Seat Mates

Chapter 18

We wake to Charlie’s alarm clock going off. It startles me, and I sit bolt upright from where I’d been lying with my head on his shoulder.

“Shit. I’m sorry.” He scrambles through the sheets and shuts it off.

He leans back over to me. “I have a meeting, but it’s in the hotel.”

He moves to kiss me, and I turn my head because of the dragon breath and it lands on my cheek.

“Oh no, you don’t.” He laughs and grips my cheeks in his hands so I can’t escape, and kisses me again, firmly on the mouth and I relax into him, unable to resist his touch.

“Why do you have a meeting?” I whine at him. “It’s Labor Day. Isn’t the point that you’re supposed to be not laboring?”

He shakes his head ruefully as he stands before me entirely naked. “There’s a big deal about to go through. I’m lucky I only have to be there for the first part. This place is going to be swarming with lawyers all day.”

“Oh no,” I say in horror.

He goes to the bathroom and I hear the shower running, and then he gets dressed with clipped efficiency. “Don’t move. I’ll be back in two hours. Order breakfast.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.” I pout at him, and he grins before he grabs his wallet and laptop bag, and he’s gone.

It isn’t until I’m alone that last night comes rushing back to me. There’s a post-wedding brunch at eleven o’clock, and I ruminate over the idea of going. It’s seven now, so Charlie should be back by then, in theory.

I wrap myself in one of the robes from his bathroom and poke my head out into the hallway, to avoid any awkward encounters with wedding guests, before I sneak over to my own room. The contrast between Charlie’s tidy room and the mess I’ve created is startling. And when I go to the bathroom to go through my morning routine and look in the mirror, I’m met with horror.

This is what Charlie has been looking at since last night?

I didn’t bother to wash my face when we got back, and my carefully crafted smoky eye has turned into two inky black runs down either side of my face. The hair that I was too horny and then too exhausted to deal with came unpinned in my sleep and has turned into a squirrely nest of brittle, hairsprayed straw on the top of my head. My skin is strangely blotchy, and when I open my robe, I find my nipples ringed by two angry red circles, like terrifying, bloodshot eyes. I must be allergic to the glue on those pasties, because the flesh is slightly raised with little bumps like hives, but at least they don’t hurt.

He’s such a liar, I think, with all his talk of perfect breasts and eyes and ears. I look like the girl from The Ring if she’d been dolled up and sent out to meet people. All I need to do is crawl through a television screen and the effect would be complete.

I set to work attempting to undo the damage. I’m determined for Charlie to return to his room to find a living human waiting for him. So, I get in the shower and scrub my body clean. I shave everything, yet again. I wash my face once and then stick my head out to check the mirror, and wash it once more. I pull bobby pins from my hair one by one and lay them on the marble ledge meant for soap, and lather in shampoo, rinse, and lather again. It takes a bucket of conditioner to get the tangles out.

I attempt to clean the remaining glue off my breasts with a washcloth and soap, and when I’m out of the shower I tend to them with lotion and make a mental note to stop at a pharmacy to get some cortisone.

When I’m finished, with my hair wrapped up in a towel, I put on a clean pair of fresh underwear and then put Charlie’s T-shirt that I slept in back on, because it would be insane for me not to spend as much time inside of his smell as possible. When all of my work is done, and my breath has been restored so that I don’t risk an attempted murder charge if I accidentally talk to someone, I go back to Charlie’s room.

The whole project took an hour, which means I have an hour to go before I get to see him again. I’m giddy and impatient, and I struggle to pay attention to an episode of The Office . You know things are bad when Michael Scott can’t distract you into forgetting about the clock. I pick up the phone and order room service and ask them to wait until nine o’clock before they deliver it, so I can eat with Charlie.

Finally, the time passes, and I hear the robot noise of the door’s lock sliding open. Charlie’s brow is furrowed and he generally looks stressed, but when he sees me, his face relaxes into an easy smile.

“You showered,” he says.

“I can’t believe you were going to just let me continue to exist like that without saying something!” I accuse him.

He laughs and comes over and draws me in for a kiss. “You looked perfect.”

“And now?”

“I can’t tell a difference,” he says, shaking his head. “Did you do something? Did you change your hair?”

