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“Yeah. And her friend, Pat,” he says. He’s reached up and is undoing his tie. His lovely yellow silk tie, the one that practically caused my heart to stop. “Sorry,” he says when he notices the direction of my gaze. “But this thing is driving me insane. I have to go change into real clothes. Do you mind?”
I shake my head. “Go ahead,” I say. Then, as he disappears down the hall, I call after him, because I can’t stand not knowing more, “You had lunch with your ex-girlfriend and her new girlfriend?”
“Yeah.” Chaz’s muffled voice floats toward me from his bedroom. “Only Pat’s not really Shari’s new girlfriend, is she? They’ve been together, what, like half a year now. Or more, actually.”
I am having trouble absorbing all of this. I dump some ice into my wine and stare at a pile of student papers sitting on the coffee table in front of me.
“So you guys are like… friends now?” I ask.
“We were always friends,” Chaz calls back to me. “We just had a period where we didn’t talk as much as we used to. And, of course, we no longer make the beast with two backs.
“So anyway,” Chaz says, coming back into the living room. He’s changed into jeans and a University of Michigan Wolverines T-shirt. One of his many baseball caps is back in its usual place. I know I should feel relieved that he’s out of his heart-fluttering finery, but strangely, all I feel is confused.
This is mainly because he looks as good to me in the baseball cap as he had earlier in the suit.
“She seems good,” Chaz goes on. “Shari, I mean. And Pat’s nice. For someone who clearly considers me one of the hetero male oppressors.”
“So,” I say, unable to stop myself. I try. I really do try. But before I can clamp my mouth shut, words are pouring out of it—words I’d give anything to stuff back inside it. “I know it’s none of my business, but I was just wondering if you had told Valencia your opinion on the whole marriage thing—”
“Lizzie.”
It’s no good, though. As usual, the words are just streaming out of me, like water from a fountain. And nothing can plug it, not even me.
“Because it really isn’t a good idea to lead her on,” I prattle away. “I’m just warning you for your own good, you know. I imagine a female tenure-track philosophy professor scorned is not a pretty—”
“Lizzie.”
For the first time in my life, something in another human’s voice actually causes my own to dry up. I close my mouth and stare. His eyes, for some reason, seem bluer than normal. His gaze blazes into mine from where he stands, looking at me from behind the pass-through.
“What?” I ask, my throat suddenly going dry. I realize, from the intensity of his gaze, that we’ve somehow passed from ordinary—or, in my case, anyway, mindless—conversation to something much more serious.
And, incredibly, I feel myself blushing to my hairline, my cheeks flaming hot as the asphalt outside had been before when Chaz had come walking up.
Anything, it seems, might be brought up at such a moment. The fact that for the past six months we’ve barely talked… except politely, and always in the presence of someone else (Luke).
Or the fact that six months ago, we had our tongues down each other’s throats.
Is he going to bring up one of those things? And if so, which one? I’m not sure which I dread him bringing up more—the fact that I’ve been trying so assiduously not to be alone with him so we can’t have a repeat performance of what had happened on New Year’s Eve… or discussing what actually happened on New Year’s Eve…
What if he comes out from behind the pass-through and tries to reenact what happened on New Year’s Eve? Will I try to stop him?
Wait. Of course I will. Won’t I?
Yes! Yes, of course I will! I’m engaged! To his best friend!
Except… his eyes are so blue right now… I feel as if I could go swimming in them…
“I swore I wasn’t going to ask this,” Chaz says.
I gulp. Oh God. Here it is. I try not to remember that loop-de-loop my heart gave when I saw him coming toward me down the street. I swear I don’t even know what that had been about. I am not in love with Chaz. I am not in love with Chaz.
“Are you—”
Then I jump as the buzzer to the front door to Chaz’s building goes off.
My shoulders, which I’d clenched with nervousness, sag. Whatever it was he was going to ask me, he evidently decides to drop the subject, since he says, “Huh, speak of the devil.”
And he goes out into the hallway to buzz Luke in without another word.
I find that I’ve been clutching the sofa cushions. Slowly I release my fingers… as well as the breath I’ve been holding. I’m sweaty, as if I’d just been ru
Not that I’ve ever actually run a mile. But as if I have.
What’s going on? Why am I such a bundle of nerves? This is di
And when is this evening going to end, so I can go home and kill myself?
Weddings farther west in postcolonial America were short on ceremony and heavy on the partying. It was around this time that the shivaree, or charivari, became popular, a tradition based on an old French custom that included the wedding guests gathering beneath the bride and groom’s bedroom window on the first night of their honeymoon and banging on pots and singing drunkenly, allegedly to drive away evil spirits… but mainly with the intention of forcing the groom to throw money down to them in order to make them go away. Occasionally the festivities would reach such a fevered pitch the groom would be pulled out the window, and the bride would be forced to pay a ransom if she actually wanted to enjoy her honeymoon in the company of her new husband.
They didn’t call it the Wild, Wild West for nothing.
Tip to Avoid a Wedding Day Disaster
Do you need a wedding pla
Your wedding pla
LIZZIE NICHOLS DESIGNS™
• Chapter 10 •
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
Germaine Greer (b.1939–), Australian-born feminist writer
I’m having a hard time picturing The Office’s Jim Halpert dining at the Spotted Pig, which he allegedly did once on a date with Karen. I know it’s just a TV show and fictional and all, but this place is super-trendy, and part of what makes that show so endearing is that everyone on it is so tragically unhip.
But there are people here with the kind of glasses they wear only in Scandinavian countries and tattoos all up and down their arms and I heard a guy at the bar telling another guy that he just got late admission to Harvard Law School, and saw a girl lifting up her skirt to show her friends her new thong. Plus everybody standing outside smoking in their camouflage cargo pants with their carefully messed up—but really loaded down with product—hair is also checking their e-mail on their BlackBerries.
“Why are we here again?” Chaz keeps asking. We got a table only because someone Luke knows from one of his classes—a girl, Sophie—knows the guy who is seating people tonight.