Chapter 16
The stylist arrived at two on the dot. A woman named Reina with a rolling case and the kind of calm, efficient energy that suggested she’d prepped bridal parties in rooms far more chaotic than this one.
She set up at the desk by the window, laying out curling irons and pins and a collection of products, and within minutes Kelsey was seated in the desk chair with a cape over her shoulders while Reina sectioned her hair with practiced fingers.
Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bed reading something on her phone.
She’d changed into a robe at some point, dark gray, belted precisely at the waist, and Kelsey could see the bare line of her collarbone where the robe parted.
She kept her eyes on the screen and said nothing while Reina worked, and Kelsey tried to do the same, watching Reina’s hands in the mirror.
“Side part?” Reina asked, meeting Kelsey’s eyes in the mirror.
“Yeah. Left side, please.”
Reina nodded and kept going, and Kelsey sat still and breathed and tried not to think about the woman on the bed behind her whose reflection she could just barely catch in the lower corner of the mirror.
Elizabeth’s ankles were crossed. Her feet were bare.
Her toenails were painted a muted rose that Kelsey had never seen before and would probably never forget.
The Hollywood wave took about forty minutes.
Reina brushed each curl out with a boar bristle brush and then set the whole thing with a mist of hairspray that smelled like vanilla, and when she was done, Kelsey’s hair fell in a sleek, golden cascade over her right shoulder, the left side pinned back just enough to keep the wave from hiding her face.
It looked like something from a magazine editorial, and Kelsey touched the end of it gingerly, half afraid it would collapse.
“Thank you,” Kelsey said as she stood.
“Your turn,” Reina said to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth slid off the bed, taking Kelsey’s place in the chair.
Their shoulders nearly brushed during the exchange, and Kelsey caught a trace of Elizabeth’s perfume, something cool and clean with cedar underneath, and her stomach did a slow roll that she ignored.
“I’m going to do my makeup in the bathroom,” Kelsey said. Elizabeth nodded without looking at her, already settling into the chair while Reina ran her fingers through Elizabeth’s dark hair, assessing the weight and texture of it.
Kelsey went into the bathroom with her garment bag and closed the door behind her.
The bathroom was large and white and bright in the way that hotel bathrooms always were, all marble countertop and warm overhead lighting that made her skin look better than it probably deserved.
She hung the garment bag, and then stood there for a moment with both palms flat on the cool marble, staring at her own reflection.
Her hair looked incredible. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was the rest of the day. The ceremony in less than two hours, and the reception after that, and all the hours in between where she would need to stand beside Elizabeth Moretti and hold her hand and look at her like she was in love with her while Elizabeth watched the woman she used to be married to marry someone else.
Kelsey had thought about this all week, during the days Elizabeth hadn’t come into the shop, during the silent car ride up through the valley, during the strange tense hour they’d spent in this room unpacking and eating room service salads and not saying anything that mattered.
There was what the contract required. Accompany Elizabeth.
Participate in reasonable public displays of affection.
Hold hands, light touching. She could do all of that.
She had been doing it. She was, if anything, a little too good at it, because none of it required acting on her part, which was the central irony of this entire arrangement and one she tried very hard not to examine too closely.
But there was something else underneath the contract language that Kelsey couldn’t stop thinking about, something that had nothing to do with five thousand dollars or what constituted a reasonable display of affection.
Elizabeth was going to watch her ex-wife get married today. Not in the abstract way she’d been dealing with it for weeks, probably since she got the invitation, but in the physical, unavoidable way of sitting in a chair and watching Grace walk down an aisle toward someone new.
And Elizabeth, who processed hurt by going quiet and still and perfectly composed, was going to need someone in that chair next to her who saw through the composure.
Who noticed the tight jaw and the shallow breathing and the fingers pressing too hard against her own arm.
Who didn’t just hold her hand because the contract said to, but because Elizabeth shouldn’t have to sit through that alone.
Kelsey wanted to be that person. Not the fake girlfriend performing her role.