“ Stoppp !” I protest. “I could have been arrested walking around like that!”

“Don’t worry, Mini, I would have bailed you out, and then I would have hosed you off.” He sets his bag down and kicks off his sensible airport shoes.

I giggle and scoot over in the bed so he can get in next to me.

“Did you eat?” he asks, glancing around the room for a room service tray.

“Food’s on the way,” I answer. “I got you the eggs Benedict again. How was the meeting?”

He rubs his forehead with his thumb and forefinger and shakes his head. “Horrible.”

“Really? What happened?” I turn so that I’m sitting cross-legged, facing him.

“My firm is representing a business trying to acquire another, and neither side will budge on their demands. And to be honest, our client is being a real prick.”

I frown. “I’m sorry.”

He’s silent for a moment, his elbows resting on raised knees, as he stares at Michael Scott attempting to revive a CPR dummy.

I watch him as he thinks. He’s wearing his lawyer face.

“I’m going to quit my job,” he says.

“Are you?” I lean back as I study him.

He nods. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but I’ve been too afraid to take the leap.”

“What changed your mind?”

He looks at me, “This weekend. You.”

I shake my head vigorously. “Oh no. Don’t do that. Don’t quit your job just because I think I can save the world. That’s a bad idea, Charlie.”

“I was thinking about it before this weekend too. It’s not just because of you. But remember in the taxi when you asked if I work for the bad guys?”

“Yeah.” I nod my head slowly, waiting for him to continue.

“Well… I do. I really, really do. And I don’t want to anymore. And there’s probably some things I should tell you about my work—”

The knock at the door interrupts him, and I grab a robe and go to answer it. It’s the same bellman who brought my food in when I forgot to put on pants, and he looks relieved to see me dressed.

I let him wheel the cart in and set the food out, since my body isn’t screaming at me to mount Charlie as soon as possible, although I do plan to do so in the not-too-distant future.

I sit down in front of the little in-room dining table and grab a fork. “What did you want to tell me?” I ask, looking back at Charlie where he’s still sitting, leaning against the headboard of the bed.

“Nothing.” He scoots forward to join me. “It’s not a big deal.”

We eat in silence, both hungry after all the sex and the morning without food.

“So, what do you want to do with the rest of the day?” he asks.

The fact that we are going to be spending the day together is a given. I don’t even need to ask. It’s our last day together. His flight leaves tomorrow morning. I’m headed back the day after. We haven’t discussed after. Not yet. But I think there will be an after. I hope there will be a lot of after.

I’m enamored with him. The way he touches me in public—not possessive, but protective. So I know he’s in my corner. He has my back, both literally and figuratively. I love watching him think. The way he read the information about each animal at the zoo, and the way he nodded when he’d finished and I could see him filing the information away and prepare to shift to the next one. And his attentiveness. The degree of consideration he has for the people around him. The fact that he wouldn’t even kiss me when the chemistry between us was already so strong it had become combustible, because he was concerned I was in too vulnerable a position.

I set my fork down with a strawberry speared on the end of it. “There’s a post-wedding brunch in an hour. We could go drink awkward mimosas with Diane and company.”

“Would you like to do that?”

I shrug a shoulder. “Do I want to? Not necessarily. But this whole thing hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be, and I think I should.”

So, of course, Charlie agrees to go with me. I love having him here, but I don’t need him here. Not anymore. I’m okay, I think. If Charlie got called away on a moment’s notice, I would be fine.

The brunch is on the patio where Charlie and I first sat at a bar together, but a banquet has been set out with a buffet overflowing with every food imaginable. A chef is making to-order omelets, and there’s a raw bar. Charlie and I beeline it towards the bartender offering Bloody Marys and mimosas and, for some particularly poorly situated attendees, something called a Bartender’s Breakfast.

The sight of Tyler, more than a little ashen, standing next to Astrid, makes me decide that I should just ask for a watermelon juice.

Rob and Gabby are sitting at a table in the corner with plates full of eggs and toast, and Charlie and I go over and join them.

I look around the patio, but I don’t see Mom or Michael anywhere. Maybe they’re having a post-wedding lie-in. I put the kibosh on that train of thought right then and there. Nothing good lies down that road. Gross.

