One-Star Romance

Chapter 10

The vows had been made, the hors d’oeuvres passed, and Rob Kapinsky was hiding in a corridor, practicing his speech one final time.

Rob had not, for one moment, entertained the thought of saying no when Angus asked him to be best man. He could stand up straight in a suit, plan a bachelor trip, and handle any last-minute crises without collapsing under pressure. He understood that to be a best man was to put the groom’s needs before your own, so he would not be annoyed if he was taken away from the party to run errands. (In fact, his introverted heart might enjoy the momentary break from socialization.)

But one part of being best man had caused him significant anxiety ever since the wedding planning began: giving the toast.

One might think that an aspiring academic would relish an opportunity for public speaking. But Rob’s ultimate career goal involved research and seminars over lecturing to packed auditoriums. He’d chosen his specialty carefully: students were not lining up around the block for Linguistics 101.

The way that people could hold a microphone with ease seemed entirely foreign to him. Were they not always worried that it was too close to their mouth, creating an unpleasant plosive sound that caused the listeners auditory discomfort? That or too far away so that no one in the audience could quite hear, and everyone wanted to say, Bring it closer! but did not because of the social awkwardness that interrupting would entail?

But for Angus, Rob was determined to give a speech that meant something. He’d signed up for an online public speaking course and taken notes through the lectures. He’d practiced in his bathroom mirror. He’d scoured various websites for wedding toast advice. Then he’d written three drafts, performing it once for his roommate to get feedback, even though he hated asking for favors. The resulting toast was a tight four minutes and twenty seconds when Rob read it straight through, enough time built in for laughter and other delays so that it would stay under the requested five-minute limit.

In the privacy of the hallway, he recited it under his breath, pacing, tugging at his collar. The back of his neck itched from the way his shirt had dried, stiff and crusted, after his unplanned swim. His fingers landed on a fragment of leaf that had gotten stuck right above his shoulder blade, and he pulled it out, placing it in his pocket when he didn’t see a trash can readily available.

Despite what Natalie probably believed, he had considered talking Angus out of the zip-line plan, going so far as to bring it up at the bachelor party earlier that week. But the moment that Rob said the word “zip-line,” Angus had lit up.

“It’s perfect, isn’t it? Gabby’s nervous about walking down the aisle. Can you imagine being that beautiful and yet not liking it when people look at you?” Angus shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t.” Then he stared off into the middle distance, smiling dopily as if seeing Gabby there.

“And how does zip-lining play into this?” Rob prompted.

“Ah, right! If I come in that way, it takes the pressure off! It’ll loosen people up, make it so that Gabby doesn’t have to get all in her head about her walk down the aisle.”

After that, Rob didn’t have the heart to pour cold water on the plan. Angus knew his relationship with Gabby better than Rob did. Better than Natalie did too, though clearly she thought otherwise—

The door to the bathroom opened, and Natalie emerged, stopping short at the sight of Rob. She also held a piece of paper in her hands, and her eyes flitted down to his.

“Practicing your toast?” she asked. “Me too.”

He cleared his throat. “Just want to do well for Angus and Gabby.”

“Of course. It’s not a competition,” she said in that irritating voice she’d been using with him all day, honeyed and insincere, a voice that didn’t seem like her at all. But then again, he didn’t really know her. The past couple of weeks had made that all too clear.

Beyond the toast, another part of being best man had begun to cause him anxiety in the time leading up to the wedding. This anxiety was different, though. Anticipatory. Almost pleasant. The anxiety of seeing Natalie again. Sometimes, without meaning to, he’d think of the way her big smile turned her face…well, the only word that seemed to fit was “luminous.”

Angus kept Rob apprised of the latest in Natalie’s life, though Rob had never asked outright for information. Angus was a gossip, in the nicest sense of the word. He spread not secrets or judgment but updates. The people he knew, even barely, were fascinating to him, and he wanted to broadcast their achievements to all. Someday, he’d be the kind of father who knew exactly what was going on in the lives of all his children’s school friends. Rob and Natalie had met one time; therefore, in Angus’s mind, Rob would surely appreciate any pertinent updates in her life until he was on his deathbed. Even after that, perhaps, Angus would come visit his gravestone bearing flowers and an update on how Natalie had won last week’s bingo night at the nursing home.

