Текст книги "Luckiest Girl Alive"

Автор книги: Jessica Knoll

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“A little.” I took the reach out of my voice like a sick person would, so that he saw only my lips moving around the words.

“Come on, TifAni.” Mr. Larson’s voice was so chastising, so typically adult, that my body tightened in teenage outrage: How dare he turn on me like that? “You know you can’t skip out on practice. What happened?”

I knew if I lied and told him I’d gotten my period that he’d leave me alone, but the idea of talking about my period with Mr. Larson made me want to throw up. “I wasn’t feeling well. But it passed. I swear.”

“Well then.” Mr. Larson smiled, and not sincerely. “I’m happy for your miraculous recovery.”

“Finny!” The voice behind me turned the night on its side. Hilary’s skirt was so short that I could see a flash of cherry red underwear. Hilary dressed the way I was trying to train myself not to dress, but because she did it as a form of rebellion, rather than out of habit, it worked for her rather than against.

“Come on.” She curled a hot pink fingertip at me.

“If you girls leave school property I have to alert your parents.” Mr. Larson’s voice was closer now, and I turned back to see him just one step below me.

“Mr. Larson.” I bulged my eyes at him. “Please. Come on.”

For a little bit there was just a beat of some horrible song, and then Mr. Larson sighed and said he never saw me.

A navy Navigator idled by the curb. The door swung open to reveal three rows of Hairy Legs, Dean and Peyton included, Olivia perched gleefully on Liam’s lap. Jealousy corkscrewed in my chest. It’s just because it’s a full car.

Hilary settled in and smacked her hands on her thighs. “Sit on my lap,” she sing-sang. We could have fit if we just scrunched up next to each other but as I folded myself in the L shape of her body, I smelled the gin, and understood her affection.

I addressed the group. “Where are we going?”

“The Spot.” The driver met my eyes in the rearview mirror. Dave was a senior with arms so thin and devoid of body hair this rabid Italian girl envied him. They called Dave the Hammer behind his back, he was such a tool, but cars are currency in high school, and he had one.

The Spot was nothing but a lone patch of land, fenced in by resting dogwoods, their fleeting bloom still three quarters of a year away, and voluminous, untamed maples clustered close enough together to block the road in the front and the Bryn Mawr College dorms in the back. Bradley kids had claimed the property years ago as a place to drink Natty Ice and give the occasional blow job.

It would have been faster to walk. Cut through the brush behind the squash courts, cross the sleepy, one-way street, and we would have been there in five minutes. But Dave circled the perimeter of the Bradley campus, found a spot to park on an active street several hundred feet from the rough opening in the forest. We filed out of the car, clumsily, giggling, and gathered by the curb. Dean took the lead, helping me navigate the path even though it was clear and well-worn. The trail ended at the base of a miniature vista, and in the far corner, I made out a sawed-off stump. I wove toward it, patting my hand on the surface, making sure it was dry before I sat.

Dean reached into his pocket and held out a beer. “I can’t,” I said.

It was too dark to make out Dean’s face, but his form loomed, challenging. “You can’t?”

“My mom’s picking me up in an hour,” I explained. “She’ll smell it.”

“Lame.” Dean snapped the can open for himself and sat next to me. “My parents are away next weekend. I’m having a few people over.”

The prong of a car’s headlights illuminated our pen, just long enough for Dean to see me smile. “Cool.”

“Don’t tell the HOs,” he warned.

I wanted to ask why, but Peyton sauntered over. “Dude, you know you’re like sitting in the same place that Finnerman blew that little faggot.”

Dean released a wet burp. “Fuck off.”

“I’m serious. Olivia saw them here.” Peyton redirected his voice. “Liv, didn’t you see Arthur giving Ben Hunter a blow job right here?”

Her words carried over in the dark. “It was nasty!”

I traced my finger over the smooth wood surface, considering how sharp the chain saw must have been for the amputation to be this clean. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to draw attention to my connection with Arthur if he was more marginalized than I thought. This was a serious accusation. “Who’s Ben Hunter?” I asked, trying to stall while I worked out this new piece of information.

Dean and Peyton laughed at each other, and Dean slung his arm around my shoulder. “Some little faggot who used to go here. Slit his little fairy wrists.”

Peyton leaned forward. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, and his face was even more striking up close. “Sadly, he did not succeed in killing himself.”

“Sadly.” Dean shoved Peyton with one hand. He stumbled, dropping his beer. The can rolled, hissing, on its side. Peyton muttered a curse and chased after it.

