Chapter 30
Will can’t go back and sit in an empty hotel room. He’s simply too wired. You can’t spend years building up to a phone call like that, finally have it, and not be. That’s how he ends up spending hours just walking laps around 12 South, trying to wrap his head around it all, getting very sweaty in the process.
He feels good, although not necessarily happy, sort of like that finals week in college when he crammed for his Physics 2 exam, finished it knowing he’d done better than he’d expected to 24 hours earlier, only to have to gear up for something even harder, Calc 3, the next day.
Because it’s getting late in the afternoon, and there’s still no word from her.
He eventually ends up calling a Lyft—he doesn’t want to risk getting drawn into exploring the call with his dad with Shayla—to take him to the multilevel bar on Broadway hosting Swift Saturday, aware that going there without Rachel might throw him back into the depths of where he was overnight and this morning. But she’d been looking forward to it so much that he can’t bring himself to go somewhere different. It’s early enough that the night’s festivities won’t have started, anyway, so he tells himself the reminders of her won’t be more overwhelming there than anywhere else. He’ll just grab some dinner, have a beer or two, and then go back to the room and keep waiting.
What he didn’t count on was seeing Rachel sitting there in that purple dress when he walks in.
Her back is to the door, so she doesn’t see him, and he freezes in place at the end of the counter. He wants nothing more than to go straight to her, but she hasn’t said she’s ready to talk yet. To show her he understands just how much he messed up by not listening to her about the job, he knows he needs to start by listening to her when she says to leave her alone. If she wanted him here with her, she would’ve told him. She’s waiting for the music, not for him to come in and sweep her off her feet.
Then again, he’s not sure he’s strong enough to just walk away, either, or even if he should. Which is why 30 seconds later, he’s still standing there when a glass drops to the floor behind the bar. Rachel turns at the sound, only to see her husband rooted to his spot.
It looks to him like she’s chuckled, and he motions toward her to ask if it’s okay for him to walk over. She hesitates, then nods.
A good sign.
“I promise I didn’t think you’d be here yet,” Will says when he gets to her table. She’s sitting, some sort of frozen drink on the dark wood in front of her, and he decides he shouldn’t take a seat unless explicitly invited. “I mean, I’m not going to pretend I’m not happy to see you. But I was just going to eat and go. I can leave now, though.”
Rachel weighs his explanation. “No, you don’t need to go,” she says, swirling the straw in her drink.
Will tries to hide both his surprise and his elation at the news.
“But I’m also not sure I want to have this conversation just yet,” she adds.
“I get that.” He pauses. The purple in her hair perfectly complements the dress. “I’m just not sure where that leaves me. Like, physically. Should I go sit at the bar or something?”
She scopes out the dozen or so people seated there, and then maybe 20 more scattered around the first floor at this early hour.
“I don’t think so,” she says. “Too easy.”
“Okay. What do you suggest then?”
“I think,” she says, her face lighting up with whatever’s just occurred to her, “I think I want you to ride the mechanical bull.”
This is ... a confusing sign.
“You’re joking.”
“I never joke about mechanical bulls, Will.”
“What possible purpose could that serve besides embarrassing me?”
“Ah, fitting you should mention embarrassment,” Rachel says and takes a sip of her drink. “Because I have a funny story about that. It involves you, actually. Would you like to hear it?”
Surprise and elation have left the premises.
Will wants to look away, to break eye contact, to say he’d like to hear literally anything else. But he doesn’t. He knows he forfeited that right as soon as he emailed Beatriz.
“It starts with when I had to call Rochelle on her vacation,” Rachel says, mimicking the tone you’d use to tell a child a fairy tale, “then apologize for calling on her vacation, and explain to her my husband went behind my back and scheduled an interview for me with her company—by pretending to be me. An interview I had previously turned down, and an interview I quickly confirmed she didn’t know a thing about. It was easily the most humiliating moment of my career.
“So I got to turn her down, again, even though she hadn’t asked this time. Which led to her reiterating how perfect she thought I’d be for the job, but that she agreed with me there was no way I could possibly come out for an interview after this. That in my shoes, she would find that too humiliating. So I have no clue what she thinks of me now.