“Good morning.” Gabby smiles at us, and even Rob manages to lift the corner of his mouth. “Not eating?” Gabby asks. She’s been carrying the conversational baton rather heroically, despite a few speedbumps.

“We ate in the room.” I glance over at Charlie who appears proud of the fact that I let it drop that we spent the night together.

“We should have done that,” Rob says.

“Oh, but this food is so good!” Gabby says cheerily and gives his shoulder an encouraging squeeze.

Tyler and Astrid sit down with us shortly after we arrive at the table, and we all scoot our chairs together to fit them around the four-top. I take a corner since I’m not eating, and Charlie squishes his chair up next to me so that Astrid can fit in on his other side.

“A little worse for wear?” Rob asks his cousin.

“Dude.” Tyler rests his head in his hand. “You have no idea.”

“Tyler decided it would be fun to go out to an after-party,” Astrid says. “And apparently—this didn’t come from Tyler, by the way, because he was too drunk to remember—someone thought it would be a good idea to play a drinking game where they took a shot every time they said ‘Jose Cuervo’ to a song called ‘Ten Rounds with Jose Cuervo.’”

This is funny enough that even Rob starts laughing.

Astrid holds her hands out in disbelief. “I mean, who on the planet Earth thinks that that’s a good idea?”

Tyler stifles a gag and forces down a sip of his Bartender’s Breakfast. “I’m never drinking again,” he says miserably.

“Said everyone with a hangover, ever,” Gabby adds.

“When do you guys head out?” Astrid asks the table.

“Our flight is this afternoon,” Gabby says and leans in like she’s sharing a secret. “Michael treated us to business class.”

A resentment box gets ticked in my mind, but again, to my continuing surprise, I no longer care.

“Lucky,” Astrid says with a note of envy. “We leave tomorrow afternoon. I’m going to Diane’s ladies’ spa day.”

Gabby sulks a little. “I wanted to, but Rob has to get back to work.”

“How are you guys spending your last day?” I ask Astrid.

“We were planning on hitting some museums,” Astrid says. “But I think that’s going to be a solo venture now.”

Tyler has given up entirely, and he’s now resting his elbows on his knees, hanging his head, taking slow, deep breaths.

“I can’t,” is all he says.

“You can’t what, honey?” Astrid asks, reveling in punishing him for his sins.

“Continue existing,” Tyler moans.

A man walks by with a large plate of oysters, and that’s when Tyler gets up in a hurry and speed-walks towards the bathrooms.

“Is he going to be okay?” Rob asks, watching him cross the room, dodging a woman holding a plate piled high with shrimp.

“Fine.” Astrid waves a hand. “This isn’t the first time Jose Cuervo’s come calling. But I should probably go make sure, just in case.” She smiles apologetically at us and rises to go nurse her ailing husband.

“When do you guys go back?” Rob asks. He seems to have brightened a little bit and I’m encouraged.

“I leave on Wednesday morning so I can do the spa thing and have some time to collect all of my belongings.”

Rob and Charlie both chuckle, and Gabby looks between them. “What?”

Charlie throws an arm around me. “Daisy has a pathological inability to travel without bringing everything she owns along with her.”

“It’s a pretty serious condition.” Rob nods. “Specialists will be required.”

“It’s okay, Daisy. I overpack too,” Gabby says in solidarity.

Rob and Charlie exchange a glance, and their attempts to stifle their laughs fail.

“It’s not that bad,” I say to defend myself, even though it is.

When we get up to leave after saying goodbye, and Rob actually offers Charlie his hand to shake, Gabby asks me to hang back a second.

We stand behind a topiary of an elephant and donkey shaking hands.

“I just wanted to say, I’m sorry if I was a little awkward at first.” She fidgets with a charm bracelet on her wrist, running her fingers over each little ornament before letting it drop.

“Oh, Gabby, you weren’t, of course not,” I start to dismiss the apology.

