Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Cami doesn’t remember a thing.
Or at least, she’s acting like she doesn’t, and Camila Sanchez has never been one to play coy. She calls it like it is, doesn’t beat around the bush.
Which means she doesn’t remember a thing.
This morning I found her with her head bent over the toilet, a Liquid I.V. packet clutched in one palm. After I got her a glass of water and asked if she was okay, Cami hushed me aggressively (she was not) and mumbled in Spanish for half an hour.
Luckily her sister Jane had some weed, which Cami smoked after swallowing one of Mariana’s anti-nausea pills. After that, it was a hot shower and a rallying pep talk from David (I got him to record it, then I played it on the Airbnb’s sound system for the whole house to hear; it started with “Pick yourself up by your bootstraps” and finished with “If you’re not ruining a local’s day in three hours you’re failing”).
One shot of tequila for the bride, and now we’re here.
Here being a swanky restaurant in the 12 South neighborhood at a long wooden table laden with white and pink flowers—and airplane bottles of Tito’s vodka spread out between the bouquets like confetti. Nobody’s touched them; we’re all still nursing espresso martinis, our first sips of alcohol of the day.
At the opposite end of the table, Cami peruses her menu. Her sisters are lined up on either side of her, bickering over what to order.
“Josie?”
I rip my gaze off Camila and look at Gio.
“Hmm?” I mumble.
She gives me a knowing look. “You’ve been in your head all morning.”
I wince. “Sorry.”
“Work stuff?”
“Kind of,” I admit, trying to keep my eyes off Cami.
Gio nods. “I’m sort of amazed you pulled this off.” She gestures around.
It was a huge time suck; I won’t deny it. I felt more and more guilty with every hour I spent planning this instead of doing productive work to bolster Revenant’s bottom line.
Maybe that should tell me something. It probably would tell me something if I paused long enough to let it.
“Do you think it’s weird,” I ask, “that she wants me to be her maid of honor? Over all six of her sisters? And the cousins?”
Gio leans toward me, lowering her voice. “She picked you to be her maid of honor because other than David, she’s closest with you. You’re the one who supported Camila when she was stressed out of her mind back in college. Remember all those times you took her clicker to classes you weren’t even registered for, just so Cami could get attendance points while she was dealing with some new brand of family drama?”
“It wasn’t that often.”
She gives me a look. “You’re a different kind of family to her, Jo.”
Cami certainly feels like family to me. She feels so much like family I don’t know how to manage without her.
How the fuck am I going to manage without her?
Where is she going? Why is she leaving? Is there a widespread corporate problem I’ve overlooked? I’ve made the most conscious effort I can possibly imagine to keep her happy. To make her stay. Camila’s happiness is my pulse check. If she hasn’t lost her faith in me, in Revenant, I’m still doing all right.
But if she has —lost her faith, that is—what do I need to do to restore it?
For the twentieth time today, I rack my brain, looking for some explanation as to why she’d want to leave. And for the twentieth time, I come up short.
I push down the tears threatening my eyes and take a glug of my espresso martini, polishing it off. Then I twist open one of the airplane shots, swallow that, too.
I hail our waiter and say, “I’ll have a margarita next, and can you make it a double?” And when he brings it, I suck it down in record time.
The other women follow my lead, and before I know it, I’m halfway to drunk, and we’re done with lunch, heading to midtown to find some live music.
There’s a rooftop we’ve rented—a surprise for Camila. When we show it to her, dousing her in a champagne shower, she comes up and hugs me, screams, “Best MOH ever!” before she proceeds to twerk down at all the ordinary bar-goers on the floor below us.
“Plebians!” Mariana shouts.
“You wish you were us!” Jane shouts.
“Hey, those are the girls from the party wagon!” someone shouts.
There is an exact relation between the way the sun is slipping into the horizon beyond us and the feeling of my veins loosening, of my inhibitions letting go. Who cares about Revenant? Who cares about work? What if we all stayed drunk all the time ?
Cami invites the band upstairs to drink with us during a break in their set. The guitar player—a tall, slender guy with a lazy grin that feels practiced in the mirror—latches onto me the second our eyes lock.
“You look familiar. Are you a model?”
I shrug. “You’ve probably seen my face in a fashion magazine.”
He puts a hand on my arm. “That’s so hot.”
Eighteen-year-old me would be reciprocating his flirtation at this point. Hell, even twenty-two-year-old me would’ve leaned in. But even though I can note objectively that 1) he smells nice, 2) he’s not the worst to look at, and 3) he plays guitar in a band, I can’t summon the energy to care. It’s been a common theme of my singledom over the past four years, ever since Clay and I cut things off a couple years after college graduation. Hardly any man catches my attention, and nobody holds it.
