Chapter 22 Babe the Big Blue Tots #2
His smile loosened a bolt in my spine. I was at ease for the first time since I’d started planning my beast of a wedding. I couldn’t help but relax into the comfort of being this close to my best friend.
“This night’s been a disaster. Start to finish,” I said, flopping my forehead onto his shoulder. “But I’m so glad you’re here now.”
“Me too,” he responded. His voice sounded uncharacteristically thready.
Out of nowhere, the faux-tuxedoed men started hollering a fraternity drinking chant. Our shoulders jumped.
“Been a minute since I’ve heard one of those,” I said, looking at Ethan’s face and noticing with a jolt how close we were standing.
For some reason, stepping back felt like an admission that being near him affected me in a way it didn’t, so I kept my feet planted in place even as tension spooled in my stomach.
“I don’t think I’ve been to a frat since that night I rescued you and Laurel from one.”
“?‘Rescued’ is…a verb. The wrong one, but—”
He leaned forward and looked straight into me when he asked, “Do you ever think about that night? Do you wonder what would’ve happened if you’d gone on tour with me?”
His face was serious, but he had to be kidding. “I would’ve bombed the LSAT and flunked out of school.”
“Naturally.”
“And then I would’ve been forced to sell my organs on the black market to make ends meet.”
His eyebrow arched in a way that looked like a question but felt like a dare. “You always go straight to organ selling. Why is that?”
“My brain is weird? I don’t know.” I clapped my hands on my face to hide my hot blush. We were too close. It was too warm. He was too nice. It all felt so familiar and, yet, exhilarating.
“I like your brain,” he said. He pushed a rogue strand of hair behind my ear.
“I like lots of things about you.” His gaze dragged between my eyes and my lips, down the gauzy minidress that Laurel had forced me into earlier that night.
Like sex , she’d said. That’s what you’re supposed to look like on your last night out as a single woman.
I knew I wasn’t single , but somehow, when she’d zipped up the dress, Ethan’s face had appeared.
Only for a millisecond. It was natural to wonder, I’d reminded myself, but I never let the intrusive thought settle.
Ethan Powell was nothing but a fantasy. Not even a fantasy.
An impossibility. And it was normal to ruminate on impossibilities.
If there’d been a chance Michael B. Jordan would waltz into this bar that promoted a special called Babe the Big Blue Tots, I might’ve imagined him reacting to my outfit too.
I leaned my temple against the wall next to him, and he rolled his head to face me, matching me beat for beat. “You would’ve evicted me from the tour bus and sent me to the suitcase compartment.”
“Benson got stuck in there by accident once.”
Imagining that asshat trapped between roller bags sent a dart of laughter through my chest. “You’re joking.”
“Dead serious,” he said. His forefinger brushed mine, but I didn’t pull my hand back right away. He didn’t either. We were two people, face-to-face, connected at the index finger in the strangest re-creation of E.T. ever conceived of in a Minneapolis ax-throwing bar.
“You might’ve written a song about me,” I whispered, and it was as though I’d lit a fuse. The space between us crackled with dangerous intensity. God, why had I said that?
“Who says I haven’t?” His eyes darkened, and I felt them everywhere. My pulse throbbed in the tip of the finger that was touching his.
“What’s with all this chaotic energy, Powell?” I asked, injecting much-needed lightness into this confoundingly weighty conversation. “My money’s now on you as the member of the bridal party who makes a scene.”
His lips pinched, and I could almost hear his mind working. “I’m hoping to be the one who gets very drunk and pops out of the cake.” Between his voice and his face, he couldn’t seem to settle on a tone. Breezy or sincere. Nonchalant or wholehearted.
“People don’t pop out of cakes at weddings. You’re thinking of strip clubs.”
“I forgot you opted against the Spearmint Rhino Gentlemen’s Club in favor of the Nicollet Island Pavilion,” he deadpans.
“You’re obsessed with my wedding venue.”
“I’m fascinated by this choice. I still can’t think of you as married.” His eyes narrowed. He was settling on serious, it seemed.
“Probably because I’m not. Yet.”
“You’re not. Yet,” he whispered, drawing even closer. I told myself it was the acoustics, but I knew it was something else. The intensity of his half-lidded eyes. The quirk of his lips.