So Angus told Rob all about Natalie’s book deal, beaming with pride as if he’d written the book himself. He had not written it, nor in fact read it. Angus’s literary tastes veered more toward business books and Dune. But Rob liked literature of all kinds. Or he had. In recent years, his PhD program had sucked the joy out of reading for pleasure. He read for research. Oh, how much he read for research. He walked out of the library and stood motionless in the sun for five minutes and then went back down and read for research some more. And when the research was done, he had no energy left for complicated text. (He unwound with nature documentaries instead.)

But he’d taken note of Natalie’s release date, then bought the book as soon as it was available at his local bookstore. She had actually done it—what she’d said she was going to do.

And as he’d begun the book, for the first time in a long time, reading had not felt like work. Natalie had a clever, engaging voice. Perhaps it was more cynical than he’d expected from how she’d talked about the magic of writing when they’d met, perhaps he could feel the writing striving to impress, but still, he’d read eagerly about the travails of a twentysomething woman in New York City. Then he’d reached page 28.

“Right,” he said to her now, staring down at the speech in her hand. “Not a competition.” He turned and walked back into the dining room, determined to win.

He had time for one more sip of his whiskey and a bite of salad before the DJ called his name. Steeling himself, he approached the microphone stand, an unpleasant ticking in his ears—his heartbeat.

Looking over the assembled guests, his eyes fell upon his parents. Angus had invited them—after all, he’d spent many afternoons at their house, gone on family vacations with them, listened to Rob’s father regale them all. Now, Professor Kapinsky held court at table seven, telling some anecdote to Angus’s second cousins, Rob’s mother fading into the background beside him. This was how it always was. His mother deferred—well, except during that strange, chaotic three-month period when Rob was young that they never talked about, that had been erased so fully from their family history that Rob sometimes wondered if it had all been an exceptionally vivid dream.

His parents’ dynamic had been set up from the beginning of their relationship, when his mother secured a highly sought-after position as his father’s graduate student. Only a few months after starting in his office, she became pregnant with Rob, an event that broke up his father’s first marriage and instilled a lifelong enmity in Rob’s two older half siblings, who were determined to hate this invading baby forever. Who hates a baby? Rob sometimes wanted to ask them whenever awkward family functions forced them together, but it was a lost cause.

Rob’s father was brilliant. Rob’s father was a cliché.

Now, Rob’s mother gave his father a diffident pat on the shoulder to indicate that he should stop talking and pay attention to his son. Rob grasped the microphone. He couldn’t stop himself from looking at Natalie, who was leaning back in her chair, arms folded across her chest, an eyebrow raised. He yanked his eyes from her, cleared his throat, and began.

“Hello, everyone.” Irritatingly, his mouth was dry, despite the recent whiskey sip. He forced a swallow, then went on. “I met Angus in the spring of eighth grade, when I transferred schools. Now, being a boy with pimples and a changing voice, coming into a group of ruthless middle schoolers who have known each other for years…” He paused for effect, just as he’d practiced. “This may surprise you, but it’s not the optimal way to make new friends.”

A murmur of laughter from the audience, and Rob’s shoulders loosened a smidge.

The key to a good toast was understanding what to leave out. The strangers in this ballroom did not need to know where the story really began, the confluence of factors, the decisions small and large, that led to Rob’s transfer in the first place.

But if he were to tell the whole story, he’d begin with the fact that his father was a legend. Professor Stuart Kapinsky, Princeton University’s preeminent constitutional scholar. Admired, feared, and sucked up to in equal measure. If you wanted to see a perfect public speaker, all you had to do was attend one of his classes—if you could get in.

