18. Traitor
traitor
NICOLAI
“John! I say, John! Can we speak for a moment?”
I ran after John Borbon, the man of the hour and groom in a month or so, as he glad-handed through the crowd. Everyone joked with him, and he joked back, as I could see from the too-wide grin on his face.
God, I hoped he wasn’t knackered already. The evening was young, but that meant nothing.
My school friend Nassim was blocking my way, arms spread. His shout of “Nico!” with a much thicker Lebanese accent than his usual was jubilant and drew laughs from his buddies.
“Fuck you, too!” I yelled back, grinning as I shook his hand all the way up his arm and promising to catch up with him later, and ran on.
My shortened name, Nico, sounded remarkably like how one said “Fuck him” in Lebanese and most Arabic languages.
I ran with a linguistically diverse group of friends in high school.
Many international boarding schools have instituted “language caps” to enroll native speakers from a wide pool of languages.
Thus, I absolutely was informed about such an important translation of my name, often, and with great enthusiasm.
Luckily, after Nassim and my other friends had taken the piss out of me for it, I’d thought it was pretty damn funny that I could curse with my own name and somehow not get a demerit for it.
I finally caught John Borbon’s arm and dragged him around to face me. “John!”
“What do you need? This is my bachelor party. You aren’t going to tell me to run for the hills, too, are you?”
“Anna is far too good for you. Lock her down before she wises up.”
That was the truth. I dared not tell him what I really thought, though.
“I always knew I could count on you for moral support and personal insults. Now, what were you going to tell me? Are we going out after this dreadful cotillion for hookers and blow?”
I’d thought Anna’d had more than a light hand in the week’s “bachelor party” events. “That would be your friends from Southwestern State, not us. Don’t look for me for the next few days. We should be back before the final event next Friday, though.”
He gazed over the crowd, sipping his highball. “Traitor. Cocksplat. Why are you leaving me to face this gantlet alone?”
I leaned in, confiding my dirty little secret to John.
“I’m taking Lexi back to Verona to reenact our meeting.
It’s our honeymoon after our elopement. This time while we’re there, we’ll be married so she won’t demurely hold out on me, and I’ll fuck her on every horizontal and some of the vertical surfaces in Italy. ”
Was it a bit crass? Quite. And yet I felt sure it would convince John of the importance of our immediate departure for Italy.
And perhaps that entire conversation was a Freudian slip.
“Nice. Going to rock one of those gondolas until it tips over and throws you in the sea, eh?” he asked.
“Verona, not Venice, but I’ll take it under advisement. I could rent out the city of Venice for my honeymoon.”
“Oh, God. Don’t do that. The Venetians nearly had a revolution when Bezos tried to rent Venice. We wouldn’t want the mob to rise. Not again, in both our cases, anyway.”
“Indeed. What a terrible future that would be.” I think I was lying.
It felt like I was lying. “We’re going to start in Verona, at least. We’ll be at Juliet’s House at dawn to do, ‘What light through yonder window breaks,’ and then I’ll climb up the wall to the balcony and ravish her on that movie set bed they have in Juliet’s supposed bedroom. ”
“I can’t decide if that’s suspiciously romantic or absolutely depraved. Will the docents be watching?”
“I’ve already sent an email. I’m paying them all off to leave us alone.”
“Romantic, then. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Perhaps you have been possessed by the pod people, as I suspected. I might have thought you would produce such an extravaganza to get some innocent young maiden on her back, but not your own wife. This seems a bit much.”
“It will definitely be a bit much.”
“Well, as long as you’re going to do something thoroughly debauched. That bride of yours does seem excessively innocent. I swear to God, I can smell the lingering aftereffects of virginity on her. Made me want to have a go at her.”
My heartbeat pounded in my ears like my head was inside a bass drum, and the entire ballroom bulged with each beat.
I took a deep breath, calming myself, keeping it British, maintaining my dignity, and I did not grab one of my oldest friends and most decent cousins and slam him through the wall.