“What happened to him?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound as stricken as I was.

“Aw, Finny.” Dean gave me a shake, harder than I was prepared for, and I bit down on my tongue. “You feel bad for him?”

I swallowed, tasted the tin of my blood. “No. I don’t even know him.”

“Well, I’m sure his boyfriend is devastated.” Dean sucked on his beer. “Watch out for that guy. Arthur. He’s a fucked-up kid.” His fingers dangled over my shoulder, absentmindedly brushed my nipple. “Don’t forget Friday”—our secret made his voice low and private—“and don’t tell Hilary and Olivia.”

I was stupid enough to do as he said.

The cabdriver who drove me to Dean’s party, unlike the ones who would later whip me up and down the West Side Highway on mornings I was late for work and nights I stayed past 8:00 so I could expense the ride, was a patient man. He watched in silent amusement as I piled a ten, nine ones, eleven quarters, six dimes, and one nickel into his palm. $22.40. That’s how much it cost to chauffeur me from school to Dean’s house in Ardmore. That’s how much I paid to lose my dignity.

The sun was slinking behind the trees when I climbed out of the cab, my sports bag pulling one shoulder low. I was still wearing my sweaty running clothes, but Dean said I could shower at his house. I was terrified someone would burst in and discover the secret of what my body actually looked like, so once Dean led me inside and showed me the guest bedroom, the one with its own bathroom, I was in and out in record time.

I ran a brush through my new blond hair and aimed a blow-dryer at it for a few minutes. I was years away from understanding how to “do” my hair, which was thick and wavy but would have answered obediently to a round brush and a straightener, had I known those were tools I needed to have. Fortunately, the look of the early millennium was a messy half loop high on the head, so I threw my hair into a damp knot and patted my chin and nose with Clinique concealer. Some mascara and I was ready. I’d begged Mom for money to buy new underwear specifically for this occasion, taking scissors to the pairs I owned and telling her that running was causing them to unravel at the seams. In the lingerie department in Nordstrom I purchased the sexiest thing I saw: three pairs of silk, leopard print bikini briefs. When I got home and tried them on I discovered the waistband came all the way up above my belly button—it was pre-Spanx control top, really—but I just shrugged and rolled them down to my hips, figuring the material and the print were all that mattered. Nothing sadder than the adolescent rite of passage to have sex before understanding what sexy is.

“Hey-o!” Dean gave me a high five as I entered the kitchen. He was crowded around the granite island with Peyton and a few other guys, all soccer players, dinging quarters into cups of beer. I was the only girl in the room.

“Finny, make a cameo for me.” Dean kissed the quarter. “You’re my good luck charm.”

Peyton whispered something to his partner and they laughed. I knew it was about me. Probably something rude and sexual, and I burned with pride.

I had no technique, just the momentum of the moment, and I angled the quarter, the edge closest to me facing down, slamming it against the sticky marble of the countertop. It bounced high, spun in a dizzy blur, and thunked into a glass, the beer erupting into angry bubbles.

A roar from the crowd and Dean slapped my hand again, this time clamping his meaty fingers around mine when our palms met, pulling me toward him and hugging me so hard I could smell the spicy deodorant he’d generously applied in lieu of taking a shower after soccer practice.

“Fucking awesome,” Dean bellowed at the opposing team.

Peyton cast those blue eyes on me, approval warming me from the inside out. “That was pretty sweet, Tif.”

“Thanks.” My smile reached my ears. Dean handed me a beer, and I took a pull, relished the sourness fizzing in my empty stomach. I wasn’t in the habit of skipping meals yet, but that night I was so giddy, so hot to the touch with excitement, that it didn’t take any effort to forgo dinner.

I felt two hands on my shoulders, squeezing the muscles just a beat too long. Liam smiled and wrapped his arm around my shoulder. I was barefoot, and I fit perfectly into his armpit, which thank God smelled nothing like Dean’s. “Look at what a midget you are,” he said.

“I am not!” I protested giddily.

Liam took a sip of his beer and fixated on a spot above my head, contemplating something. He looked back down at me. “There’s a table on the porch that would be perfect for beer pong.”

“I’m really good at beer pong,” I said, putting more of my weight on him. The side of his body was hard with lean teenage boy muscle.

Liam took another sip, a long one this time that emptied out the contents of his beer. He made an ahhh sound when he brought the can away from his lips. “No girl is good at beer pong,” he declared. He walked me to the sliding glass door. The deck was damp and slimy beneath my naked feet, but I didn’t want to go back in the house and find a pair of shoes, risk Liam asking someone else to be his partner in my momentary absence.