“Then there’s my actual job. After I left last night, I started thinking, ‘Did he just expect me to go out to LA and keep calling in sick?’ And then I thought, no, not Will—he’s too thorough. So I log into my work email, and lo and behold, I see two messages from my boss: one asking to meet with me about a project that just got dropped on us when I’m back on Thursday, and another three minutes later apologizing for forgetting and spoiling the surprise you had planned for me. So apparently you emailed her. Tell me, Will: Did you do that as yourself, or was that as me too?”
“Myself,” he says quietly.
“Well, how honest of you for a change. And either way, I get to figure out how to explain all this to her when I show up on Monday. But hey, at least I know I can go to my sister’s doctor’s appointment now.”
“You told Isa?” he asks because it’s the only thing he can think to say.
“Of course I told her! We talked all about it. And you’re lucky Owen is such a shithead because you’d be coming off even worse if he weren’t.”
She hasn’t been yelling, but the intensity with which she’s looking at him is just as uncomfortable as if she had been, like he’s being cross-examined on the witness stand, the main difference being that he has no defense. He knows he was wrong.
“All right, potential public mockery seems more than fair,” Will says. “Whenever they start the bull for the night, I’ll sign up.”
“That’s very generous of you, babe. But you know, I’m thinking it would be better if we did it right now.”
He’s not sure why she’s giving him the benefit of a smaller audience, but he’s not going to question it. “Oh. Okay. Whatever you’d like.”
The smile that creeps across her face makes him rethink his relief.
“I mean sure, there will be fewer people here to witness it,” Rachel says. “But there’s a zero percent chance that the people who are here will miss it. It will be like a little private show. For all of us.”
“Uh,” he says, scrambling for the technicality that will save him, “I don’t think you can just get on it at, like, any time. I’m pretty sure someone has to, you know, run it.”
Rachel slurps the last of her drink. “Well, good timing,” she says brightly. “I need another one of these, so I’ll ask the bartender while I’m up there.” She stands and brushes past him. “I have a song to request as your musical accompaniment, anyway,” she adds with a wink.
Will watches her walk to the bar, his remorse for what he’s done temporarily replaced by concern for the next five minutes of his life—and if he’s being honest, a little sexual arousal triggered by the combo of her in that dress and her ruthlessness.
His mood shifts exclusively to terror when he sees the bartender hand Rachel her drink and the two of them look over at him and smile in unison.
Rachel begins walking back over to the table, where Will still hasn’t sat down. She’s about halfway there when he hears it.
The opening guitar riff of “22.”
She wouldn’t,he tries telling himself, now remembering that when they got into their room at the hotel, Rachel realized her Mackinac purchases were still in the car. And not just the dress.
All of her purchases.
“Here,” she says, setting her drink down and reaching into her bag. “You’ll need this.”
She goes to give him the black hat, but when he doesn’t reach to take it, she just places it on his head for him.
“Perfect,” she says, stepping back to admire her styling. “I mean, you’re significantly sweatier than Taylor, but for the most part, this is what I was going for.”
Will’s eyes scan up in the direction of the hat and then move back down to her, silently pleading for mercy.
“All right,” Rachel says, “hop to it. Taylor’s going to hit the chorus before you know it.”
She’s still smiling.
Okay,Will says to himself, turning to make the short trek across the bar to the ring, where the bartender has relocated to run his ride. This isn’t that bad. She’s talking to you. That’s all that counts. Lawrence would do this naked if it gave him five more minutes with Josie. You got this.
Will has indeed become the focal point for the late-afternoon gathering of patrons, who are beginning to realize the flustered-looking guy in the sweat-soaked shirt and the Taylor Swift hat is the reason the music has changed and No Bull, the resident mechanical bovine, has been awoken from his slumber. The several other people who have also clearly shown up early for Swift Saturday have no more idea than anyone else what’s going on, but they’re here for it simply because the queen is now playing on the speakers.
