Chapter 14
fourteen
“DRESS” — TAYLOR SWIFT
Tavey
Sometimes, even cake is not enough.
This is one of those times.
Not that the cake isn’t good.
It’s excellent cake. Dark chocolate with some kind of blackberry filling and dramatic black frosting roses that probably stained half the wedding party’s tongues an alarming color.
Under other circumstances, I would be deeply invested in this cake.
Right now, I am mostly using it as a prop.
A delicious, emotionally supportive prop.
Because if I am holding a cake plate, then I look like a person who is busy doing something normal instead of a person who is actively trying not to implode in the middle of a wedding reception.
Totally different vibe.
Miller is still beside me. Quietly observant in that way that he always is.
Every now and then he says something dry in my ear and I laugh despite myself because he is constitutionally incapable of not being funny at exactly the wrong moment.
He is also, I notice, not touching me.
Not in the way he was before.
No hand at the small of my back. No fingers threading through mine. Just — proximity. Warmth. Presence. Which is fine. Which is normal. Which is absolutely not me cataloging every square inch of space between us and assigning it meaning.
I take another bite of cake.
The thing is — and I am aware this is the kind of thought that only arrives after several themed cocktails — I don’t actually think tonight was ever what I thought it was.
I think I wanted it to be something, and so I decided it was something, and then I showed up in a fantasy costume with dragon clips in my hair and approximately twelve yards of scarf, and I just… assumed.
I assumed he dressed up for me.
I assumed the hand-holding meant something.
I assumed that a man like Miller Evans looked at a woman like me—box hedge, not willow, unpolishable shoes and all— and saw someone worth wanting.
And then Raquel walked in from marketing in her polished existence, with her cake-related restraint and her elegant relationship with gravity, and Devon said wingwoman, and apparently I was wrong about all of it.
I stare at my cake.
My cake stares back.
And then, from somewhere in the back of my slightly alcohol-soaked brain, a thought surfaces.
Clear and sharp and thirteen years old.
I wasn’t going to let anyone make me feel small.
I made that promise.
I have kept that promise.
I have kept it through bad haircuts and worse job interviews and one extremely ill-advised attempt at a juice cleanse. I have kept it through every meeting where someone talked over me, and every date that went nowhere, and every morning I looked in the mirror and decided I was enough anyway.
I have kept it.
And I am not breaking it tonight because of willowy Raquel and her architectural footwear.
Also — and this just occurred to me — didn’t I see on LinkedIn last month that Alexa Maddox works in marketing now?
Of course she does.
Of course the girl who made me feel small at a sleepover grew up to be the template for women like Raquel. The universe has a sense of humor, and it has always, always been at my expense.
Fine.
Fine.
I don’t have to tolerate the universe’s sense of humor anymore than I had to tolerate Alexa’s spite.
I set down my cake plate with perhaps more authority than strictly necessary.
If Miller Evans wants a wingwoman tonight, I am going to be the most spectacular wingwoman in the history of the institution. I am going to be so gloriously, outrageously, unapologetically myself that he is going to have to physically shield Raquel from the blast radius.
Go big or go home.
And there is no going home when you’ve already rented a nearby barndominium.
I grab a fresh drink from a passing tray, turn to the woman sitting on my other side—Geeta’s cousin, I think—and then at Maybe Miranda, and say, “Do you want to dance?”
They look delighted. “Absolutely.”
The DJ, bless him, is playing Icona Pop’s “I Love It” like he knew exactly what this moment required.
I crashed my car into the bridge.
I don’t care.
I love it.
We take the dance floor with the energy of women who have collectively decided that tonight is not the night for self-restraint.
Geeta’s cousin—her name is Priya, I learn, shouted over the bass—turns out to be an excellent dancer.
Maybe Miranda turns out to be Maribella and is an even better co-conspirator.
We are loud. We are enthusiastic. The scarves are a menace and I love them.
At some point, I become aware of Miller watching from the edge of the room.
I tell myself I don’t care.
This is only partially true.
But I keep dancing anyway, because I promised twelve-year-old me, and she has been through enough.
Two songs later. Maybe three. Priya gets stolen away by her husband. Not long after, Maribella’s date steals here for a dance, and I drift back toward our table, flushed and slightly breathless and feeling, despite everything, significantly more like myself.
Miller hands me a glass of water when I slide back into my chair.
No comment. No raised eyebrow. Just water, offered with the quiet matter-of-factness of a man who noticed I’d been dancing and thought I might be thirsty.
I take it without a word.
We sit in companionable near-silence as the reception winds down around us. The candles are burning low. The dance floor is thinning. Someone is definitely asleep at the far end of the head table.
“Did you have fun tonight?” he asks.
I consider this with perhaps more seriousness than the question requires. “Oh, absolutely. Brilliant, amazing fun. Not what I expected to happen, but exactly what I needed.”
He looks at me with that steady, slightly unreadable expression. “What did you expect?”
“Well.” I turn my water glass in my hands. “I’ll tell you what I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect willowy Raquel to show up with her polished shoes and her cake-related restraint.”
There’s a beat.
“Raquel?” he says.
Just the name. Like he had to search for it.