Dean and a few others trailed us outside. Teams and rules were set. Liam and me against Dean and Peyton. Hoes could blow and a bounce knocked out two cups. Five minutes in, Liam and I were winning.

It didn’t take long for Dean and Peyton to catch up to us. I lost a little bit more of my touch every time it was my turn to raise the red Solo cup to my lips. When Peyton and Dean beat us, I thought that was it and we could just walk away from the table, but Liam said that where he came from, it was good sportsmanship to drink the last cup. It was my turn and I obediently swallowed the remaining contents in small, sickening waves.

“Holy shit!” Dean clapped his hands. The stern October air caught a few words before releasing them into the night—“Never seen a girl take it down like that”—their effect as good as an A in English class, as the pride I felt years later when I landed a desk in that glossy honeycomb tower. Who are the pussy girls they’re hanging out with? I smiled smugly, knowing it was Hilary and Olivia. I accepted the cocoon of Liam’s odorless armpit again, leaning into him so heavily he stumbled.

“Easy there,” he said, but he laughed.

Then we were inside, sitting cross-legged around the living room table, playing quarters again. Only this time whiskey scorched my throat when it was my turn to drink. Dean said something so funny I fell over from laughing. Liam—no, wait—Peyton was next to me and he propped me back up, telling me maybe I should sit this next round out. I looked past him, searching for Liam. I wanted Liam.

“She’s fine.” Dean tipped the bottle over the glasses again.

Someone called Peyton a pussy, and he said, “Look at her. I’m not taking advantage of her like that.”

That must have been when I fell asleep. Because the next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor of the guest bedroom, my gym bag by my side. I groaned and lifted my head and so did the boy between my legs. Peyton. He stroked my thigh and went back to doing whatever he was doing that he thought was making me feel good. I couldn’t feel a thing.

There was activity by the door, someone poking his head in and urging Peyton to do something, go somewhere. I was too tired to cover myself.

“I’m coming,” Peyton snapped. A laugh and then the door closed.

“I have to go.” I looked at his beautiful face in the valley of my legs, meticulously shaved on the off chance something like this would have happened with Liam. “Let’s hang out for real, okay?”

I fell asleep.

“Ow, ow,” I was moaning this before I opened my eyes, before I could locate the source of the pain. Liam. There he was. And there was his face above mine, also twisted in pain, his torso immobile but his hips pressed close to mine, pressing closer still in an agonizing rhythm.

I was hunched over the toilet in the guest bathroom, the tiles cool beneath my knees. Was I throwing up blood? Why was there blood in the toilet?

A few months after this, when I stopped lying to myself long enough to admit that I’d become the cautionary tale mothers told their daughters, I pretended like I was asleep when the train lurched to a stop at the Bryn Mawr train station. I rode the R5 the rest of the way into Philadelphia and called the school when I arrived. “Oh my God! I fell asleep on the train and ended up in the city.”

“Oh dear,” croaked Mrs. Dern, Headmaster Mah’s longtime assistant and an exceedingly committed smoker. “Are you all right?”

“I am, but I’ll probably miss first two periods,” I said.

Mrs. Dern made the mistake of sounding concerned rather than suspicious, so instead of boarding the first R5 winding back through the Main Line, I wandered around Thirtieth Street Station. I found a Chinese food buffet, and even though it was not even ten in the morning, the undisturbed rows of glistening meat and vegetables were too beautiful to resist. I made a plate, and with the first plastic forkful I shoved into my mouth, I bit into some mysterious pocket that exploded, a burst of salty, gritty chemicals that made me gag.

That’s what I tasted in my third and final round that night. A foul, bitter blob on my tongue deposited in tandem with a boy’s euphoric groan.

When I woke up it was morning and I was in a bed and in a room I didn’t recognize, the sun unraveling like flight lines, welcoming and warm, as initially oblivious to the night’s tragedy as I was.

There was movement behind me and before I turned over to see who it was, I accepted that I wanted it to be Liam so badly that it couldn’t be. But of all people, it had to be Dean. He was shirtless, his lean torso exposed, and, for a moment, I thought I would throw up on it.

He groaned and rubbed his face. “How you feeling, Finny?” He propped himself up on his elbows and looked down at me, curiously. “Because I feel like shit.”

I realized I was still wearing my Victoria’s Secret tank top, but only that. I sat up, clutching the duvet cover to my chest, looking around the room. “Um, do you know where my pants are?”

