Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Devon
Tara is on cocaine. I mean—I know she isn’t—but the way she flits and flies around the apartment filling my champagne glass, making drinks for Jeff with Marcello, feeding us an array of antipasti, primi piatti, secondi piatti, all the piattis—it’s like the two of them are performing some sort of tango they’ve rehearsed for months.
Their infectious bliss keeps shaking something loose inside of me.
Hope, maybe? A question floats through my brain like Tara floats atop her three-inch heels.
Is this what love looks like? Will I look like Aphrodite on speed if I fall in love?
Doubtful.
Tara slices a cucumber and passes the slivers to Marcello beside her.
Whispers of enchanting, vowel-filled, flowing Italian reach me as he presses his lips against my sister’s ear while muddling the cucumbers in the copper mule mug.
My future brother-in-law cannot look away from Tara.
She is impossibly beautiful in her silk slip dress, her curls bouncing around her shoulder like golden springs in a physics experiment run by King Midas.
Marcello’s eyes are comically wide as he takes her in.
I feel Jeff watching me as I watch them.
He’s been on his best behavior—thank goodness—sitting as far away from me as physically possible in 1,500 square feet.
But, he has barely taken his eyes off of me—a fact that unsettles me in both a worrisome and pleasant way, the latter of which I choose to ignore.
I recognize that my hair is sticking to my neck more than bouncing around my shoulders and that my ten-dollar high waisted pencil skirt from the consignment store at home does not send waves of iridescent light off my body like Tara’s designer dress. Yet, still, the man stares.
I glance toward him and tilt my head.
“You’re being creepy again,” I tell him, then point toward the bar. “And Tara’s giving you a six count on the vodka. Tread lightly.”
“Says the woman holding her seventh glass of Brut.”
Shit. Is this seven? I tick away on my fingers and lose count at three, then look back to Jeff.
He nods and I know for a fact that I didn’t ask that out loud, because the rim of the glass is pressed to my lips and bubbles are bouncing happily on the front of my tongue like it’s a diving board.
“You must drink more quickly, Jeff,” Marcello shakes his head firmly and wags a finger at us. “We have many cucumbers left here for you.”
Tara lifts up two absurdly large cucumbers to bring the point home. She waggles her brows at me, and I let out a loud sigh. It’s difficult to imagine her as a high-power design mogul when she’s still making cucumber dick jokes like we did at sixteen.
Tara turns back to overpouring the Grey Goose into Jeff’s bronze mug.
Her ring catches the white light from the huge crystal chandelier above us and sends a dazzling array of glitter over the far wall of her apartment.
These two might be happy and beautiful together behind the bar, but they are dangerously distracted, and Jeff and I will end up as collateral damage if we don’t slow down.
“Yo, T. Easy on the Goose,” I say.
Tara levels out the bottle and looks away from her fiancé like she’s only just remembered I’m there.
She smiles at me and I have to laugh. I’ve seen Tara in love before—giggling, eyes glistening, flirtatious and free, pouring drinks that could down a silver-back.
But this is something else. She’s lit from within, like Marcello’s energy mingles with her own, overloading the circuit breaker.
I’m waiting for the lights to flicker around us—for a loud pop to sound and sparks to fly from the outlets.
“Yo, D. Easy on the Brut,” Jeff murmurs and I glare.
But I can’t maintain the evil eye while he sits tucked into Tara’s girl-organ-shaped modern armchair.
Watching Jeff figure out how to sit down in that hideous thing was the highlight of my evening.
I was with Tara when she purchased it from a furniture gallery four blocks South.
I called the chair “The Ovary” when I laid eyes on it amongst the overpriced, pretentious furniture, and since Tara only had one ovary left after having a baseball sized cyst irreparably damage her right female organ at age sixteen, she bought it without even sitting her ass down inside the white ellipsoid, claiming that it would bring balance to her apartment and her reproductive system.
Impossibly, Jeff seemed right at home in Tara’s Ovary, a fact that she and I giggled about through the first three glasses of champagne every time we glanced over at him.
“Alright, is anyone ready for il dolce?” Tara asks as she sinks beside me on the couch with a fresh glass of champagne. The bubbles trail upward in my glass, happy little golden chains of intoxicating air.
