Chapter Three #2
The one person I didn’t see while circulating through the steadily more crowded room? Vienna. I kept one eye out for her, wanting to make sure she was having a good time after whatever was going on earlier.
“Pom!” As soon as I registered that the voice belonged to Jessica, her arms were around me. She smelled like she’d just finished baking something with apples and vanilla. “A million congratulations! I’m so proud of you!”
I gave her a genuine smile as she released me.
She was beaming so hard in my direction that it almost made up for the lack of smile coming from Nicholas.
If I were to commission a custom cocktail for my brother tonight, it would consist mostly of lemon juice.
With the seeds. “Pomona,” he said flatly, his arms crossed.
“Congratulations. The room looks nice. Though—”
“Though not as nice as if I’d held it at the Afton, I know,” I finished for him. He looked a little stunned by my daring. “I appreciate you coming anyway.”
He sniffed. “I wouldn’t miss my sister’s first gala. Even if she’s—”
“Even if she’s a traitor to the family. I know.” I leaned in and gave him a hug. It was like hugging a mannequin. “Jessica, you look stunning.”
“Thank you!” I’d taken her shopping after all and helped her find a gauzy blue-violet crepe dress that had been, to her great and inexplicable pleasure, on clearance.
Hopefully she’d just stick to telling everybody who complimented her on it that it had pockets.
“Pom, you’ll come wedding dress shopping with me, won’t you?
I mean, I haven’t even started the wedding planning process, but—”
“Say no more.” I linked arms with my future sister-in-law. “I’ll start working on a spreadsheet.”
“A spreadsheet?” She blinked at me. “I was thinking we just go to the Say Yes to the Dress store and try stuff on until I find something I like.”
I heaved a sigh. “We’ll loop back on this soon.” Jessica really didn’t know anything.
“Okaaaaay.” She sounded like I’d told her we’d be wedding dress shopping inside a bear cage. “By the way, is your friend okay? I just saw her over there looking like she was about to cry.”
“My friend? You mean Vienna?” I followed Jessica’s pointer finger to the far corner of the room, where… Was that the tip of Vienna’s sleek black chignon peeking up over that bookshelf? “Excuse me.”
I nodded goodbye to my brother, who grabbed a The Pomona Afton off a circulating tray, and Jessica, then hustled toward the side corner, nodding hello and giving my busy smile to several small donors and the girl from Broadway, who I really wanted to talk to later (namely to ask an important question: If the part of Elle Woods in the Legally Blonde revival vibed with somebody’s very soul but they could neither sing, act, nor dance, could they still hypothetically be stunt-cast on Broadway?).
I reached the bookcase Vienna was hiding (???) behind just in time to hear her speak and realize that she wasn’t alone. She was saying, in a low, tense voice, “You’ve got to give me more time. I don’t have it yet.”
“Tonight was your deadline.” I blinked in surprise, because the voice belonged to my guest of honor. Conrad Phlume. “If you can’t—”
“Please,” Vienna said. “Give me one more day.”
“Perhaps there’s another way—”
“Oh my God, Pom, why are you hiding away here in the corner?”
Before I could turn myself, I was physically grabbed by the shoulder and turned by two tiny, bony, illogically strong hands. My cheek was bumped by a hollow jawbone and the corner of a thick glasses frame. The smells of freesia and lavender drifted past me.
“Millicent, Coriander,” I said, trying to turn back and failing. How was Coriander so strong when she refused to do any exercise that made her sweat? “So good to see you, but—”
“Oh my God, Pom, you look amazing,” Coriander said, pushing me away at arm’s length—I almost hit a pillar—so that she could look me up and down. “Love that dress. It’s so… bohemian.”
Was that a compliment or an insult? Did she know what “bohemian” meant? It didn’t matter. I just smiled and nodded. “You look amazing too. Both of you. Especially you, Coriander. Those glasses are so wow.”
I tried to turn back toward the corner where Vienna and Conrad were seemingly conspiring, but now the pillar was in my way.
I was trapped staring at Millicent and Coriander as their hands moved to their hips and they ducked their chins, posing.