Dean laughed, like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “No one does! You were walking around without them for half the night.”

The way Dean told it, this was just another innocent anecdote from our wild party, the same way some senior announced he was going home and everyone found him passed out in his car in the driveway the next morning, never even having fit the key into the ignition. Or the way another guy from the soccer team had forgotten to put any turkey on the sandwiches all the guys made late night, so he ended up eating a mayonnaise sandwich. It was a story so funny it deserved to be told again and again: TifAni was so hammered she walked around without pants for a few hours!

Life had shifted drastically while I slept, but Dean was looking at me like we were comrades in this post-party apocalypse, and it was so impossibly tempting to accept that reality over the other one that I did with a weak laugh.

Dean gave me a towel and dispatched me to the guest room. There, on the floor by the dresser, were my enormous panties crumpled into a little leopard ball. I shoved them in my gym bag, ignoring the blood.

CHAPTER 5

Oh come on. No one?” The editor in chief of The Women’s Magazine spun around her office like a Phillip Lim–outfitted lazy Susan, presenting a tray of macaroons to a circle of painstakingly malnourished editors in an unsuccessful bid to get one of us to eat.

“I’m off sugar,” I said, defensively.

Penelope “LoLo” Vincent dropped the tray on her desk and plopped into her chair. She waved her hand at me, her nails painted the color of gangrene. “Of course. You’re getting married.”

“Oh, fine. I’ll bite the bullet!” Arielle Ferguson was our associate editor, very sweet and very clueless in her size eight dress. She lurched forward and selected a cookie, so pink it concerned me, between her fingers. Ugh, Arielle, I wanted to telecommunicate to her, LoLo only wants the anorexic editors to eat.

LoLo watched Arielle, aghast, as her jaw worked through the two hundred empty calories. Everyone held their breath, frozen in secondhand fear for her. Arielle brightened when she swallowed. “So good!”

“Right.” LoLo lingered on the word, her tongue snapping on the t, a deranged mother hen cluck. “So! What does everyone have for me?” She dug the heel of her YSL Tribute sandal into the floor and spun half an inch in her chair, her eyes holding Eleanor in their laser gaze. “Tuckerman, go.”

With a flick of her wrist, Eleanor transferred a pile of blonde hair from the front of her shoulder to the back. “So I was talking to Ani the other day and she mentioned how her friend used to work in finance, and how sexual harassment is still shockingly commonplace in that industry.” She nodded at me. “Right, Ani?” I was slow to smile at her. Only when I did, did Eleanor continue. “So Ani and I were talking, you know, it’s like we’ve come so far in terms of recognizing that sexual harassment is a problem and educating people about it. Which is great. But it’s like we’ve gotten really black and white and earnest about issues like this at the same time that raunchy humor—particularly from women—dominates pop culture. It’s bled over to how women speak and joke around, and that blurs the line in terms of what women are comfortable with, so how do you know what is unacceptable, or even illegal behavior in your professional life? I’d love to do a piece that examines what is sexual harassment in 2014 when nothing is sacred anyway.”

“Fascinating.” LoLo yawned. “What’s the hed?”

“Well, um, I thought, ‘What Is Sexual Harassment in 2014?’”

“No.” LoLo examined a chip in her nail.

“The Funny Thing About Sexual Harassment.”

LoLo spun in my direction with a gay little laugh. “Clever, Ani.”

I glanced at the notepad on my lap, bearing the words “THE FUNNY THING ABOUT SEXUAL HARASSMENT” in all caps, skimming all the research I’d collected underneath it. “Also, there’s this great book coming out and we could time it to our story. It’s by these two Harvard sociology professors. Specifically about how pop culture has influenced the workplace much more so than we realize.” The galley was sitting at my desk. I’d requested it from the publicist so I could read it before pitching this very idea to LoLo.

“Excellent.” LoLo nodded. “Be sure to pass that to Eleanor and help her with anything she may need.” The vein in her forehead throbbed like an angry heart over the word “anything.” I always wonder if LoLo knows more than she lets on. That she sees what a talentless hack Eleanor is, what an obvious kiss ass. Eleanor is from some Podunk town in West Virginia. But oh, the places she’s gone since she’s moved to New York. She’s tenacious, I’ll give her that much. We have so much in common that it took me a while to understand why we didn’t get along. Infighting. We both defeated the odds to get to where we are now, and we’re terrified there isn’t room enough for the both of us.

“Now”—LoLo drummed the armrests of her chair—“what have you got for me, Mrs. Harrison?”