“No, I was.” She grabs my wrist. “I was really defensive. It was just hard, walking into this really bizarre family dynamic and feeling like the fifth wheel. And you’re Rob’s ex-fiancée and I know the only reason you two split up was because… well, you know.”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t think that’s the only reason we split up,” I tell her sincerely. “It was insane, if I’m being perfectly frank, but if Rob and I had really been on the same page, we could have found a way through it. Rob and I just weren’t each other’s people.” I shrug a shoulder, like it’s just that simple.

“You think so?” Gabby asks.

“Yeah, I do,” I answer. “And I think Rob is crazy about you. I think he’s going through all of this so you can be included in a big family event, and he wants you to be a part of his family.”

Gabby’s big blue eyes fill with tears. “That means so much, Daisy. And if we’re both being honest here, it wasn’t until I saw how in love Charlie is with you that I stopped feeling so insecure. But you two are smitten.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that…”

“I do,” she says firmly, “The way he looks at you, when you don’t realize it. It’s like seeing someone falling in love over and over again.”

My expression grows serious as I attempt to maintain my composure, even as an eruption of fireworks in my stomach make me feel faint. A champagne-fizzy feeling overflows up into my chest, right up to my heart, and then I can’t help it: a smile breaks out over my face.

“See?” she says and starts to go.

“Wait.” I stop her, collecting myself. “I’m sorry too. You weren’t the only one feeling defensive and left out, Gabby. I shouldn’t have said those things at dinner. And I apologize.”

Never in a million years would I have imagined that Gabby and I would leave this wedding as friends.

She smiles softly. “That’s alright, Daisy. This hasn’t been easy for any of us.” And then she gives me a hug with her long slender arms that I hated her for and that don’t bother me one bit now. She has beautiful arms.

“I guess I’ll see you at Christmas,” I say, and she laughs at the realization, that keeps coming over us all again and again, that while this wedding is over everything else is just beginning, and we are going to have to learn, and keep learning, how to be a family.

“I guess so,” she says and raises her eyebrows at me, and then goes back to join Rob at their table.

Charlie and I leave brunch and wind through the restaurant out into the lobby.

“So, what do you want to do? It’s only noon,” Charlie says, “You feel like a museum?”

“Not really,” I answer.

“You want to go back to the room?” He raises an eyebrow at me and gives me a filthy look that makes me drag my bottom teeth between my lips.

“How do you read my mind so well?” I ask.

He taps his head with his pointer finger. “It’s not a perfect brain. But it’s pretty good.”

“Daisy!” a voice echoes after us from across the lobby. “Daisy!”

I turn around and see my mother striding towards me with long, intent steps. Her heels echo sharply on the marble floor. My grasp on Charlie’s hand loosens at the look on her face as she approaches. A thunderstorm rumbles behind her eyes. Adrenaline shoots through me, clearing the haze of the dream I’d been walking through just moments before.

“What did you say to Walter Peterman?” she demands in an angry, hushed voice.

“Who?” I ask in confusion until realization dawns on me, and if it weren’t for the look on her face I would already be laughing.

“Walter. Peterman,” Mom says in a clipped tone. “He seems to believe you’re dating some… guru or something. And you’re moving to a commune ?”

Next to me, Charlie’s shoulders start to shake with laughter, and it’s catching. I’m laughing too. Heavy belly laughs that have me bending over and gasping.

My mom stands there, aghast at our display.

“It’s not funny.” Her eyes are rimmed in red, as though she’s been crying. She grips me by the arm in a bruising grasp like I’m six years old again and drags me into the little library side room where Charlie first consoled me.

“Ow! Mom, stop,” I protest as I stumble after her.

“What did you say to him?” she demands.

“I didn’t say anything,” I answer honestly, all laughter gone now. Charlie stands just outside the door looking conflicted. Unwilling to intrude but unwilling to leave me.

“You must have said something. He came up to me this morning and said he was sorry. He felt sorry for me, Daisy! Can you imagine? I’m humiliated, on my wedding weekend!” Her tone is ferocious. Angrier than I remember her being since I told her I was going to work in environmental conservation, like, as she put it, a “hippie.” “How could you do this to me?”

Do this? How could I do this ? To her ?

“What? Mom,” I attempt to calm her. “Who cares what Walter thinks? Just tell him it was a joke.”

