Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
KIRA
I don’t know why I’m so panicky tonight. I’ve performed at these sorts of events my entire life.
Maybe it’s because of the stalker, but the second I lose sight of Isaak, my breathing gets short.
“You’re alright,” Drew whispers in my ear, clasping my hand.
I nod repeatedly and clutch his arm tighter. He’s seen my panic attacks. He knows what to do.
“Get my mother away from me,” I hiss into his ear. Her hand on my back has made me want to crawl out of my skin the entire time we stood in that receiving line. It was like she was reclaiming me as her property and proving that I had no say after I stood up to her and told her not to touch me in the dressing room earlier.
The place on my back where she’s still touching me is making me feel like that spot is sizzling and numb at the same time. I need away from her. Fucking away .
“It’s not for much longer,” Drew says, voice soothing. “She’s your mother. Just calm down. Come on, we’ll sit down and have a nice dinner.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. I love Drew, but I hate it when he gets like this. Compliant. He knows his parents are here and won’t make a scene. God forbid we make a scene.
I know I’m being unfair. He’s under his dad’s thumb as much as I am my mother’s. Worse, really, because he works in his dad’s Senate office. Drew’s always had it so much worse than me.
So I swallow and nod tightly. I don’t want to make tonight any harder for him than it already is. No doubt his dad is watching his every move, too.
Finally, we get to our seats, and I can finally pull away from my mother’s touch. But our little name cards on the table have me sitting next to her, and I just can’t.
I quickly reach down and swap Drew’s for mine so I’m sitting one place away from her with Drew in between as a buffer.
Drew looks surprised but pulls out the chair for me like a gentleman, then pushes it back in once I’m seated. He sits beside me and I finally let out the breath it feels like I’ve been holding the entire time my mother was touching me.
“You okay?” Drew leans over to ask. I so appreciate it when he checks in with me like this.
I give him the first genuine smile of the evening. “Better now.”
He nods and smiles back. It’s one of our little shared smiles as our eyes connect. But it’s only for a moment before he goes back to being the politician and schmoozing everyone at the table around him, including my parents.
I relax in my seat. This is one of the best things about being with Drew. I don’t have to be on very much when I’m beside him because he’s so good at this. Doing the society thing. When I’m Drew’s girl, it’s fine to just be the quiet mouse beside my handsome boyfriend and let all the light shine on him. People expect it, even.
Except… he’s not going to just be my boyfriend for much longer. Or my fiancé. He’ll be my husband. And then my whole life will be…
I look around the room at all the glad-handing rich people around me. Mostly white faces greet me with a few tokenized representations of folks forced to conform. I shudder a little. What started out as a way to shield myself from the worst of my mother’s narcissism is starting to feel an awful lot like complicity. This place looks nothing like my diverse everyday life at the university, where it’s more like… ya know, the real world.
My breathing threatens to seize. I never could handle these things very well. I spent half of them bent over in a coat closet, clutching my chest and heaving for breath, sure I was about to die as I wheezed for my next gasp of air. Drew was the only one who could ever help calm me down, but tonight I’m not sure even he can help. We aren’t kids anymore.
I reach for my champagne flute and down a healthy swig. I can feel my mother’s eyes on me, but she’s too far away to kick me under the table, so I take another big swallow before setting the glass down. A waiter immediately steps forward to refill my glass.
Oh yeah. Keep ’em coming.
Getting plastered is one way to deal with anxiety since I forgot my beta blockers back at the hotel. Maybe it’s not the ideal way, but hey, I gotta work with what I got. After another long sip, I do feel my breathing begin to relax.
My face is probably becoming flushed, but I can almost take a full, deep breath. Or at least I would be able to if not for the ridiculous corseting it took to be able to fit into this nightmare of a dress. Beige lace, I mean, really? Who designs this shit? I look like I’m a throw on some couch at Pottery Barn.
“So, Kira, dear, you must be so excited about the wedding!” says a smiling woman across the table. Mrs. Price is only a few years older than me, blonde, and hugely pregnant. She’s sitting beside her much older husband, who is one of Drew’s father’s biggest donors. “Maybe by this time next year, you’ll have some even happier news to share.” She deliberately puts a hand on her belly.
I choke on my last sip of champagne, and Drew pats me on the back.
“We can only hope we could be so lucky as you and Mr. Price,” Drew cuts in smoothly. “When is the blessed occasion?”
Mrs. Price beams at Drew, then looks lovingly at her husband, a man who must be at least twenty years her senior, if not more. “Just another few weeks now. This will be our fifth.”