Rob loved academia as a child. How could he not? His father brought him into class once or twice a semester, where college students doted on him. Professor Kapinsky would have Rob come up to the front to help illustrate a point, and all these almost grown-ups would laugh and coo and beg to babysit. Sometimes, at night, he and his parents would get ice cream from one of the many shops dotting the small downtown and wander the campus, stopping off in an archway to listen to a concert by one of the student a capella groups, and as they sang some Paul Simon song in perfect harmony, Rob would think he’d never heard a more beautiful sound. Everywhere, great minds discussed great topics. Someone could be solving some heretofore unprovable mathematical theorem, and you’d never know it because they’d be sitting in the student center wearing baggy sweatpants, unwashed and ripe, like any other student, clutching a Red Bull in one hand and scribbling furiously with the other.

It all made his own education feel a little boring. After you’d sat in on your father’s special seminar—hundreds of students applied for it, and his father only picked fifteen!—junior high history classes paled in comparison.

But when Rob was in eighth grade, a teacher came in and shook everything up. Ms.Lindsay was twenty-four. She wore flared jeans and drove a car with a bumper sticker that read this is what a feminist looks like years before corporate America decided feminism was something to splash all over tote bags and coffee mugs. For their first lesson in American history, she held up a copy of the pocket Constitution.

“This document governs how we live our lives. A bunch of brilliant men wrote it hundreds of years ago, and there’s so much good in it,” she declared to the class in a raspy, thrilling voice, a voice that indicated that she’d spent time smoking cigarettes or maybe even marijuana. “But we’ve got some bright minds in here too.” Then she ripped the pages in half. “And I think we could do better.”

In that moment, thirteen-year-old Rob fell in love for the first time.

Their assignment was to write an essay proposing what they’d put into a new Constitution, a document to govern the country now if they were starting from scratch. They’d all present their ideas and use them to make a Classroom Constitution. “After all,” Ms.Lindsay said, “so much has changed since these old dead men wrote the rules. They didn’t even consider Black people and women to be full citizens with rights!”

Rob went home, put his head down, and worked harder than he ever had before. He was determined to impress Ms.Lindsay. And more than that, he liked the assignment, which made him think differently about something he’d always taken for granted. That night over dinner, he presented what he had to his father, knowing that he’d have excellent notes. Rob imagined burnishing his arguments, presenting them in front of everyone, Ms.Lindsay trying to collect herself when he was done. She would put her pen down, take a deep breath, and say, “Well, class, I think we’ve found our Thomas Jefferson.”

But instead, when Rob stopped talking, his father frowned for a long moment. Then he sat back, folded his hands together, and said, “The entire premise of this assignment is flawed. Of course the Constitution is an imperfect document. That’s why the founders gave us the ability to write amendments. But to suggest we toss the whole thing out is, frankly, ridiculous.”

“But don’t you think that the world has changed a lot since they wrote it?”

“Sure it has. So the fact that the core tenets hold up so well only confirms the brilliance of the founders.”

Arguing with his father was like being tossed around in an angry ocean. Professor Kapinsky was relentless, letting you catch your breath for a moment only to knock you off your feet again before you could formulate a full response. (No wonder all the other professors in his department seemed to fear him.) And he was not pleased that Ms.Lindsay had ripped up a sacred document in what he dismissed as some “pandering display of theatrics.” By the time he was done, it was hard for Rob to remember what he’d liked about the assignment in the first place.

So, the next day in class, when it was Rob’s turn to present his ideas, he stood and said, “I disagree with the premise. I don’t think we should throw out the Constitution.”

Ms.Lindsay smiled. “Dissent! I like it. But you do still need to do the assignment. I’ll come back to you tomorrow.”

But the next day, Rob refused again, egged on by his father, who told him that he was standing up for his principles, just like the founders did. Ms.Lindsay admired that Rob had a strong point of view. But he simply didn’t do the work, so he left her no choice. She gave him a D.

It was the worst grade he’d ever gotten, and his father was incensed. Not at him. At Ms.Lindsay. Professor Kapinsky rode his high horse all the way to the principal’s office for a meeting in which he railed about the curriculum. What were Ms.Lindsay’s credentials, anyway? Also, she had a public profile on this new Myspace website, on which someone had posted a picture of her drinking in a bikini—was that not incredibly inappropriate for a teacher of children?