Shifting in my seat, I gave her my backup option, the one I wanted to present as a fun little aside, a great cover line, once I’d wowed her with a pitch that actually had some gravitas. Eleanor makes me meet with her before we go into these meetings so we can discuss the issue as a whole, make sure the lineup is just the right amount of smart and skanky. She tends to pluck my sharpest idea and present it as this half-baked nugget I was struggling to make something out of until she swooped in and reshaped the whole thing into ASME-winning material. “The American Council on Exercise recently adjusted the calorie burn for a few activities,” I began, “and sex is one of them. It’s almost double what they assigned it twelve years ago. I thought it would be funny if we had some writer do the Sex Workout or something. She could wear a Jawbone and a heart rate monitor and actually evaluate her efforts in terms of calories burned.”

“Brilliant.” LoLo turned to our managing editor. “Can we bump ‘Dirty Talk’ from October and replace it with ‘The Sex Workout’?” Without waiting for her response, she barked at the digital director, “Let’s get that cover line up online and testing immediately.” She lowered her chin at me. “Well done.”

Eleanor trailed me back to my desk, a contrite little gnat. No, she was too gangly to be a gnat. More like a mosquito who had gotten a taste of my blood and wanted more. “I hope you don’t mind that I brought up your friend’s situation in the meeting. I know that’s a personal thing.”

My desk phone was lit up red with a voice mail. I hiked up my pants before sitting down—I’d been following the Dukan diet for the last seven days, and the waistbands of my skirts and pants were starting to pucker away from my stomach as I sat. It was so soothing that when I couldn’t sleep, the gnawing in my gut and the memories on an insomniac Tour de France, I would grab a pile of pants from my closet and model them for myself in the bathroom mirror, marveling at the way I could pull on size twos without ever unbuttoning them. This small, private victory almost made up for the fact that when I crawled back into bed, Luke flinging his sleep-heavy arm over my size twenty-six waist, I’d have to smell his searing middle-of-the-night breath. Did his breath smell this bad when we were dating? It couldn’t have. I couldn’t have ever been that in love with someone who had breath that bad. Something had happened. His tonsils maybe. I’d mention it to him in the morning. This was fixable. Everything was fixable.

I cooed, “Of course, I don’t, Eleanor.”

Eleanor perched on the edge of my desk. She was wearing a pair of white, wide-legged pants. “Love those trousers,” LoLo had said when she walked into her office for the meeting, and now I have the misfortune of knowing what Eleanor’s face looks like when she squirts. “Maybe she’d want to talk about her experience for the story?”

“She might,” I said. There was my green ballpoint pen, cap off, idling on my desk. I nudged it with my elbow, inch by inch, until the inky head grazed the seam of Eleanor’s pants. I maintained eye contact with her as I dutifully promised I would ask her that very afternoon.

Eleanor rapped her knuckles on my desk, and the corners of her mouth dug into her jowls. Not a smile, a conciliatory smirk. “Maybe we can arrange to get you an additional reporting byline. That would be so great for you.” Additional reporting bylines go to interns. My piece on birth control and blood clots had been nominated for an ASME the year before, and Eleanor would never forgive me for it. She removed her ass from my desk, and I admired my handiwork, the way the oily squiggles took on the appearance of green varicose veins on her outer thigh.

“So great for me,” I agreed, my smile finally genuine, and Eleanor mouthed “Thank you,” and pressed her hands together in prayer, like I was such a dear, before walking away.

I picked up my phone, triumphant, and dialed into my voice mail. After listening to the message from Luke, I hung up and called him back.

“Hey, you.”

I loved the sound of Luke’s voice on the phone. Like he was busy but having fun and stealing away to tell me something in confidence. I’d been the one to push for the engagement—obnoxiously push. The HBO producers had e-mailed me almost a year ago now, asking if I would want to participate in a documentary loosely titled Friends of the Five. I was no friend of the five, but the opportunity to redeem myself, to tell my side of the story—it made my mouth water. But if I was going to do this, I would do it right. There was no way I was mugging for the camera if I hadn’t checked off all the boxes in the hotly contested “having it all” category: cool job, impressive zip code; hungry body, and the kicker—dreamy, loaded fiancé. An engagement to Luke would make my rise unassailable. No one could touch me if I was marrying Luke Harrison the IV. How many times had I fantasized telling my story to the camera, bringing my hand to my face, the emerald that would soon be mine gloating as I wiped away a dainty tear?