“Your fifth ?” I gasp. “That’s—” So many! When the fuck did he start knocking her up? When she was in diapers? “A dream!” I smile with my teeth.
“I know,” the woman enthuses. “I just love hearing the pitter-patter of little feet around. Isn’t that right, Bob?”
“What?” the man beside her asks, then waves his fork from where he was spearing some sushi that’s been put down as an appetizer. “Oh yeah. The kids are great.” He smiles at Drew. “All boys to proudly carry on the Price name.”
Mrs. Price rubs her belly. “We’re hoping for a girl this time.”
“What?” Mr. Price barks. “Five strapping boys will be just the ticket. Finish out the pack. I had all brothers and look how I turned out.” He gives up on the fork and picks the sushi up with his fingers, shoving it in his mouth with a loud slurp.
Mrs. Price only gives the barest look of distaste before smiling back at me and Drew. “Are you going to settle in the neighborhood? It’d be great to have some new faces around. New…” She looks up and down the table of mostly older couples. “ Energy .”
She looks back at me expectantly.
“Oh, well, we haven’t talked about where we’ll live—” I start, but Drew cuts me off.
“Certainly, we’ll live here. There’s no better spot in Dallas than Highland Park.”
My head swings toward Drew, my mouth dropping a little. This is news to me. I was lying when I said we hadn’t talked about it. “But I thought we’d discussed”—I glance around the table at the eagerly listening ears and lower my voice—“about living closer to the university.”
Drew stops the sushi roll halfway to his mouth. His eyebrows lift in surprise. “Well, that was before, honey. Now you’ve only got another year left. I thought you’d want to be in a safer neighborhood where we can start a family.”
A family? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who said anything about a family? I stare at him, bewildered. I thought we were on the same page. No kids. No kids till I have at least two clinics established and well-underway?—
“This is the perfect neighborhood for young families,” Mrs. Price says excitedly. “I know the price point can be intimidating for young couples, but that’s why I got so excited when Carol mentioned you might be moving in. It’s not like money will be a problem for your family,” she laughs, waving a hand.
But I’m still stuck on the part where Drew thinks we’re moving here . To the same neighborhood our parents live. To start a family .
“Um.” I smile, heart racing and breathing getting short, then tap Drew’s knee. “Why does Carol think we’re moving here?” I whisper to him when the Prices move on to a conversation with others around them. “I thought we agreed that I’d need to get a practice established in the city first.” And then I figured once we got settled somewhere and started putting down roots, I could convince him to stay there.
He just shrugs, an easy smile as he nods to someone else down the table. “Wouldn’t that just be a waste to get a practice up and going if you’re only going to quit a few years later once you get pregnant? Then you’d just end up leaving your clients in a lurch. It’s much smoother if we only move once.”
I cough a little, bringing my napkin to my mouth. He massages my knee gently under the table. He can tell I’m getting upset, and this is one of the tricks he does sometimes to help me calm down. Usually, I love it because I’m so starved for touch. And it feels like a secret language between us—him seeing my anxiety in a way that feels like he’s seeing me. But what he’s just said…
“I don’t intend on giving up my practice. I’m getting my degree because I want to do important work. There are a lot of people in our community who need good psychological care?—”
He chuckles under his breath. “Not in our community?—”
I gasp and yank my knee away from Drew’s previously comforting touch.
Mr. and Mrs. Price’s eyes have zeroed back in on us, bouncing between Drew and me like a tennis match. A fact that’s not lost on Drew.
“Let’s talk about this later.” He grasps my cold hand underneath the table. “Have I told you how beautiful you look tonight?”
“Yes,” I say succinctly.
Drew starts to discuss his father’s campaign, and I go quiet again, focusing on my breathing instead of my mounting frustration. This is nothing. All couples fight. And we’re barely a couple. Lord knows how Drew is planning to make a baby, considering he can’t even get it up around me.
God, that was an awful night. It was graduation night of our senior year.
I’d finally gotten over him… mostly.
We were all but inseparable senior year. He might have hung out with whatever girlfriend he was currently with during school—he never kept them for long because it was generally known that he slept around on them—but it was me he spent hours with after school in his SUV.
And I’d read enough romance novels to hope that someday he’d open his eyes and see that if he could just find the right one, he could settle down. Obviously, I was the right one, there in front of him all along. I was the one he depended on when things with his dad got bad. He put on a front with everyone else at school, but he confided in me. I was the only one he was real with.
I was the one he needed.