“You know, I came here tonight to tell you something…” There was a grit to his voice I’d never heard before—an intimacy—like we were talking in the dark, and suddenly, I wasn’t sure I could get married on Saturday without knowing what he’d come here to say.
I held my breath, dangling out on a ledge of what was about to happen next. He didn’t say anything at first, as though he was trying to read me. “Telling the time,” he’d called it once. My heart pounded in my ears as his lips formed the first word.
“Don’t—”
It was all he could get out before a stray ax came careening over our plywood divider and clocked Ethan on the back of the head.
—
Ethan sat beside me on the cot in a curtained-off area of an emergency room, holding an ice pack to the back of his skull and stinking of wound ointment.
“And that’s when you were struck with the ax?” A younger nurse asked the questions while an older nurse typed the answers into the computer.
“It was an accident,” he repeated for the third time, maybe fourth. “And it was the broad side of it. It’s not like the blade got me or anything.” No matter how many times he emphasized that last part, it never sounded reassuring.
“There was blood, though. Is that normal?” I was repeating things too.
“Head wounds, even superficial ones, tend to bleed,” the nurse informed us, just as the doctor had. As had the first triage nurse we saw before they moved Ethan to this bed behind the curtain.
Since they didn’t suspect a concussion, they provided wound care instructions and sent us on our way.
“Should I call us an Uber?” I asked when we stepped outside. It was late, maybe one in the morning, and, as we’d taken the ambulance to the hospital, both our cars were parked at the ax-throwing bar.
He pulled out his phone. “I can get myself a car.”
I felt a bit silly. Why had I assumed I’d be going somewhere with him?
“Were you going to say something? Back at the bar? Before…”
He didn’t look up from his phone as he typed in an address I didn’t recognize into the search field. “Huh? Oh. I, uh, was about to…give you this.” He plucked something from his pocket.
I accepted it, confused. “Is this a penis?”
“A straw. You can’t have a bachelorette party without a penis straw.”
“Of course,” I responded, blinking my disappointment away. “Was this really what you wanted to tell me? That I needed a phallic party straw?”
His jaw tightened. “No. I, uh…”
Someone brushed past us on the sidewalk, and when I was starting to suspect I’d made the whole night up, Ethan tipped his face toward me.
I’d missed that face more than I cared to admit.
He dragged his head from side to side, his tongue in his teeth like he was contemplating something, until finally, he spoke.
“Rich sucks.”
Those two words drew all the sound out of the ambulance bay. It was actually pretty impressive for only a couple of words.
“I’m sure there’s a more elegant way to put that, but my head is killing me, so I’m just saying it. That guy sucks.” He drew out “sucks” into multiple syllables for emphasis.
“What?” I laughed, because what else were you supposed to do when your best man told you your future husband sucked days before your wedding? “What are you talking about?”
“He’s so boring, Chuck. He’s a pair of khaki pants with personhood. And he’s always referring to himself as a ‘foodie.’ What is that? You eat food, bro. That’s not a personality.” Each new insult seemed to burst from his mouth like Pop Rocks.
My eyes bored into his, searching for…I wasn’t sure what. A sign maybe. A signal that there was something I was missing that would make sense of all of it. He just tilted his head, like he was playing with me. Maybe he was. Maybe he thought this was funny.
“I thought you liked Rich,” I argued.
“It’s not that I don’t like him. I don’t care about him. I care about you, and you also kind of suck when you’re with him.”
“Nice.” My mouth tasted like vinegar.
“I don’t even recognize you with him. You’re not you . You’re this creepy yes-man…the wives…you know, like those wives that start out normal and turn into these agreeable automatons…”
Rage built behind my eyes. “Are you calling me a Stepford Wife?”
“Yes! Sorry. It’s my head. The words are…” He scrubbed his stubble with palpable frustration. “You’d never show him up at an ax-throwing bar like you did with me tonight. Do you ever let him see the real you?”
Hot anger prodded my neck like a curling iron to the throat. Who did he think he was, telling me what I was and who I belonged with? “Did it ever occur to you that maybe you don’t know the real me? I barely see you anymore.”
A bullet of clarity shot through my belly.
Ethan was no longer my best friend. Time and distance had contorted him into something else entirely: He was merely my oldest friend.
A visitor in my life. The same way my parents were.
He came and went with ease in a way I’d wanted to believe wasn’t possible.
“Come on.” The corner of his mouth lifted into a smirk, and I suppressed the urge to flick it. “Even you don’t believe that. I know you better than anyone.”
