Chapter Five #2
I abandoned sipping and began swallowing wine with a great fervor, knowing that if I climbed atop our table, ripped off my dress, and danced in circles until I passed out, I’d be less of an embarrassment to my mother.
I’d downed at least three quarters of the glass when Gerald leaned forward to get my attention.
“My friend Lila is gay. I should tell her to look for your books.”
“Thank you so much. That would be great,” I said. He did not ask my last name, which told me that he was either going to do nothing of the sort, or for some ridiculous reason, he actually did remember my family from swimming lessons. “Excuse me. I’m going to find a ladies’ room.”
Even though I really had to pee, I passed two restrooms before ducking into a third, as far away from the ballroom as I dared stray for fear of getting lost. I didn’t want to chance running into anyone at all, let alone someone I knew.
This one was completely deserted, which was a good thing.
I could lock myself safely in a stall and hold my head in my hands for as long as I wanted without causing a traffic jam or suspicion.
I could also spend as long as I needed to standing alone at the mirror, touching up the makeup that had run conspicuously while I was locked in that stall.
I was still far too indignant to admit to crying over my mother’s games, so I blamed it on the alcohol, made sure I was presentable, and finally headed back toward the festivities.
Not quite ready to face my mother’s wrath, I found a waiter with another glass of wine, stepped out onto the patio overlooking the duck pond, and sat at a high-top table.
As unladylike as it was, I kicked off my shoes and pulled my aching feet up onto the next chair.
I wondered whether I would die if I walked all the way home in heels.
I’d been out on the patio less than five minutes when a sharply dressed man with a long ponytail set his drink on my table. “I’m Ben,” he said. “I work as an acupuncturist at the clinic with Cami.”
I was about to attempt a facade of politeness and at least move my feet off the chair, but he held up his hand to stop me.
“No, no, let me.”
“Let you what?” Before I could react, this man picked up my feet and slid into the chair underneath them. I scrambled to reclaim my appendages, but he held them fast, though not in a particularly uncomfortable way.
“Just give me a second.” He moved his hands around my left foot, pressing gently on the sole here, then there.
I was not ticklish, but I’d had a lot to drink. “What the hell are you doing?”
Ben stuck up one finger to shush me and leaned in as if my feet were telling him something. “You’re left-handed.”
“So?”
“You’re fastidious when you’re feeling good, but a bit messy when you’re depressed. You love reading, dogs, and you have several tattoos, most of which you’ve gotten when you’ve been angry.”
Now, I stared. I was drunk, sure, but I had no idea how he could know such things from my feet.
“Color affects you profoundly. It has to be exactly right or you’re distracted.”
I’d painted my office five times. “How do you know this?”
He shook his head again, this time smiling gently, still rubbing my feet. “You’re going to spend the rest of the night avoiding people, and you’re going to fake it the first time we have sex, although I’ll remedy that the next time.”
I sat up and removed my feet from his grasp in one motion. “Yeah, no. Apparently my feet didn’t tell you that I’m gay.”
Ben jerked his chair backward. “Fuck. You’re not Zoe?”
I rolled my eyes. “Sam. So nice to meet you.” I grabbed what was left of my drink instead of offering my hand.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Cami said that Zoe was the one in the green dress and—”
“She’s the cute perky one, and she’s likely to fall for that one hook, line, and sinker. Best of luck.” I took off down the steps toward the pond, half looking for somewhere to throw up.
That didn’t happen. Instead, I discovered one of the bridesmaids hiding out around the corner, leaning hard against the wall.
I remembered her as one of Cami’s much older cousins, and I knew her only as Smash-and-Grab, due to an unfortunate incident in high school which, thanks to a good lawyer and a sympathetic judge, resulted in community service and a smudge on her record rather than a lengthy stay in juvie.
The wedding program said that her given name was Julia, but that didn’t really fit.
She was sitting on the ground, mounds of baby blue ruffles surrounding her haphazardly, shoes cast off to the side.
She had a Budweiser in one hand and a Marlboro in the other.
“Ben’s a fuckhead,” she said. “Where are your tattoos?”
I sat on the sidewalk next to her and stretched my left arm in her general direction so she could see one. “I’m not drunk enough to show you the others.” It stung more than a little that someone had heard that exchange.