She wanted to be the person who got Elizabeth through today in one piece, because she cared about her.
Because somewhere between the first cappuccino and the garden at James’s party she had fallen so hard for this woman that the idea of Elizabeth hurting without someone to anchor her made Kelsey’s chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with their arrangement and everything to do with who she was when she looked at Elizabeth Moretti.
Kelsey didn’t see the lawyer or the ex-wife or the woman who kept the world at arm’s length, but the person underneath all of that, tired and proud and lonely and worth so much more than she let herself believe.
She exhaled slowly and opened her makeup bag.
Foundation first. Then concealer under her eyes.
She blended it with her fingers because she’d never gotten the hang of those teardrop sponges, and then set it with the translucent powder she’d splurged on last month.
Bronzer along her cheekbones and temples.
A warm blush, peachy and subtle, high on the apples of her cheeks.
She did her brows with a pencil and a spoolie, filling in the sparse spots with short strokes, and then moved to her eyes.
A wash of champagne shimmer across the lids, a deeper bronze in the crease, a thin line of brown eyeliner along the lash line.
Two coats of mascara. A sheer rose lipstick that made her mouth look fuller and softer and like the kind of mouth someone might want to kiss, which was a thought she set aside immediately.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She looked good. She looked like someone who might plausibly be the girlfriend of a woman like Elizabeth.
She unzipped the garment bag.
The dress slid out of the bag like something liquid. Pale gold silk-jersey, heavy enough to drape but soft against her fingers, the fabric catching the bathroom light and throwing it back in a warm shimmer that made her think of champagne in a glass, the way the bubbles caught the light.
She stepped into it carefully, pulling it up over her hips, fitting the ruched waistband into place, and then reached behind her neck to fasten the two gold bands of the halter.
The deep V of the neckline plunged, the fabric parting to reveal the sun-kissed skin of her chest and the curve of her breasts, and when she looked down at herself, she felt a small shock of exposure that she hadn’t felt when she’d tried it on in her apartment.
In her apartment, the dress had felt daring. Here, in this bathroom, an hour before she would walk into a room full of lawyers and Grace’s friends and people who would look at her and decide in seconds whether she belonged, it felt like a declaration she wasn’t sure she had the nerve to make.
She fastened the delicate gold lariat necklace, watching the pendant drop into the plunge of the neckline, resting against her sternum.
She adjusted the halter straps. She smoothed the skirt where it flared into a subtle train.
She twisted to check the back in the mirror, the open expanse of her shoulders and arms, and then she picked up her heels and opened the bathroom door.
The desk chair was empty. Reina was gone, her rolling case and curling irons and products vanished as if she’d never been there, and the room smelled faintly of hairspray and something floral.
Elizabeth stood across the room in front of the full-length mirror beside the closet, her back half-turned, fastening an earring, her makeup already done. A thin diamond bracelet caught the light on her wrist.
Kelsey’s breath left her body.
The dress was midnight navy, so dark it read almost black until the light moved across the fabric and the silk came alive, rippling like deep water.
It was bias-cut, clinging to Elizabeth’s body in a way that made the word “clinging” feel insufficient.
The silk followed every line of her, the curve of her hip, the narrowing of her waist, the lean length of her thighs, with a fluidity that looked less like fabric and more like something poured.
The front was a high cowl neckline that draped softly at her collarbones, sleeveless, elegant, restrained in a way that was so completely Elizabeth that Kelsey almost could have predicted it.
But the back.
The back was nothing. No fabric, no structure, no coverage from the nape of Elizabeth’s neck to the very base of her spine.
Just skin. The long line of her vertebrae, the sharp architecture of her shoulder blades, the smooth expanse of muscle and bone that tapered to her waist, where the silk finally picked up again and continued its descent over her hips.
Her hair was up in a high chignon, and it left the entire sweep of her neck and back exposed in a way that felt almost obscene in its restraint, because the front of the dress said professional and the back of the dress said something else entirely, something that made Kelsey’s mouth go dry and her fingers tighten around the shoes she was still holding.