Rob was one of the quieter kids in class, but he wasn’t unpopular. They’d all grown up together, and the friendships he’d formed in the sandbox had mostly stuck. But as the news of his father’s war against Ms.Lindsay spread, Rob got caught in the crosshairs. Everyone liked Ms.Lindsay, who started coming into class dampened and sad, holding on to her job but on a sort of probation that made her scared to do anything but teach straight from the textbook. Many of Rob’s classmates stopped speaking to him or called him “Daddy’s little prince” or worse. Rob’s father wasn’t overly concerned with harming someone’s career—he’d done it before to up-and-coming colleagues who threatened his position or when it helped his own advancement. That was simply what you needed to do to succeed in this world, and didn’t Rob want to succeed? Didn’t he want the things that his father had? But if Rob couldn’t deal with the fallout, if his son was too sensitive…well, then Rob’s father would pull him out of that school and send him to a private academy half an hour away, a cliquey, competitive school where Rob seemed doomed to have even fewer friends than he already did.

“The first day of my new school, no one spoke to me,” Rob said now to the wedding guests. “I found out later that the most popular kid in class had made a rule that no one was supposed to talk to new kids for at least the first week, and nobody was brave enough to defy him. So I ate lunch in the bathroom, which was very unhygienic. I resigned myself to going through the rest of the year unhappy. But things changed the second day. Because on my first day of school, one kid from my class had been absent. And that kid was Angus.”

A knowing murmur from the crowd. Rob took another deep breath, feeling more and more in control.

“Day two, I was sitting at my desk, and this kid with a startling amount of headgear takes the chair next to me. Despite having been informed about the new-kid rule, he leans over and offers me a Capri-Sun. For some reason, his backpack was full of them. I later found out that he carried them around to offer to people whenever they were thirsty. And he says, ‘Hey, buddy! Where did you come from?’

“And from that moment on, I wasn’t alone. Let me tell you what it’s like to go through the world with Angus at your side. He cheers you up. He makes life into an adventure.” Rob was feeling so good, he decided to go for an ad-lib, of all things! “For example, he might decide to zip-line into a wedding.” The crowd laughed again. Oh, Rob was riding high. Perhaps public speaking was not so terrible after all, when you felt strongly about your topic. He continued, not even needing to glance at his written copy. “And then along comes Gabby, a smart, hardworking woman who embraces Angus’s irrepressible spirit but also grounds him in a way that has been really heartening to see. And, Gabby, though we don’t know each other as well as we’d like to yet, I get the sense that the reverse is true for you. That Angus loves you for your drive and focus while also encouraging you to, every once in a while, walk into a pond in your wedding dress.” Gabby laughed and nodded, and Rob squared his shoulders to deliver his final lines. “So, Angus and Gabby, I know you’ll approach your journey through the world together with the same curiosity and kindness that Angus had even as a headgear-wearing eighth grader. And the world will be all the better for it.”

Gabby put her hand over her heart. Angus mouthed a Thank you, his eyes red. And Rob held up his glass, prompting the ballroom to raise their own in a cheers to the happy couple. Rob sat back down amid a hearty round of clapping, resisting his urge to shoot a triumphant glance at Natalie. His speech was good, and his speech was done. The groomsman sitting next to him clapped him on the back. “Nice job, man!”

Then, at the next table over, Natalie rose to her feet.

“Let’s give our best man one more round of applause,” she said, baring her teeth in his direction. A tendril of hair had unwound from her updo over the course of the day’s exertions, and now it clung to the soft curve of her neck, the same way her blue dress clung to the curves of her body. “A beautiful speech and a tough act to follow.” She paused. Collected herself. “But I’ll do my best.” Then she shot the crowd a smile of such confidence and ease that Rob knew he was screwed.

“I’m Natalie, Gabby’s maid of honor, and I met her in college, so at that point, she was past the ‘unfortunate orthodontics’ phase.” There it was, the first chuckle from the audience, and with an ad-lib too. Natalie held the microphone steady in her hands as she went on.

