Chapter 23 Noah Today
The party is in an actual tree house. Or at least, it feels that way.
We are seated in white wooden folding chairs, on a large, open-air platform, almost like an apartment without walls, hovering high above the ground. Globe lights are suspended from branches above us like our very own galaxy.
They’ll glow brighter when night fully descends, setting the mood for what will be the dance floor.
Cara and Ben stand at the front and John, the driver, is acting as officiant. Apparently he is ordained—not that he needs to be.
After all, they’re already married.
“I don’t understand,” I whisper to Rita, Sabrina, and Nell, who are seated in the row beside me. “What were they planning to do if the driver didn’t wind up being so distinguished?”
“It was supposed to be Cara’s cousin,” Sab says.
“What happened?”
“He got in an accident. Tiny little temporary coma.”
Nell’s eyes go wide. “Really?”
“No,” Sabrina says. “Stage fright. He chickened out.”
For reasons I don’t understand, Nell heaves a sigh of relief.
I am trying not to pay special attention to her, to respect her desire for no one to know what’s up with us, but it’s hard.
Maybe it was the twenty-four hours of relaxation, the fact that she didn’t have time to change her hair after the beach, or maybe—I congratulate myself—it was all that life-altering sex, but she is luminous.
Her gray eyes are full, her skin is smooth, her lips are slathered in some kind of shimmery pink.
I wonder how it tastes.
I want to sweep the waves off her neck with my palm and bite her shoulder. I want to rest my hand on the exposed skin of her thigh, inch it higher and higher.
But I can’t. Because, according to everyone else here, we are not a thing. Though we agreed we can at least tell everyone we buried the hatchet and are good to hang out, so we don’t have to avoid each other all night.
I focus my attention back on the ceremony, which has been sweet and corny in all the ways it should be.
This may be an un-wedding, but the details have felt pretty classic.
Cara walked down the aisle in all white, clutching a bouquet we picked up on the coast, to “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones—and all of us in the cheap seats cheered.
(I know where Ben falls in the Beatles versus Stones debate, so I assume the song was his suggestion.) Like a real-deal officiant, John the driver mused about complementary qualities he’d observed in the couple, including the way Ben took care of Cara when she overdid it on the booze bus. That one got some laughs.
I hope Ben and Cara had the day they needed yesterday to recenter. I hope they’re both feeling more themselves.
It looks like it. Whatever stress my best friend was feeling is gone from his face now as he gazes at his wife like she is the beginning and the end.
“I love you even though you’re terrible at making beds,” Cara is saying now, her eyes welling.
“Seriously. No one is worse. I love you even though you still put Ansel’s diapers on backward sometimes—and it’s been years!
You really should figure that out. Stickies at the front. At least you also clean up the leaks.”
Laughter titters through the crowd. Ben offers up a sheepish shrug.
And it occurs to me that maybe there is value in knowing the best and the worst of someone before you agree—or in this case re-agree—to spend your life together. Maybe Ben wasn’t sure he wanted this whole crazy celebration, but he looks full up right now as they choose each other again.
“But, most of all,” Cara says, “I love you because you are my partner in crime. Not today. Not tomorrow. But always. Of course, you’re the father to our incredible children—and I can give you some credit for them.
But having this time to be with you here without the kids has also been so incredible because it’s allowed us to just be us again—the us we have been since we met so many years ago.
The us we still are. And the us I hope we will be for the rest of our days. ”
I know in that moment that Cara has gotten the confirmation she needed that, though time has passed and life is bedlam, she is still herself, that they are still them.
There is not a dry eye in the house. Even Damien, sitting on my other side, has misty eyes.
When Nell and I got back after our adventure, it was hard not to experience a little comedown. It was such a gift to retreat from the rest of the world together. It didn’t help that the first person I saw—after she and I parted ways and I began unloading the trunk full of party stuff—was Damien.
“What’s up, man?” he said, giving me a pound.
“Not much,” I said, immediately tense. I wasn’t even sure why.
But then he leaned up against the car without offering to help, chewing his gum with his mouth open. And I remembered. Right away, he started in: “So, you got stuck, huh? Alone with Nellie?”
“Yup,” I said, tight-lipped, as I pulled out the cooler of oysters. Turns out maybe Mike was extra strong ’cause that thing was heavy as hell. Got to give credit where credit is due.
