that evening, it all seemed to blur around her. The only thing she could focus on was the weight of Rob’s hands on her shoulders.
“Sorry,” she said, her voice faint.
“That’s all right,” Rob replied, his dark eyes intense. “To what you were saying, though…” His voice caught, and he cleared his throat, eyes still locked on hers. Still gripping her, steadying her in a way that made her feel entirely off-balance. “Maybe some people get lucky. They find someone early on and don’t need to figure anything out because there’s no doubt at all.”
Amid all the turmoil inside her at the turn the night had taken, something sparked in Natalie’s chest. Fluttered. And then a twinge of guilt. Dammit, she should have mentioned Conor by now. The space behind her had cleared. There was no excuse for her to keep touching Rob.
“I’m probably having trouble wrapping my mind around it because marriage feels so far away for me.” She stepped back, leaned against the bar, and looked over at the crowd, away from Rob’s gaze. “I mean, I get hives when my boyfriend wants to sleep over two nights in a row.”
Rob blinked, then nodded. “Ah. Is your boyfriend here?”
“No, he’s out of town doing an artist’s residency.”
“An artist, huh?”
“A writer. You’d approve of him; he did an MFA.” Rob rolled his eyes and she went on. “He writes these experimental short stories. They’re brilliant.”
At least, Conor received enough accolades that the stories had to be brilliant. If Natalie didn’t understand them, she probably wasn’t smart enough. Conor liked to give her drafts, then insisted on watching as she read. Whenever this happened, half of her mind paid attention to the story. The other half silently freaked out, struggling to find something intellectual to say.
“The wounded rabbit. So…melancholy. I couldn’t help thinking of the lost innocence of childhood,” she’d said the last time they’d performed this strange ritual.
He’d furrowed his brow, as if disappointed in both her and himself. “I was actually hoping to convey the crushing weight of capitalism.”
“Yes, I was about to say that I felt that too!”
Conor took her to literary salons with his friends from his writing program. Natalie tried to network. But Conor’s friends were terrifying. If they found someone, particularly a writer, lacking, they immediately knew the perfect, devastating sentence to expose that person’s deeply uncool core.
God, there were so many ways to like all the wrong things in this world, weren’t there? Was there anything more pathetic than having bad taste? When she was younger, Natalie had just wanted to write things that made people feel, things that people understood. She’d fantasized about a version of herself wearing a flouncy, indulgent nightgown and drinking champagne while typing away. But Conor’s friends made her feel like the only way to write well was to smoke a cigarette and burn it on her arm, and then catalog the pain she felt. Everything made her feel that way, actually, from book reviews in papers of note to the writing classes she’d taken in college, and when she looked at the novel she was currently writing, she wanted to despair—it had no animating fury, no bite. Conor’s friends would snark about it for hours. She had to toughen up and dig deeper if she wanted to write anything of value in this world.
“I’ve personally never gotten into experimental short stories,” Rob said, “but he sounds impressive.”
“Oh yes, he’s very fancy,” Nat said, and forced a grin. “Not sure why he bothers with me.”
Rob’s eyebrows knitted together. “Don’t say that.”
Her breath caught in her throat. Because suddenly Natalie knew that she was playacting with Conor, keeping up a facade of being cooler and artsier than she actually was so that he wouldn’t get bored. Somehow, she’d shown more of her true self to Rob in the past hour than she had to Conor in the entirety of their three-month relationship.
But she didn’t want to be the kind of person who clung on to something that wasn’t real just so that she didn’t have to be alone. She’d seen where that had gotten her mother. After her father had left (five days after Nat’s bat mitzvah), Nat’s mom had dated a string of men who had broken her heart, and Nat’s too by extension. Throughout it all, Nat had picked up the pieces, and her mom had been fine eventually, because it was the two of them against the world. But when Nat had gone off to college, her mother had been unable to stand the silence and loneliness of her empty house.
Soon enough, she was engaged to Greg, a man Natalie barely knew, a man Natalie’s mom didn’t even seem to like all that much. She was just so far out of Greg’s league that she knew he’d never leave her. She tolerated him, and Nat couldn’t think of anything more depressing. (Well, she could. Climate change, etc.) Now, her funny, lovely, bubbly mother spoke through gritted teeth, always annoyed, wishing for the solitude of which she’d been so afraid.
A chill ran through Natalie. God, she hoped Gabby hadn’t just consigned herself to the same fate.
“All right, doppelganger,” Rob said, breaking through her reverie. “Tell me what I need to know about Gabby.” Natalie turned back to him, and Rob shrugged. “I’ve got to do my research, because Angus asked me to be his best man.”