“Gabby has an amazing way of making you feel at home. So it made perfect sense that, our senior year, she became a resident adviser. Which was great for me, because as her roommate, I got to live in a sweet dorm room without having to do any of the work of comforting homesick freshmen. No surprise, Gabby thrived as an RA. You should have seen this girl lead icebreakers. Those freshmen in our dorm were the luckiest kids in the world—Gabby kept them in a constant supply of snacks. She made sure they were all getting 4.0s and held their hair back when necessary. There was a line out our door of kids who claimed they were having a hard time adjusting, but really, they just wanted an excuse to hang out with her.

“She was so good at it that she got nominated for an award: the Spirit of the School, meant for students who demonstrated exceptional commitment and compassion. Gabby hadn’t been trying to get nominated, but once she was, she set her heart on winning. I mean, you got a certificate AND a small cash prize? I’m not sure if you know this about our girl, but under the surface, she’s incredibly ambitious. She schmoozed, she committed, she was on track to win it all.

“And then, the morning of her final interview with the nominating board, I woke up in excruciating pain. See, the day before, I’d gone to the campus gym with this cute guy who wanted to show me his weight-lifting routine, and, in trying to appear more badass than I was, I worked out harder than I ever had in my life. The things we do for men with six-packs, huh?” she said, as if every single person in that ballroom was her best friend, grabbing a drink after work with her. In response, they leaned forward. Rob even felt himself leaning too, before he pulled back. Because if anyone else but her had been delivering this speech, he would have been just as charmed. This toast was good, but more than the words, it was the way she delivered it, totally at ease, taking the perfect pauses. She was a natural and she knew it.

“But,” Natalie went on, “I ended up getting this rare complication of overexercise called rhabdomyolysis, which involves muscle breakdown and other gross things I will not mention, because I know you’re all trying to eat your individual portions of cod. Gabby found me crying in bed. She rushed me to the medical center and sat with me for hours, holding my hand, refusing to leave my side, no matter that it meant losing out on the award she’d tried so hard for. She never once made fun of me for being an idiot, though I probably would have deserved it. I always thought that she demonstrated the spirit of the award better than anything she might have done in her interview, but still, the college gave it to Emily Weinbacher instead, which was a gigantic mistake.” Nat paused. “Oh hey, Emily!” The ballroom gasped, and she burst into a grin. “No, she’s not here, can you imagine? And look, I’m sure Emily is a great person. But she’s no Gabby.”

Amid all the laughter, Natalie’s face softened with true affection. “Because Gabby is a once-in-a-lifetime woman. And I know she and Angus will have a once-in-a-lifetime marriage. Angus, I bet all those freshmen kids in our dorm are steaming with jealousy that you get Gabby to be your resident adviser through life.”

And that would have been a solid enough closing, but she wasn’t done. “And because I continue to feel terrible about making Gabby miss out on that award, I called up the university’s alumni office last month. They agreed that you deserved some sort of recognition after I made a very persuasive argument, aka promised to donate to them every year for the rest of my life. But joke’s on them, because they did not specify the donation amount, so until I pay off my loans, they will annually be receiving five dollars. Anyways!”

She was reaching down to the paper she’d been carrying earlier, which he’d assumed was a printed-out copy of her speech. Had she brought a prop? Natalie held the paper out for the ballroom to see—fancy-looking, with their college crest on it. “I’d like to present to you the certificate you should’ve gotten all those years ago. Please ignore the asterisk on here where the school stipulates that it’s not an official award.”

“Stop!” Gabby said, tearing up, and the rest of the guests clapped, full of the satisfaction that arrived when a story came back around to a surprising yet inevitable conclusion.

Natalie began to read the honor aloud. “?‘The university recognizes the exceptional compassion and commitment that Gabriella Alvarez’?”—she paused—“?‘and Angus Stoat the Third’?”—here, Angus let out a bellow of surprise and delight—“?‘have shown to each other and to the people they love. They truly demonstrate the Spirit of the School, even though Mr.Stoat the Third did not go here.’?”

Natalie handed the certificate to Gabby, who had happy tears streaming down her cheeks now. “May your marriage be full of compassion and commitment for all the years to come. It’s the two of you, so I have no doubt it will be.”