I stare at him. “From marketing. The woman you were talking to for—” I check an imaginary watch. “Approximately one geological era.”
Something shifts in his expression. Not guilt. More like… genuine confusion.
“I was being polite,” he says.
“You seemed very comfortable.”
“She’s a colleague.”
“She’s very beautiful.”
“Sure.” He says it the way someone says the sky is blue—accurate, factual, completely devoid of personal investment. “And?”
I open my mouth.
Close it again.
Because and is actually an excellent question, and I don’t have a clean answer for it.
“Devon said you used to date,” I say finally.
“A long time ago.” He looks at me directly. “She’s seeing someone.”
“And you’re okay with that?” I ask.
“With what?”
“With her dating whoever it is that she’s with now.”
He seems to give the matter some thought before saying, “I probably wouldn’t have introduced them if I wasn’t.”
Oh.
Oh, that is deeply inconvenient for my entire internal narrative.
I take a sip of water. “Well,” I say, with as much dignity as I can assemble, “Devon also called me your wingwoman, so I thought …”
Miller goes very still. “He called you what?”
“His wingwoman,” I say, in a cheerful tone that I’m quite proud of.
“Apparently he thought I came with you tonight so you could chat up Raquel. Which, honestly, is a very reasonable assumption for Devon to make, because why would anyone assume that you—” I gesture vaguely at all of him. “Would be here with me.”
He is quiet for a long moment.
The kind of quiet that has weight to it.
“That’s what you’ve been thinking,” he says. Not a question.
“I mean.” I shrug one shoulder with studied casualness. “It’s not an unreasonable conclusion.”
“It’s completely wrong.”
“Is it?”
He looks at me steadily. “Yeah. It is.”
I want to push further. I want to ask exactly what he means by that, want to nail it down with specifics and evidence and a signed affidavit. But the reception is breaking up around us now, and the moment feels too large and too fragile for a public setting.
So I just nod.
File it away.
Try not to assign too much meaning to it.
The walk back to the barndominiums is warm and quiet and slightly uneven underfoot, which gives me a legitimate excuse to hold on to his arm. The string lights are still on, casting everything in that soft gold that makes even a cluster of repurposed sheds look like something out of a fairy tale.
I’m still working through it all in my head. Raquel. The wingwoman thing. The way he said completely wrong, like it was the most obvious fact in the world.
We reach my door. I fish out the key card from the dragon clutch — which takes longer than it should, because the dragon clutch is adorable but structurally complicated — and turn to face him.
He’s leaning one shoulder against the column that supports the pitched roof of the porch, arms loose at his sides. Watching me with that expression I can never quite read. Steady and warm and entirely focused.
He’s not looking away, like there’s somewhere else he wishes he was. But he’s also not crowding my space the way he was earlier. He’s not close.
“You’re not supposed to be standing there,” I tell him.
One eyebrow lifts. “Where am I supposed to be?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure where you’re supposed to be.” I wave a hand. “I apparently misread the entire assignment.”
“You didn’t misread anything.”
“I thought tonight was—” I stop. Start again. “I thought you and I were—”
“We were,” he says quietly.
Oh.
“Then why,” I say, with the precision of someone who is several drinks in but still making a coherent legal argument, “are you out there?”
“Actually, we’re both still on the porch,” he says with maddening logic.
Instead of throwing my purse at him, I push the door open and step inside, kicking off one shoe, then the other. I reach up to pull a dragon clip from my hair and immediately get it caught in the pins underneath, because of course I do.
Only then does he follow me across the threshold.
“Here—” he starts.
“No.” I bat his hand away without looking at him. “Stop being so nice.”
“You want me to be mean?”
“I want you to stop taking care of me.” I reach for the second dragon hair clip, but come away with only a bobby pin. “Oh, no!”
“What?”
“My dragon is gone.” I immediately regret the despair in my voice. “It must have fallen out on the walk back. Or when I was dancing.”
The thought makes me want to cry, which somehow makes everything worse. I cannot cry over a lost hair clip. Not when there are women in the world with polished shoes who don’t even wear hair clips.
“Do you want me to go look for it?” he offers.
His tone is entirely too … something. Too kind, maybe.
“No.” I want to sound proud and dignified, but I probably don’t. “I want you to stop treating me like I’m twelve. That’s not how you’re supposed to see me.”
“Trust me,” he says, with a quiet certainty that does something irreversible to my cardiovascular system, “I don’t see you as twelve.”
“But here you are.” I gesture at him, at the room, at the general situation. “Helping me get ready for bed so you can tuck me in. Which is very kind. Very Miller. And I don’t even—” I stop.
The words come out before I can catch them.
“I don’t even have my Cinnamoroll pajamas anymore.”
Silence.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
And then, because I have apparently decided that tonight is the night I say every true thing I’ve ever kept to myself, I set down the dragon clutch and say, plainly, without bravado and without apology:
“I don’t want to be your wingwoman. I wanted to be your date. I only bought this dress so you could take it off. ”
The room goes very quiet.
His expression doesn’t change.
But his eyes do.
Something shifts in them—deep and immediate and entirely certain—and for one perfect, terrible second, I think maybe he will take it off.