Luke and I had been dating for three years before the engagement, I loved him, and it was time. It was time. This was how I put it to Luke, solemnly over dinner one night. “I wanted to wait until next year’s bonus,” he said. But he caved, had Mammy’s ring reset for my tiny finger, and I happily agreed to participate in the documentary. I know I shouldn’t fall into the old trap that I’m not someone, that I haven’t really “made it,” until I have a ring on my finger. Fucking Lean In and all that. I’m supposed to be better than this, a more confident, independent woman than this. But I’m not. Okay? I’m just not.

“What if we do that dinner with my client tonight?” Luke asked. He’d been trying to set this thing up for a week. I still had two more days left on the “attack phase” of Dukan. After that, I would be allowed to eat a few select vegetables. Don’t even think about broccoli, fat ass.

I held the phone tighter. “Can we do it in a few days?”

The only sound was frat-boy hollering from Luke’s floor.

Back when we first started dating, I was terrified for Luke to meet my mother. Her nostrils would twitch—yup, that’s the smell of the real deal—and she would call me Tif, would ask Luke how much money he made, and it would all be over then. Luke would come to his senses, realize I’m the girl you meet in a bar and bang a few times until you fall in love with a natural-ish blonde with an androgynous first name and a modest trust fund. Instead, to my utter amazement, when we returned to his apartment after dinner with Dina and Bobby FaNelli, he bundled me in his arms, rolled me onto the bed, and said in between kisses, “I can’t believe I’m the one who got to save you.” Like I had a slew of blue blood Dumpster divers lined up before me, vying to wife away my garbage scent.

“Never mind,” I said. “I can do it tonight.” Maybe some broccoli would help.

I stopped by the fashion closet before dinner. The outfit I was wearing wasn’t ugly enough. The uglier and trendier the outfit, the stronger I emanate intimidating magazine editor.

“This?” I pulled out a baggy Helmut Lang dress and leather jacket.

“Is it 2009?” Evan snipped. Come on, there has to be a requisite bitchy gay fashion editor.

I grumbled, “You pick something.”

Evan drummed his fingers along the racks of clothing, tapping each hanger like a key on a piano, finally landing on a Missoni striped top and polka-dot shorts. He looked over his bony shoulder and stared crossly at my chest. “Never mind.”

“Oh, fuck you.” I leaned against the accessories table and nodded to a floral print shirtdress, the lower back cut wide open. “That?”

Evan regarded the garment, brought his fingers to his lips, and hmmed. “Derek usually cuts for straighter figures.”

“Derek?”

Evan rolled his eyes. “Lam.”

I rolled my eyes right back at him and snatched the dress off the hanger. “I’m seven pounds down, I think I can handle it.”

The dress pulled slightly across my chest, so Evan unbuttoned it a notch, slipped a long pendant over my head, and studied me. “Not bad. What diet are you doing again?”

“Dukan.”

“Isn’t that what Kate Middleton did?”

I started to apply eyeliner in the mirror. “I chose it because it was the most extreme. It’s not going to work unless it feels like the worst thing in the world.”

“There you are,” Luke greeted me, crossed between relief and irritation. On time is late for Luke, and his militant punctuality annoys me so much it’s something I actively rebel against by running a few minutes behind, always.

I made a big show out of checking the time on my phone. “I thought you said eight?”

“I did.” Luke’s kiss was either oblivious or placating. “You look nice.”

“It’s eight oh four though.”

“They wouldn’t seat us until we’re all here.” Luke pressed the palm of his hand into the naked small of my back and guided me further into the restaurant. That was a chill, right? That was us, still electrified by each other?

“God, I hate that,” I said.

Luke grinned. “I know.”

I had vaguely noticed the couple standing by the hostess station, looking on as though they were waiting to be introduced. The client and his wife, body mean with Equinox muscles, cheery blond hair swept away from her face in a ninety-dollar blow-out. I always eye the wife first; I like to know what I’m up against. She was wearing the typical Kate uniform: white jeans, nude wedges, and a silky, sleeveless top. Hot pink, I’m sure she spent a few minutes debating it—was she tan enough, maybe the navy silky sleeveless top instead, can’t go wrong with navy—and over her shoulder, a cognac Prada the exact same shade as her shoes, the perfect match more age revealing than the skin starting to pucker in her neck. She had at least ten years on me, I determined, relieved. I don’t know how I’m going to live with myself when I turn thirty.

“Whitney.” She gave me her hand, sporting that afternoon’s manicure, and shook so weakly it was like she wanted me to know that being a stay-at-home mom was the most important thing in the world to her.