With that, she thrust her glass of champagne into the air, and the ballroom burst into applause. The toast was a triumph. Rob would’ve admired her, maybe even asked her for tips, in any other situation. She was radiant, a gladiator emerging from the arena with a lion’s pelt on her arm. He would not be receiving any more compliments for the rest of the night. Her toast had eviscerated the memory of his. And when she shot him a look, he knew with absolute certainty something that he’d suspected over the course of the day.

She knew about the rating he’d given her book.

The night he read the novel, finishing it at four a.m., he’d logged on to his Goodreads, skimmed all of her gushing reviews, and typed out one of his own, along with one star. He’d let his finger hover over the submit button for one tantalizing moment. Then he’d deleted it all, determined not to stoop to her level.

Until he saw her again at the rehearsal dinner, looking infuriatingly pleased with herself and pretty in her red dress, accepting compliments on her book left and right, then coming over to him to make a crack about Angus flying them all to Vegas. The moment he returned to his computer, fuming, a whiskey running through him, he pulled up the website and clicked submit on one star before he could talk himself out of it. It was justice. Let the world know that not everyone worshipped at the altar of Natalie Shapiro.

The whole ballroom seemed to be worshipping her now, though. After the dinner portion, Rob’s parents found him at his table. Rob’s father clapped him on the shoulder. “That maid of honor really blew your toast out of the water, huh?”

Rob’s mother gave him a gentle push. “Now, be nice.” She turned to Rob. “Yours was lovely too.” Somehow that faint praise felt even worse.

“Thanks,” he said. Then, desperate to get away, “I should see if Angus needs anything.”

He made his way over to the dance floor, where Angus and Gabby were sweating up a storm in a throng of friends and family.

“Hey, buddy,” he called into Angus’s ear. “Can I do anything for you?”

“Yes!” Angus turned to him and clasped his arms. “You can dance!”

Rob laughed, giving a small shake of his head.

“Come on, Robert,” Angus bellowed. “What is life for, if not dancing?”

Rob had no illusions about it: he was an unfortunate dancer. But then so was Angus. The pond water had caused his curls to dry into a blond halo of frizz, and he wiggled his body like one of those tubular inflatable creatures outside a car dealership. Gabby laughed at the sight, but not in a cruel way, not the kind of laughter that Rob had seen directed at Angus at times over the years. Then Gabby began to shake herself in a similar ridiculous wiggle. A veil of formality still hung between her and Rob, their conversation stilted whenever Angus left the two of them alone. But now, Rob could not stop himself from grinning because Angus had done it. His odd, enthusiastic, openhearted best friend—who had saved Rob from the bullies despite knowing it would make him even more of a target himself—had found a woman who understood him, who saw the full picture of who he was and wanted to walk alongside him through life, to the point where she would follow him into a pond in her wedding dress. And what was more beautiful than that? One had to celebrate. Even if one moved with the range and stiffness of a Lego figurine, one had to dance.

So Rob threw his arms in the air as “Don’t Stop Believin’?” played, and for the length of one glorious eighties rock song, he lost himself in joy. Then, as the DJ transitioned into “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” he turned to find himself face-to-face with Natalie.

Her cheeks were flushed. A challenging look came onto her face, her jaw set. “I wanted to ask you…” she began, the edges of her words slightly fuzzy with alcohol.

“Oh, yes, Rob, dance with her!” Angus said, jumping in, making assumptions, and Rob and Natalie both gave him a startled look. “A dance for the two people who helped this wedding go so smoothly!”

“Would we say smoothly?” Gabby asked with an affectionate nudge.

“No,” Angus said. “But we couldn’t have done this without you both.”

“Thanks,” Natalie began, “but we don’t need—”

Angus turned to the people in their immediate vicinity as Mama Cass’s lush, hypnotic voice unspooled from the speakers. “Clear some room for our superstars!”

“Superstars!” Gabby shouted, a little drunk herself, leading a round of applause.