My phone vibrates in my back pocket. I slip past the guitar player, muttering that I’ll be right back.
When I look at the screen, my throat closes.
Will.
Who might be the singular exception to the nobody-holds-my-attention rule.
I haven’t forgotten he’s in town this weekend visiting his mother, but I’ve also been fairly confident we won’t bump into him (unless Mrs. Grant has developed a sudden penchant for rowdy cowboys and downtown honky-tonks).
I take a deep breath and walk to the opposite edge of the patio, holding onto the railing as I answer the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hey.” It’s such a casual hey. That’s a hey you’d use to greet a longtime best friend. That’s the hey David gives Camila when he calls her, I just know it. “You’re going to Andalo tonight. I just forwarded you the new reservation confirmation.”
For several drunken moments, I say nothing and stare at the gray beginnings of night folding into the sky. The crowd below is starting to fill out at the corners, and the volume of the whole city is on its way to all the way up.
“What?” I ask numbly.
“Thirteen, right?” Will asks. He sounds like he’s walking somewhere. “That’s what I said for the reservation. Thirteen of you.”
“Y-Yeah,” I manage. “How did you—”
“Don’t worry about that. Just check your email for the details. You need to be there at eight. I’ll cancel the Wagon Wheel reservation for you, okay?”
“Will.”
“Josephine.” There’s a touch of humor in his voice, as if he’s indulging me. Do I sound as drunk as I am? Can he tell?
“This isn’t what consultants do for their clients,” I half whisper.
On the other end of the line, a stretch of silence. A sigh. And then, in a voice that strips me of every bit of my sanity, he says, “I know, Josie. But it’s what friends do. And I think we could be friends. I think maybe we already are.”
It’s a bold claim. We’ve been back in each other’s lives for less than two weeks. Still, in that time, I’ve gained more ground with Will than I did our entire senior year.
It’s a shame neither of us tried very hard. Until now.
I white-knuckle the railing, feel the alcohol pulse and zip through my body. I want to say something—anything—but I’m terrified the words will come out wrong. Or maybe my true fear is they’ll come out honest. I can’t even think straight. Not when he’s saying those words in that voice while I’m this drunk.
After this weekend is over, thoughts of him will become my primary distraction, I can already tell. He wants to be friends, so why does it feel like there’s kindling in my stomach waiting patiently for a wisp of flame?
“Is that… What do you think about that?” he finally asks, like he’s holding out a friendship bracelet, waiting to see if I’ll put it on.
I nod my head, belatedly realizing he can’t see me. “Good,” I say, settling on that single monosyllabic word as the full extent of my abilities. “Being friends would be good.”
It’s a lie.
I’m pretty sure being friends with Will Grant would be really, really bad, but only because he’s the first man in four years to make me fumble with my words, to make me reach for my lip gloss, to put my heart in my throat.
Sure, maybe part of that is based on the history of us, but something tells me if I’d met him from scratch the day he hit my car, I’d feel just the same.
“Okay then.” On the other end of the line, Will opens a door. “What time do you have to be at Andalo?”
“Eight,” I repeat.
“Have a good time.”
“Sometime soon, I’m going to do something nice for you. ”
“You already did,” Will says. “I got to eat an award-winning dinner at Agricole.”
“That was Cami,” I say. “I still owe you.”
“That’s not how friendships work.”
“You’re right. We need to make a blood pact first.”
I can hear his smile. “Bye, Josephine.”
“Bye,” I say back, already missing him. “And thank you, really.”
When I turn around to look for Cami, the guitar player is waiting for me. He approaches when I pocket my phone, crowds me against the railing. “Baby,” he coos.
“No.”
Brushing past, I search our crowd for a flash of white and grab hold of Cami’s arm when I see her. Her hangover is either long gone or buried deep. There’s a beer in one of her hands, a champagne flute in the other. She smells like wheat and body spray.
“Andalo!” I shout.
Her eyes brighten. “Andalo?”
“Tonight! Eight p.m. We’ve got a new reservation!”
Cami shrieks and jumps into my arms, pecking me on the forehead. “You! Are! My Best Fucking Friend!”
I laugh and spin her in a circle before her weight shifts and she topples out of my grasp, landing against one of her cousins. “Isn’t Josephine the best?” Cami asks her.
“The best!” the cousin concurs.
Cami shoots me one more glassy-eyed look of happiness before she runs off to tell every other bridesmaid. I watch her spread the news, pulling up my email to find the confirmation, just as Will promised.
Part of me knows it’s a ridiculous thought. But I wonder—briefly, and with the full understanding that Camila Sanchez would never make a life decision that impulsively—if a perfect night at Andalo might change her mind about leaving.