I kept my hope alive all the way up through prom, a secret little seed inside me wishing that he’d ask me. His latest girlfriend had just thrown an iced coffee in his face when she found out he was cheating on her. I knew he’d only acted out because he’d gotten into a particularly brutal argument with his father the day before.
That day after school, he lay in my lap, silent tears running down his beautiful face. I’d run my fingers through his hair, my heart beating so wildly in my chest, it had taken everything I had not to let the I love you beating with every thump burst out of my lips. I only kept it inside because I actually did love him, and I knew that, with all the pain he was going through, it would be the most unloving thing I could do to burden him with my emotions right then.
Still, still , I thought, he has to feel it. He has to know.
And so, when the week of prom came around, I got it into my head that he finally reciprocated my feelings. He saw the gem I was inside and out, and he’d pull out all the stops for some ridiculous prom-posal that would sweep me off my feet…
Instead, he asked Hannah Bradley, the longtime girlfriend of one of his basketball buddies. Theo had recently broken up with Hannah because he didn’t want to do the long-distance thing in college. After school, Drew joked with me: Wasn’t it lucky Theo wanted to be free to fuck college girls?
When I wasn’t obsessing about Drew, I read books and had recently begun watching YouTube videos about mental health. One nugget of truth I kept coming across was: When people tell you who they are, listen .
Drew had been telling me who he was all along, hadn’t he?
“Kira?”
I blink and look up. Drew and my mother, along with half the table, are looking at me as if waiting for a response to some question.
“Yes?” I ask weakly, looking from face to face.
My mother grins in that polite way that manages to hold a furious glare of disappointment underneath for losing track of the conversation. “Mrs. Garcia was just asking who’s designing your wedding gown. I told her how I’ve dreamed of my daughter wearing my own vintage Dior since the time you were a little girl.” She looks around the table, giving a calculated but gentle laugh. “But of course, she’s got her mind set on a Carolina Herrera. Young people. What are you going to do?”
Laughter echoes from around the table. Ah. My mother is in her comfort zone, holding court.
“So we’ve decided to leave it up to the last minute, getting both sized to her proportions.” I feel her searing eyes pinning me like a butterfly to a board. “Have you made your decision yet?”
Again, I feel everyone’s eyes on me, and sweat bursts out on my forehead. My breath immediately gets tight in my chest.
I don’t want to wear my mother’s dress. Just trying it on made my skin crawl. Not that it fits. I feel the same way about the Carolina Herrera that she ordered in the too-small size she refuses to allow the tailor to let out.
I’m frozen, my fight or flight response making me feel like a deer in the headlights. Play dead. Play dead. If you just stop talking and pull back far enough inside yourself, the predator will go away .
Or you’ll end up dead meat smushed on the pavement.
At some point, you’ll have to stand up to your mother , my therapist’s voice repeats in my head. Last session, you even connected that it makes you ill when you don’t .
“I was actually thinking of something different than either of them,” I burst out in a rush, pushing my glasses up my nose. “I’ve got a friend at school who’s a really amazing costume designer. She was sketching out this gorgeous dress for me last week. She said a couple months would be a squeeze, but because we’re friends, she’d fit me in. She’s a genius, and I told her I’d be honored to wear an original of hers.”
I beam at everyone around the table. “It’s going to be stunning.”
I’m met with silence in return.
Intentionally, I don’t look Carol’s way. But even with her in my periphery, I can feel her horror at what I know she’ll later call an outburst. I can already hear her shrieking the next time she gets me alone because I’ve heard it so many times before: How dare you embarrass me like that in public?!
But all I’m doing is being myself. The one mortal sin in the Roberts’ household.
“So,” I smile at everyone, then pick up my chopsticks, my breathing returning to normal as I finally suck in a deep breath. “That’s exciting.” I pinch a piece of sushi in between my sticks and pop it in my mouth.
As I smile and chew, conversation slowly picks back up around the table as partners begin to first murmur between each other and then to those around them. They sneak glances at me and Drew, then my mother. I can feel Carol boiling in her cauldron at the head of the table, but I just keep smiling, popping another sushi roll in my mouth.
Wow, I just realized how hungry I am.
“What are you doing?” Drew whispers under his breath. Like a ventriloquist, his mouth barely even moves. “You know you’re just antagonizing her.”
I give a little, imperceptible shrug. “I’ve still got to do what’s right for me. I can’t destroy myself just to make her happy. See how much calmer I am?”
He looks at me, his brows furrowing the tiniest bit in clear confusion. “You’ve been different lately.”
I smile at him. Widely. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”