Rob and Natalie stared at each other. No way to back out without making a scene. So, as the drums kicked in, Rob extended an arm, and Natalie stepped forward. He clasped her hand in his and pulled her in, making sure to maintain a careful distance between their bodies. Slowly, background vocalists oohing, the music lush and full, the two of them began to sway.

At first, she pointedly looked anywhere but at him, smiling instead at various people in the crowd as if all was fine. Two could play at that game. He turned his own head.

As he gripped her waist, the heat of her skin burned through the thin fabric of her dress. His hand tightened around her in spite of himself, and she let out a sharp exhale. Briefly, their eyes met before they both looked away again. For a moment she stopped swaying while he kept going, so that their bodies accidentally drew closer, too close, brushing against each other. At that unexpected touch, she stumbled a little. He tightened his grip even more to steady her, a reflex.

But that had the effect of bringing her in even closer, her chest now pressed against his, her head nearly on his shoulder. As Mama Cass sang of longing, the smell of Natalie’s hair lingered in his nose, making him momentarily dizzy. Slowly, as if against her will, she tilted her head up so that her eyes locked on his, and somehow he could not tear his gaze away. He willed himself to release her, to step back. He would. Any moment now.

And then, Angus’s voice sounded faintly, telling the people around them to join back in the dance for the final choruses.

As the others began to move, Rob cleared his throat. “What were you going to ask me?”

“Oh.” For just a second, her expression was unguarded. And then that challenging look came back onto her face. “I wanted to ask how many stars you’d give my speech.”

Rob nearly choked on his own spit.

She went on. “After careful consideration, I’d rate yours four stars. So, what’s mine? Don’t be shy, I know you have opinions.”

His jaw clenched. “You know very well that yours was better. There’s no need to be cruel.” He spun her out and then back again. “Although I guess that comes naturally to you.”

She sputtered. “I’m cruel? What are you even talking about? And what about you?”

Around them, people started to shoot furtive glances at their argument. Thank God the song was ending. The moment it faded into the “Cha-Cha Slide” (an odd transition from the DJ), Rob made his way off the dance floor and into the hallway. She followed, blazing after him.

“It isn’t cruel to give one star to someone you know?” The door shut behind them, turning the thumping dance floor music faint.

“I had issues with the book, and I expressed that,” he said, more calmly than he felt.

“Oh, okay. And that’s perfectly normal? How would you feel if I eviscerated you on Rate My Professors?”

“I’m not a professor yet, so you couldn’t.”

“Well, someday.”

“In this scenario, have you taken my class?”

“No. You couldn’t pay me enough—”

“Then I’d be angry that you were misrepresenting yourself. But if you did take my class and had legitimate grievances with it, I’d feel that it was within your rights.”

“There are plenty of things within our rights that we don’t do. I’d be perfectly within my rights to go back into that reception, pick up the microphone, and announce to the crowd that you’re an insufferable asshole.” She moved closer to him in righteous fury, the pupils of her eyes expanding, black holes that wanted to suck him into oblivion. “But I would never do that because of common human decency!”

“It also shows a real lack of common human decency to—”

At that moment, the door swung open, and Angus’s grandfather hobbled out into the hallway.

“Oh hello, you two,” he said.

“Hello,” Natalie said pleasantly. “Having a nice evening?”

“The most wonderful.”

“A joyful occasion,” Rob forced out.

“I’m off to bed. Can’t keep up like I used to.”

“Sleep well,” Natalie said, waving him off, and they watched him as he slowly moved down the hallway to the main entrance. He stopped to check his pockets. Satisfied he hadn’t forgotten anything, he opened the front door and disappeared, after what felt like eons, into a taxi waiting outside.

The moment he was gone, Nat and Rob turned back to each other.

“Please,” she said, “continue telling me about my lack of decency. I’d love to hear it.”

“You want to know why I didn’t like the book?” he asked. “Because you used your talents to be petty and mean.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“The character of Dennis? It’s the most uncharitable reading of Angus that I can imagine.”

She stared at him for a long moment, her big eyes blinking rapidly, chest heaving up and down, her full lips slightly parted. Then she let out a scornful laugh. “Dennis isn’t Angus.”