“A joke?” she says in disbelief, as though the possibility is offensively absurd. “Walter sits on the board of Citibank, Daisy. He’s very important in my social circle. You know how much this weekend meant to me. Everyone is going to be talking, and I needed you. I needed you to be the girl I raised you to be this weekend. Was that really too much to ask?”

The familiar guilt comes pouring back, my mother’s insecurity and need for acceptance sluicing cold water over my head and erasing any of the warm feelings I’d managed to nurture into life. I open my mouth, on the cusp of begging her not to be angry with me. About to go offer to apologize to Walter myself.

Charlie has walked into the room, closing the sliding doors behind him, and he places a protective hand on my shoulder. The moment I feel him, it breaks me out of the shame spiral. How could I do this to her ? How can she not see what I’ve gone through to try to make her happy?

And it hits me all at once, in an unwelcome, hard realization—I will never live up to her expectations of me.

I’ll never be the daughter she wishes I was, or the person she hoped I would become, because that girl that she imagines is someone else entirely. I will never get her approval. And every time she does something to hurt me, I will have to be the one who picks herself up. Who dusts herself off and who lets it go. I can wait forever for an apology. It won’t be forthcoming. I will forever have to shrug off hurt after hurt after hurt, and my mother will continue to believe that I am the one who is letting her down.

“Daisy didn’t do anything, Mrs. Nielsen,” Charlie says, defending me. “It was me. I was just pulling his leg a bit, and it got a little out of control. I had no idea he would take me so seriously. I’ll go tell him myself.”

My mother dismisses him with a shake of her head. “This isn’t the first time Daisy has disappointed me like this, Charles.” It’s very like her to use formal names when she’s angry.

She turns back to me, her face white, her eyes steely. “You owe me an apology, Daisy. Right now.”

Charlie’s hand on my shoulder tenses. “Daisy has been exceedingly gracious throughout this entire weekend. If you’re embarrassed it’s my fault, not hers,” he says firmly.

“No.” I shake his hand off. Not because I don’t want him here, but because I need to stand on my own two feet. When I say this, it needs to come from me alone. Not me and Charlie.

“Charlie didn’t do anything wrong. And neither did I. We were having a little fun. It was a completely harmless, innocent joke. It’s not like someone pulled their pants down at your ceremony. No one died. You’re blowing this completely out of proportion.”

Her eyes widen at my backtalk.

“If you’re embarrassed,” I continue, undeterred, “it’s your fault. Not mine. And certainly not Charlie’s.”

“You think this is my fault?” she gasps, pressing her manicured hand to her chest, missing the point entirely.

I fight the urge to stamp my foot into the ground. To grab her shoulders and shake her.

“Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to come here this weekend, Mom? Do you have any idea what I’ve been through over the past year? No. You don’t,” I say, my temper building. The need to say all of the things that I’ve been holding back, all at once, pushes away any desire to keep this calm. “Because Diane Nielsen, previously Thomas only thinks about herself. I’m not your accessory, and I’m not your emotional support animal, and I’m definitely not your showpiece. I’m your daughter . And you hurt me, Mom. You hurt me. Not the other way around.”

My mother’s face darkens.

“When you and Michael—”

“Oh.” She waves a dismissive hand. “Don’t bring him into this, Daisy.”

I throw my arms out. “How can I not? How can I not mention the fact that your relationship ended my relationship? How can I not mention the fact that while you enjoyed your engagement, I was picking up the pieces of my life, as was Rob, as was Michael’s ex-wife? I don’t understand you, Mom. I don’t understand how you don’t see anyone but yourself!”

“You told me,” she says, pointing a trembling finger at me, “that you were okay. You told me that you and Rob had been having problems. You told me you weren’t even sure you should have been engaged to begin with!”

It’s true. I did say all of those things. After Rob and I ended, I questioned the relationship heavily. We could have been happy together. But there were already cracks, and what our parents did deepened those cracks until the whole thing shattered. But that is so, so not the point.

“You’re right,” I say, “I did tell you all those things. But I shouldn’t have. I should never have given you an excuse for what you did. And yes, our relationship wasn’t perfect. But it was our relationship to figure out. The position you two, our own parents, put us in was completely unfair. And then you both expected us to just… be okay with it? To celebrate with you? You are so lucky that Rob and I were even here this weekend.”