“I’ve changed.” I wrapped my arms around my middle like a shield. “You don’t know what I want or who I am. Not anymore.”
He blinked, and something sad seeped into the edges of his expression. He was no longer playing a game. Whatever this was had turned serious. “If you marry that guy, you’ll regret it. I know you will.”
“You don’t know anything. You’re one to talk about ‘sucking.’?” Dear lord, why had he anchored this conversation in conjugations of “to suck”? “You bounce between women you don’t care about to feed your ego.”
He moved to push his hand through his hair, seeming to forget his bandage or that it was pulled back into a bun.
I lifted my chin at him defiantly. “And your hair looks dumb like that, by the way.”
He looked me up and down without an ounce of the harmless, flirtatious heat I’d have bet my life had been there earlier. “Well, that dress is impractical.”
“It’s supposed to be!”
“If the world ends tonight, and everything distracting us disappears…there’s no jobs, or music, or wedding deposits…is Rich still the person you want to be with?”
My heart folded in on itself. Over the years, Ethan and I had made zombie apocalypse plans in beanbag chairs and sad first apartments, joking about our doomed partnership in a postapocalyptic society, but that’s all it ever was.
A joke. Because we always failed to address the issue of proximity, primarily our lack of it.
“The world isn’t ending tonight,” I responded. “It’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.”
I knew exactly what would’ve happened had I gone on tour with him all those years ago. I knew it as well as I knew my own name. I would’ve given up everything, only for the winds to change and him to leave me with nothing.
That would never happen with Rich. We wanted all the same things. We fit perfectly. Our lives were completely planned out. I felt safer just thinking about it.
Still, the sad, pitiful truth was that despite my vitriol, I loved Ethan too much to let him leave like this.
“I’m happy,” I pleaded with him. “I’m in love with a man who loves me back exactly as I am now, and I want you to stand next to me on Saturday and be happy for me.”
“And that’s really what you want?” The question sank through my abdomen.
I swallowed. “Of course it is.”
He put his phone in his pocket and looked ahead toward the empty ambulance bay, his smile cool and bright without a trace of the emotion that had been there mere seconds ago. “Uber’s here,” he said, his chin pointed in the direction of a blue Toyota Corolla.
I cleared my throat. “You need to be there early for pictures,” I said, changing the subject, unwilling to dwell on the way my face was surely telling on me.
“Yeah, sure, but do you need a ride home?” he asked, ignoring my subject change.
“No, uh, Rich is picking me up,” I lied.
Guilt compelled me to bring his name back into the conversation one way or another.
I hadn’t done anything wrong but this fight felt like its own kind of betrayal.
It had revealed starkly something I’d tried to hide from myself: the prospect of losing Ethan as my friend was more terrifying than the notion of not marrying Rich.
Awareness slunk up my neck, and suddenly, I felt…
gross. That full-body revulsion of touching a stranger’s gum under the bus bench rolled over my body in waves.
“I’ll see you Saturday, yeah?” I said, watching him climb into the car.
“Of course,” he promised. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
What was he seeing in my face right then? How sad and terrified I was that this could’ve been a relationship-ending fight and the only thing I’d have to show for it would be a party penis straw?
The car door clicked shut, but as I walked away, his voice echoed on the pavement behind me.
“Chuck!” He was yelling through the window, his body halfway out like he was a golden retriever on the highway. “I love you.” It was as though the words dropped out of his mouth by accident.
I swallowed down the lump in my throat and pasted on my breeziest smile. “I love you too, Powell,” I shouted back through cupped hands.
His “I love you” spun around my temporal lobe, even though he was a dude with a head injury and didn’t mean anything by it at all.
So I shoved even more nonchalance into my voice and said, “This is your final warning. If I see you climbing into my lemon buttercream cake, I’m coming for you. I don’t care if you have a broken head.”
His torso lurched forward, but he caught himself. His eyes lingered on me for an extra beat. “Lemon? For a cake?” He shook his head in that heartbreakingly familiar way. “Could never be me.”
Never ever.
The scent of his aftershave was still on my dress as I opened my rideshare app. More than ever, I was so happy to be marrying Rich. He was the would always to Ethan’s could never .
I looked behind me, just for a second, to watch Ethan’s body slide out of the window and back into the car as it disappeared into the dark.