“I’m good for now,” I tell her, looping my hand in hers and examining that gorgeous ring for the n-teenth time. I cannot believe my little sister is engaged.
“I wish Mom was here,” Tara says softly, and I rub her palm with my thumb.
Jeff catches my eye as he takes a small sip of the drink he just accepted from Marcello and he mouths the number eight at me with his crooked grin. A shudder crawls up my bare legs beneath my pencil skirt. I just need to keep him in Tara’s Ovary and I’ll be safe.
“You know Mom wishes she were here, too,” I tell her, leaning my head on her shoulder.
“I think we drive down Sunday to pay tua madre a visit, no?” Marcello asks and Tara gives him a look that tells me this isn’t the first time they’ve discussed this.
“My therapist says if we continue to enable her, she will have no incentive to step outside of her comfort zone,” Tara explains.
“Is your mother agoraphobic?” Jeff asks and I feel my sister tense a little beside me.
We haven’t used the a-word since Tara confronted my mom two years ago and was thrown out of the house and told not to come back with her “psycho-babble and bullshit.” My mother refused treatment in any form, which meant we had to continue to skirt around the obvious while coming up with creative ways to get her outside. Chickens enter stage left.
“Undiagnosed,” I tell Jeff who narrows his eyes at me and takes another tentative sip of his mule.
The way he’s studying me for information makes me want to hide in the couch cushions.
We don’t talk often about my mom’s “issues,” mostly because Tara and I can’t seem to agree on what to do.
I know she needs help, but I refuse to starve her and not buy groceries to try to lure her out into the open.
I stand when the weight of Jeff’s stare gets to be too much and the Earth tilts right.
I sit back down, ignoring Tara’s giggle.
“I think it’s time for il dolce,” Marcello says wisely, winking my way. “The espresso will burn.”
“I’ll help!” Tara pats my leg and grins at Jeff as she follows her fiancé into the kitchen.
I need to pee.
This time I move slowly, ignoring Dr. Dick’s attempt not to laugh.
“Can I help you?” he asks, trying to extricate himself from the egg.
“No!” He freezes. Shakes his head with a breathy laugh. “You cannot help. Sit. Stay.”
Good boy.
“Devon, this is absurd. You’re—tipsy—and if you hurt that tendon again I’m gonna—”
“Do what? What are you gonna do, you big meathead?” I puff out my chest and he puts both hands up, smiling.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been called that,” he says to himself. “Text me when you make it safely to the toilet.”
I ignore him and focus on taking my leave slowly. Gracefully. I keep my eyes on Jeff, making sure he doesn’t follow, until I hit the hallway wall, literally, and nearly knock a framed drawing of one of Tara’s early designs off the mount.
“You ok?” Jeff asks.
“Yup. Just checking for studs.”
I’ve stopped like I always do in front of the sketch of my prom dress.
It never ceases to amaze me how talented she was—and is—as I stare at the sleek lines of champagne-colored satin that she created especially for me.
She spent hours over my grandmother’s old Singer, me reading in bed while she sang along to Black Eyed Peas, moving that gorgeous fabric with her deft, manicured fingers.
The gown made me feel like a princess mermaid in a sea of prosecco.
The thought of prosecco makes me a little queasy.
I smile through a yawn, reaching out to touch the orange smudgy fingerprint peeking out from the top right corner of the barnwood frame.
I was eating hot wings when she showed me, and her outrage at the stain was the first time I remember thinking, “Oh shit, she’s going to seriously kill it in fashion.
” And here we are, nearly a decade of fashion weeks in Paris later, with my little sister taking life (and a hot Milanese man) by the balls just as I’d always known she would.
I glance into Tara’s room and take in the heaven that is her bed.
It’s a cloud backlit by the lights of the city stretching across the windows on the far wall.
A puffy, glorious marshmallow that occupies the majority of the master and calls to me like a siren to a sailor.
I’m just gonna bounce a little, stroke the silk pillows that keep sis lookin’ so fine in the am.
I glance behind me like a shoplifter, then sneak inside her boudoir, giving the mattress my best plop.
I sink into the quilted comforter and let my cheek cool against the smooth silk.
This is magnificent. I don’t even have to pee anymore.
I’m just going to lay here for a bit. Just to sober up.
Shit, is that mascarpone I smell? Mmmmmm. I’ll just shut my eyes for a sec—