I never should have suggested to my mom that the fact that there were problems—private problems that we maybe could have worked through, or maybe we couldn’t—made what she did okay. I never should have let her off the hook. But that’s what I’ve always done. I apologize for her actions. Or I find excuses for them to make myself okay with how she behaves. What Rob said last night was true. I’ve been enabling her, and it’s time for it to stop.

“Mom, I don’t care that you feel embarrassed right now, because what you did to me is so many times worse that there isn’t even a number large enough to describe it. It… it was…” I stutter, flustered and angry, as I search for words to express a quantity large enough, but find that none exists. “It was infinity times worse,” I spit at her, even as I choke back tears, swallowing a lump the size of a baseball that has lodged itself in my throat. “Infinity!” I say again, for good measure.

As I’ve ranted, my mother has shrunk. Back into a girl. Back into the version of herself that comes to me when she’s feeling lonely and I’m the only one who can save her. The only one who can tell her she isn’t alone or abandoned.

Once, when I was in college, she called me in the middle of the night on a Friday in tears, because she believed no one in the world loved her, and even though I had an important exam to study for, I caught a flight back east at six o’clock that morning and spent the weekend consoling her. Reminding her that I would always love her.

That remains true. I do love her. I always will. But I can’t live my life for her anymore. I can’t continue to bear the weight of her pain or make excuse after excuse on her behalf when she hurts me.

“Daisy,” she pleads as I begin to turn away from her. “Oh, Daisy, I’m sorry. Forget the whole thing. Let’s just be friends again.”

But I can’t forget. It’s all too real. Too visceral. I want her to be happy, but it can’t be at my expense. Not anymore. I look at her as tears course down my cheeks.

“I’m not your friend, Mom. I’m your daughter.”

“Daisy, it’s my wedding weekend,” she implores.

I gesture in the direction of the hotel restaurant. “Go and have your wedding brunch. Enjoy it. But I’m finished. I’m done.”

I turn away from her a final time, and walk across the lobby to the elevators, and Charlie follows, at my side as he always is. We don’t speak the whole way back to our rooms. In the elevator, I slump against the wall with exhaustion as the adrenaline in my blood ebbs. Charlie says nothing. He doesn’t touch me, as if he knows I’m already on sensory overload and it would be too much. When we reach our doors, we stop. “Do you want to come in? Do you want to talk?”

I sniff and wipe a hand across my nose. I want to curl up and sleep for a thousand years. I want my own pillow in my own bed. I want to forget the generous feelings from yesterday, when I was so awash in happy hormones that an earthquake would have felt like a carnival ride.

“I want to come in, but I don’t know if I want to talk,” I say.

He nods. “Okay.”

Charlie moves me about like a marionette. He sets me on the edge of the bed and slips my shoes off my feet. He pulls back the duvet, and I climb in, pressing my face into the cool pillow and pulling my knees up to my chest, just like I did in that same little library room a few nights ago, and he tucks me into the blankets, pulling them up to my chin and pressing the edges in around my feet. I laugh-sob as he does this. A little flicker of light in the darkness.

“I’m glad I can at least make you laugh a little bit, even though you’re hurting.”

“You can always make me laugh, Charlie.”

He removes his own shoes, and slides into the bed behind me, wrapping his arms around my body and holding me against him. His heart thumps against my back in a steady, reassuring rhythm. I’m shaken by what just happened. I shouldn’t have let my guard down with her. I should have expected something like this. The warmth that I felt towards her yesterday is draining away, leaving me feeling like a discarded doll, battered and worn, forgotten in the bottom of a child’s toy chest.

Charlie’s breath skates across the back of my neck, warm and soothing. He rubs a hand up and down the side of my arm, reminding me that he’s here. He’s got me. He always seems to. He keeps picking me up, and encouraging me, and urging me to believe in myself. To be okay with being myself. When he stepped in between my mother and me, there was something so protective about him. Like he couldn’t stand to see her go after me. I love him for that right now.

That thought warms me, and with the steady thump of Charlie’s heart at my back, his breath gently tickling me as it moves about the hair at my nape, his arm firmly settled around me now, holding me close to his heat, I fall asleep.