Coriander’s mermaid dress was so tight it was a mystery how she could walk in it, but at least it didn’t swamp her tiny frame the way the paper bag dress she wore to the last gala had, and her blond hair (expertly dyed) really popped against the iridescent navy.
Her glasses looked terrible, but that was on me.
Meanwhile, Millicent had gone for grandeur in a long, flowing ball gown in bloodred.
She’d also chosen red eye shadow around her enormous deep, dark eyes, which on most people would have made them look sick, but which gave her a look just on the attractive side of dangerous.
I stepped forward and spun around before either one could accost me again. There! The corner! Where… Vienna’s bun no longer protruded, and I could no longer hear her or Conrad’s voices. Either they’d ducked down to hide or they’d finished their conversation and moved on.
Plastering on a wide fake smile to hide my disappointment, I looked back over at Millicent and Coriander.
They didn’t let their poses fall until I gave them a nod of approval.
“Well, it’s so great to see you. Thank you so much for coming,” I said, then looked past them as if seeing another friend I wanted to talk to, the universal signal of moving on.
My friends were very good at ignoring what other people wanted, though. “Wait, Pom,” Coriander said breathlessly. “I wanted to ask your advice…”
Just then, I actually did see someone past them I wanted to talk to. Someone I very much wanted to talk to, in fact, even after more than a year together, which, according to my mom, was about when couples started to hate each other. “Gabe!” I said, and my smile morphed into something genuine.
That faltered a little bit when I realized how uncomfortable he looked—he was scratching the back of his neck and shifting a little in his tux.
“Are you okay?” I asked him. He certainly looked it, in the slim-fitting black tux I’d insisted on having made for him after the debacle of our first gala together. I never wanted to speak of it again.
Coriander, however, would. “You look nice tonight,” she said.
Gabe forced a smile. He was not nearly as practiced at it as I was, so he kind of resembled one of those corpses that had been dead for a long time, when its lips started peeling back from its teeth.
A really healthy-looking corpse, with warm, golden skin and dark eyes fringed by thick eyelashes I knew at least three women personally who would pay to harvest. “Thank you.”
“Yeah,” Millicent added. “Tonight, you look really good.” They tittered, as if I were too dumb to parse what they were actually saying.
(To be fair, when Gabe told me he had it all under control for our first gala together, who would think that would mean he’d show up in a rental tux?
And not even from a designer rental tux company, but the one our building super recommended because he’d rented a tux there for his father-in-law’s funeral?)
I linked my elbow through that of my corpse-boyfriend. A gold cuff link, a “gift from my father” that I’d purchased and wrapped and discreetly handed to my father to hand back to us, glinted at his wrist beside my diamond tennis bracelet. “Gabe, come with me. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
With that, I was able to excuse us from Millicent and Coriander and pull Gabe to the corner where Vienna and Conrad had been talking. Maybe they were hiding back here. I rounded the corner and—
Nothing. Just a waiter on her phone; she glanced up at me with wide eyes and stuttered an apology before darting off too fast for me to assure her that I didn’t mind her being on her phone.
I had, after all, spent my grandfather’s funeral riveted not to whatever boring eulogies they were saying about him but to the ugly breakup between Coriander’s boyfriend and his not-so-secret affair partner playing out in the group chat, so who was I to judge?
“Who am I meeting?” Gabe asked, raising an eyebrow at the empty nook.
Well. I could still spin this to my advantage. I spun around, backing into the bookshelf, nudging a few books out of the way as I pulled Gabe into me. “Me.”
I closed my eyes as his lips found mine.
Some of the fireworks might have stopped popping a year into our relationship, but fireworks were loud and annoying anyway.
I was happy with his warmth, the feeling of safety I felt wrapped in his arms, the way each kiss still sent heat flooding through my belly.
One of his hands cupped my cheek, fingers delicately brushing the edge of my hairline but not actually stroking my hair (which I appreciated, considering that hitting the wrong bobby pin might make the whole thing explode).
As we pulled apart I sighed, a little bit of the day’s tension draining out of me. “Okay. I really needed that.”
“I’m always at your service,” Gabe said, cracking a smile. I rested my head on his shoulder. “Is everything going okay so far? I’m sorry I couldn’t come earlier. I would’ve rescheduled, but my student takes his SATs tomorrow, so—”