Elizabeth turned.
Her eyes found Kelsey immediately, and whatever she had been about to say dissolved.
Her hand was still raised near her ear where she’d been adjusting the earring, and it stayed there, frozen, her fingers suspended in midair.
Her lips parted slightly. Her gaze dropped from Kelsey’s face to the neckline of her dress, to the deep V where the gold pendant rested against bare skin, and then traveled lower, over the cinched waist and the floor-length skirt, and then came back up to the neckline again and stayed there for a beat too long before rising to Kelsey’s face.
She said nothing.
The silence expanded. It filled the room, pressing against the walls.
Elizabeth’s eyes were wide and very still, and her jaw had gone tight in that way Kelsey recognized, the way it went when she was working through something she didn’t want to show, and her chest rose once, a controlled breath that lifted the cowl neckline and then lowered it again.
She still said nothing. And the longer she didn’t speak, the louder the silence got, and the louder the silence got, the more Kelsey felt the gold dress was a mistake. Because Elizabeth was looking at her the way you looked at something that wasn’t what you ordered.
Kelsey’s stomach dropped.
She had chosen wrong. The neckline was too much, too low, too revealing for a room full of Elizabeth’s colleagues and Elizabeth’s ex-wife and people who would take one look at the plunging V and the bare shoulders and the visible cleavage and think of course Elizabeth’s new girlfriend is the young one in the flashy dress, how predictable, how embarrassing.
Elizabeth in her elegant navy silk with its restrained cowl neck and its devastating back, every inch of her polished and precise, and Kelsey in gold with her chest on display like she’d confused an upscale wedding with a nightclub.
“Is it too much?”
The words came out before she could stop them, thin and uncertain, and she heard herself say them and wanted to pull them back into her mouth and swallow them. But they were already in the room, already hanging in the air between them, and Elizabeth blinked once, and her hand dropped from her ear.
“No.” The word came out fast. Almost clipped. Elizabeth’s throat moved as she swallowed, visibly, the muscles of her neck contracting above the cowl neckline. “You look amazing.”
Her voice was lower than usual. Half a step down from its normal register. Her eyes held Kelsey’s for one more second, steady and very blue in the afternoon light, and then she looked away toward the desk where her clutch sat beside her phone.
“We should get going.”
Kelsey slipped on her heels and crossed to the nightstand where she’d left the small gold clutch, lipstick and phone and room key already inside. She snapped it shut and caught herself in the full-length mirror on the way to the door.
The gold silk moved when she moved. The necklace glinted in the hollow of the plunge.
Her hair fell in that perfect wave over one shoulder, and her makeup was flawless, and she looked, objectively, like someone who had tried very hard to be beautiful for a woman who had already turned away to check her phone.
You look amazing could mean anything. It could mean you look amazing or it could mean that’s fine, let’s go or it could mean I am being polite because you are standing in front of me in a dress I paid for and I don’t have time to discuss alternatives.
Elizabeth was a lawyer. She chose words the way surgeons chose instruments, and “amazing” was the kind of word you used when you didn’t want to say what you actually thought.
Elizabeth was already at the door, clutch tucked under one arm, her bare back a clean line of skin above the midnight silk.
Kelsey’s gaze caught there and held. The disappointment about her own dress, the sting of Elizabeth’s reaction, all of it just dissolved, because Elizabeth looked like that, and Kelsey was supposed to function tonight.
She was supposed to hold a conversation, remember names, play the part of the adoring girlfriend while Elizabeth looked breathtaking.
She hadn’t told Elizabeth she looked beautiful. She’d thought it so loudly it was a miracle the woman couldn’t hear it, but she hadn’t said it. Hadn’t trusted herself to say it in this room, alone, where there was no audience to hide behind.
Maybe downstairs. In front of people. Leaning in close the way a girlfriend would, letting the words land soft against Elizabeth’s ear like they were part of the act.
That way Elizabeth wouldn’t know how much Kelsey meant every syllable.