“Woo, ride ’em, cowboy!” he hears a woman who is not Rachel yell as he steps over the short wall onto the padded floor encircling the bull. He looks in the direction the shout came from and recognizes a couple of members of the Lexi’s Bachelorette: Day 2 contingent from the bakery. Judging by the size of the group that has moved into prime viewing position off to Rachel’s left, it’s the full party now. The T-shirts from earlier have been ditched in favor of a wave of Tory Burch and Lilly Pulitzer, but the presumptive Lexi is wearing a tiara that says Bride. And it’s she who responds to the “Woo, ride ’em, cowboy!” with:
“Really, Amy? Didn’t you have your fill of things ... past their expiration date last night?”
All the women laugh, the one Will now knows to be Amy included, and then one standing where Rachel can’t see mimes giving a blowjob while holding her nose, causing them to roar even louder.
His insecurity flares. This is how he appears to these women looking at him right now: as lame and out of place as their friend’s sad middle-aged hookup. It shouldn’t really matter since, present circumstances notwithstanding, he’s a happily married man, but there’s no way to hear that and not have it sting. His face reddening even more than it already was, he is grateful that at least Rachel doesn’t know the full context of the joke. He puts his right foot in the stirrup and swings his left leg over No Bull’s back, determined to avoid eye contact for the duration of his ride.
“All right, everyone,” the bartender announces into a microphone, “give it up for Will and his ride of redemption!”
Nice touch, Rachel,he thinks as the Swifties cheer in a general show of support. Thank God for them. And “ride of redemption.” That had to be a good sign, right?
The bartender turns the mic back off. “Ready?” she asks Will while the song hits the chorus for a second time. He grabs the little knob on the bull’s back with both of his hands and nods.
The motor kicks on, and No Bull starts to spin and lightly buck. Will keeps his hands where they are, partly for balance, partly because he’s hoping that if he doesn’t grab the hat, it will fall to the floor of natural causes.
Alas, no such luck.
Five seconds pass, and then 10. Assorted whistles and catcalls mix with the music, but they’re becoming less bothersome as he goes. Then the chorus is wrapping up, and Taylor’s in the bridge, and he’s still upright.
He’s seen videos of people riding mechanical bulls, and it always looked more intense than this. Maybe Rachel asked the bartender to take it easy on him? Or maybe ...
Am I actually good at this?he wonders.
“Do it, baby!” someone hollers over the noise, and he looks up because this time, it’s not Amy. It’s Rachel.
And she looks happy.
Not happy as in she’s delighting in his penance, which she surely is. But happy as in she and Will are going to be okay.
It sends a surge of adrenaline through him, which only grows when he realizes that if she had the hat in her bag, she planned on seeing him tonight all along. All of it together causes him to lift the hat off his head and shout at the top of his lungs, “I am The Matrix, Nashville!”
Which, sure, is fundamentally confusing on its own. But in this case, it’s especially misguided, as it coincides with the bartender cranking up the bull’s intensity and sending him flying before the city’s name is all the way out of his mouth.
The hat finally comes off as Will sprawls face first into the heavy padding of the ring. There’s a smattering of applause that is a little embarrassing, but he’s glad the ride is over and looks up expecting to see Rachel’s smiling face, which will more than make up for anything he felt atop that bull.
“Are you for real right now?” Lexi says, literally looking down on him. “Like, why are you even here?”
She says it, Will guesses, to get a laugh from her friends, which it does. They’re young, they’re pretty, and they’re at a bachelorette party. What do they care? Like the girls in high school with his denim vest, there’s no way they could really know how hard this hits, and even if he had all night to think of a perfect comeback, he’s not sure what he’d say.
So he doesn’t overthink it.
“Because I want to be. Because I love her”—he points at Rachel—“and I did something stupid. And because it’s really hot outside, and I wanted to stop walking around. Is that okay with you?”
Lexi doesn’t say anything but rolls her eyes. The rest of the group turn their attention toward their drinks. Some look embarrassed, but not all. Will steps out of the ring so he’s standing next to Rachel and sees the smile he’d been looking for.
“By the way,” Rachel adds to Lexi before walking away, “it’s Taylor’s night, so you’re the one who looks ridiculous.”