“Sure. He’s a man with no basis in reality who happens to be intent on carrying the protagonist’s vibrant best friend off to the land of suffocating matrimony. A totally random vehicle for your biting commentary on…what was it you wrote? ‘Boys who fail upward, who approach the world as if entitled to everything on offer. Boys who would, unlike the rest of us, receive all that they’d been promised, though not because of any talent beyond sheer unearned confidence’?”

“For someone who hates the book so much, you sure can quote a lot of it from memory,” she said with a smirk, folding her arms across her chest. It had the unsettling effect of drawing his attention to said chest, which was especially distracting in this dress.

“Anger has a way of burning things into my brain,” he retorted.

She took a deep breath and said, in a calm, patronizing voice, “The book is a work of fiction.”

“In the loosest sense of the word.”

“I like Angus!” Her tone was unconvincing. “You want me to list all the differences?” She held up a hand and began ticking them off on her fingers. “Dennis is tall, Dennis is Southern, Dennis is—”

“A bumbling fop modeled after my best friend.”

“Okay, the vast majority of fiction pulls some inspiration from real life. Did I use some of Angus’s qualities as a jumping-off point? Maybe. But then I spun them out into something different. Are you saying that an author can never use anything they encounter in the world as inspiration?”

“No, but—”

“Because if so, say goodbye to almost every book you’ve ever read. Tear up The Bell Jar, burn The Great Gatsby—”

“There’s a way to be inspired by the things around you without being so blatantly obvious and uncharitable! And the hypocrisy of you giving that wedding toast just now, when in your epilogue, you imply that Dennis and Victoria’s marriage is unsatisfying, that she’s trapped, but our heroine holds out hope that, maybe someday, her friend will find the strength to initiate a divorce—”

Natalie moved even closer to him now, her finger poking into his chest, her head thrust up so she could look him in the eyes. He could feel the heat coming off her, smell the scent of her lotion, or maybe her deodorant, or maybe just her sweat: a faint, enticing blend of cucumbers and jasmine. Her fury made her buzz, as if her outline were electric. She was the angriest and most alive person for miles. He leaned forward, or maybe she pressed against his chest harder, with all her fingers now, as she went on, “Calling Dennis a simple stand-in is a willful misreading, showing both a lack of imagination on your end and an assumption that I share that lack of imagination. You’re as good as saying that I can’t do anything but plagiarize what I see in front of me. And honestly, it’s a bit insulting to Angus from your end to say that you don’t see him as anything more than the character in the book.”

“Oh please.” She was the one who didn’t see Angus, or had chosen to see him only in the most unflattering light in order to give herself something to write about. And someone who was so lazy and cruel, that wasn’t somebody he wanted in his life. “You know he’s my closest friend in the world—”

“Well, nobody else has expressed this concern to me, so maybe this is more of a you issue. And I think you know that, or else you would have said something to my face instead of posting it anonymously like some basement-dwelling internet troll.”

The pressure built up inside him, from her hand on his chest, from the inescapable fullness of her around him, the way her body in that dress curved toward him, the slit in the fabric up her thigh, from her words and words and more words, pretty and biting and infuriatingly superior, the kinds of words you could get swept away in if you weren’t careful. He wanted to stop her mouth, and for a wild, out-of-nowhere moment, the best way to do that seemed to be by pressing his own mouth against it. But he swatted that impulse away.

She would not win this battle too. He’d read all the other reviews on her page and had noticed a conspicuous absence. So he dealt the fatal blow. “If it’s not a problem, then why can’t Gabby bring herself to finish it?”

Immediately, the fury drained from her face, replaced by a deep pain. In seeking to reflect her cruelty to her, he’d become cruel himself, touched a deeper nerve than he’d meant to. Her eyes reddened, and she stepped back.

“Natalie.” He reached out a hand toward her, but she pulled her arm away.

“Screw you,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. She turned toward the stairway that led up to the bedrooms. “If Gabby asks, tell her I got drunk and went to bed.”

At the top of the staircase, right before she disappeared from view, she whirled back around. He stood there, unable to move. In a cold, clear tone, she said, “I hope we never see each other again.”

But of course, they did.