“What, are they internal or something? You’re pretty damn drunk.”
“They’re not anywhere weird, it’s just that if I undo any of this, I’m never going to be able to get it back on.”
Smash-and-Grab shrugged evenly. “I’ll zip you back up if you’ll do the same for me.”
I stared out at the duck pond. A tiny blast of adrenaline coursed through my veins, then slowed when it reached my stomach, as if the alcohol was thicker than it was, and somehow capable of reducing a crazy borderline eager feeling into mere nerves.
Smash-and-Grab flipped a fold of her dress and continued in a very different direction. “I can’t believe they’ve been parading me around in this shit all day. I thought it was sweet when she asked me, then I found out that one of her friends is eight months pregnant.”
“So?”
“You think for a second that Cami’s the type who would be okay with having a pregnant bridesmaid?”
“You don’t have to have eight bridesmaids.”
“You do if you have eight groomsmen.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. I don’t even know that many people.”
“I sure as hell don’t like that many people.”
“So is that the pregnant chick’s dress?”
“Fuck you.” Smash-and-Grab swatted me with the ruffle. She was smiling. “What’re you doing out here?”
“Besides getting hit on by Dr. Creepy?”
“Besides that.”
“Avoiding my mother.”
“Ah, your mother.” Smash-and-Grab’s tone told me that she, too, remembered my mother. “What did she do?”
“Told her friends I’m a doctor. It used to really bother me when nothing I did was good enough, but now it’s just irritating.”
“So what, it’s not good enough that you’re a writer?”
I glanced sideways at her.
“Yeah, I’ve read you. You write a good sex scene.”
I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes. “Shit.”
“Come on. You were always going to be a writer. Everybody knew that.”
That made me feel a little better. “So what have you been up to?”
“Twelve years in the army.”
I stared at her. Not only was that surprising, but when she’d moved, a delicate citrus scent had wafted over me. There wasn’t a law against butch lesbians wearing perfume, but it made the nervous twinge come back. “Really? The army?”
“Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
I couldn’t imagine anyone needing to ask. “Since then?”
“I followed a chick to Montana for a while…That was a bad idea. I’ve pretty much been here ever since.”
“It’s not a bad place to be.”
She threw me a tiny smile to tell me I was far more transparent than I knew. “I’ve mostly been doing computer work for the county since then. Did some landscaping on the side for a while, but it was too much to juggle.”
“That’s hard work.”
She shrugged. “Taught me a lot of useless things.”
“Like what?”
“Like their turf looks good, but their beds need mulching and their azaleas are covered in aphid urine.”
“What?”
“The spots?”
“Aphid piss?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s really disgusting.”
Silence. My heart had started to pound, and the alcohol only served to magnify my imbalanced feelings.
First of all, it always made me nervous and flushed when someone said they’d read my books.
It was what I’d always wanted, yes, but it still felt like I was standing naked in front of her.
I had the feeling that she rather liked that, and I was right.
“I don’t know if you knew this, but I had a huge crush on you back in school.”
“I did not.”
“Probably shouldn’t have said anything.” She smiled bashfully at her beer bottle. “That was stupid.”
“No, really, it’s okay. I’m flattered.” I squinted past the ducks again, wondering if this evening could possibly become any more awkward.
I tipped the last of my wine into my mouth and swallowed carefully, wondering what I was supposed to say next.
Here I was, sitting outside on the ground with the world’s butchest substitute bridesmaid, while my mother was surely badmouthing me to anyone who would listen.
That idea, as depressing as it seemed twenty minutes prior, struck me funny all at once.
That sparked a tiny sense of rowdy, naughty possibility, and once it was there, it became impossible to ignore.
There truly was nothing in the world more attractive than a person admitting her illicit crush on you.
“What?”
I jerked out of my own musings and felt my face go hot. “What what?”
“You’re smiling.”
So was Smash-and-Grab, in a yummy, teasing sort of way. I looked away fast. “Never. It’s just your imagination.”
“Want to know a secret?”
“Sure.”
“I used to watch you and Cheryl Sammons up in the hayloft.”
My jaw dropped. “What?”