“How’d you swing that?”
Setting the cooler down, I paused and looked up at Damien, this old friend of mine who hasn’t been feeling like a friend at all. “I didn’t swing anything. There was a flood. Turns out I don’t control the weather.”
“Right,” he said, staring me down. “So, did you tap that?”
Everything in me wanted to stand up to full height and punch him in the face in that moment.
Because of the way he cheapens things. Because he’s circling this girl he knows I love.
Because I can’t tell him the truth—that something did happen between me and Nell, and I’ve never been so fucking happy for even a modicum of a chance to win her back.
I wanted him to back the fuck off before he tainted this.
Instead, I exhaled. “D, grow the fuck up.”
“Is that a yes?”
“No. That’s a grow the fuck up.”
“I’m pretty fully grown,” he said, pulling out a dab pen and dragging on it. He slipped it back in his pocket and rose to standing, stepped in closer to me than he should. “You don’t have to tell me, anyway, bro. Doesn’t matter. This is just a trip.”
I didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what he meant. This is a short vacation, but he lives in the same city as Nell. He can play the long game.
“Good luck, D,” I grunted, because I couldn’t say anything else without revealing the truth—something I promised Nell I wouldn’t do.
“I don’t need luck, baseball boy,” he said, close enough to my face that I could smell the stale weed on his breath. “We’re not in high school anymore.”
He shot me a peace sign, then strutted away.
I watched him retreat, my face pulsing with anger, wondering how I never saw him clearly all these years.
I always thought Damien kind of had a thing for Nell.
I guess I can be honest with myself about that now, sitting next to him watching our friends tie the already-tied knot.
I remember he once told me I was lucky because I’d snagged “the perfect girl.” But I never cared.
Because I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell.
The sentiment seemed almost sweet. And it was convenient, having my best friend and my girlfriend mostly get along, at least on the surface.
Plus, as far as I was concerned, Damien wasn’t interested in being with one girl, ever.
Nell worried that was true about me too, occasionally, which is why we broke up for super-short stints those couple of times.
Because she lost patience. With how much I liked the attention. With how much I sometimes flirted.
So, when she and I were on one of our pauses, and he started talking to her regularly on the phone, it seemed a little weird. But I figured it was helpful to have someone in my court.
Now, I’m wondering if he was ever in my court at all.
Now, I’m wondering if he has a lingering thing for Nell—or if that thing is really about competing with me. About how I sucked up too much of the limelight for him. About how he felt cheated somehow.
And I’m wondering it while I sit next to him, pretending we’re all good, and clapping as Cara and Ben consummate their un-wedding with a kiss.
In that moment, I am hit like a ton of bricks with the reason why I’ve kept so many of my childhood friends around for so many years, even if I’d outgrown them—the ones like Damien, who my sister, Henny, never trusted: I have unconsciously been trying to hold on to the past, to some small connection to Nell.
As backward as it seems, I know it’s true. And now I don’t need them anymore. Not the ones who take advantage. I don’t need him.
I’m so happy for Cara and Ben, who seem truly blissed out, but I am suddenly so glad this ceremony is over. I’ve got radioactivity seated on either side of me, and it’s too much to hold.
After the happy couple makes their exit, we all rise and file out toward another area of the tree house for cocktails.
“Drink?” I ask Nell.
She nods. “Drink.”
Before we make it over to the bar, a server comes by with a tray bearing some sort of signature cocktail. It’s orange. There are bubbles. I have no idea what it is, but I don’t care.
I snag two—hand Nell one. And we wander over to where Sabrina and Rita are taking turns on a rope swing.
“I don’t know,” Rita is saying, tugging the rope to test it and eyeing the steel chains at the top suspiciously before sitting down. “I don’t trust this thing.”
“It held me,” says Sabrina.
“Yeah, but you’re not a real-sized person,” Rita says. “You’re a peanut.”
Sabrina sets her hands on her (admittedly narrow) hips. “Short people are people too.”
Rita nods. “Agreed. Just shorter people.”
“Anyway, let’s talk about something more interesting—let’s talk about the FLOOD!” Sabrina says, turning her attention on us. “Was it crazy? I can’t believe you guys got stuck.”
“We didn’t really see the flood,” says Nell, looking up at me for confirmation. “So it wasn’t that crazy.”