Authors: Chris Van Hakes
Ursula’s scratchy lace gown rubbed against my bare shoulders as she gave me another hug. “You promise you’re not going to California again, even if you get that job?” I wiped away a stray tear from her cheek before it ruined her foundation again.
“Ursula, it’s your wedding day. We need to talk about
weddingy stuff, like veils and happily ever afters and Michael and wedding night lingerie. I hope you’re not wearing a thong. Thongs are ridiculous. How is that sexy? This underwear is just like toilet paper stuck in my bum! Hot!”
She shook her head. “No. I refuse to talk with you about silly things. I haven’t seen you in days and you scared the bejesus out of me when you went on that i
nterview. We’re talking about this before I walk down that aisle.”
Emily, sitting on the upholstered chair in the corner, filed her nails and said, “She’s the bride. She gets anything she wants.”
“But aren’t you nervous about being married? To one guy, forever?”
“Why would I be worried about Michael?” Ursula said, flabbergasted. “He loves me uncond
itionally, and now I’m getting a religious and legally binding document that says that we have to stick together no matter what. But you? You I don’t have any such promise from.”
“Is your garter on?” I said, desperate to escape talking about lea
ving.
“Who gives a flip about a garter?” Ursula said. “This is going to be your wedding present to me.”
“Too late. I already got you cloth napkins.”
“No. No, Laney. You are not going to leave us again. Promise it, and mean it.”
“I’m not leaving you! You’re my best friends. We’ll always be friends.”
“You.
Are. Not. Leaving.” She put her hands on her hips and stood firm.
I blew my bangs out of my eyes and said, “Why not? Are you suddenly the person who makes all my life dec
isions for me?”
She sat down hard then, and shook her head helples
sly, and then started to cry. “No, Laney. I’m not. But you’re—you’re my family. You and Emily, and I need my family.”
“Your mom and your brother are out there.
Michael, too.
They’re
your family,” I said, my eyes watering despite my words of aloofness.
“No, I’m saying it wrong then,” Ursula said, tapping a heel against the hardwood. “They’re my fam
ily. But you? You and Emily are my soul mates.
“People talk about soul mates as one perfect lover who completes you forever, but what they forget is that love isn’t just romantic love. There’s friendship, and parenthood, and everything else. Love isn’t one dime
nsional. Just because we’re not getting married doesn’t mean you’re not my soul mate. It doesn’t work that way. A soul mate is someone who has a part of your soul, outside of your own body. That’s you.
“When you left the first time, I didn’t know what the feeling was, but when you left for this inte
rview, and I didn’t know if you were coming back? You broke my heart, Laney.” She was crying now, her face smeared with mascara, and my vision was blurring, too. “You broke my heart because you take a part of it with you, and you don’t even know you have it.
“A part of me is lost without you. So, now I know, and I know that no matter how far away you go, we’re here, we’ve got a part of you.” Ursula’s face was
streaked, snot running down it, and Emily had gotten up from the chair, and was standing in a huddle with me and Ursula, all of us a wet, drippy mess.
“She’s right,” Emily said with a loud sniffle. “You have us, fore
ver. Please don’t leave again, beautiful girl.” She smoothed my bangs back from my forehead and then said, “Now, let’s get married.”
“Wait. You haven’t promised yet, Laney.” Ursula was wiping away the mascara with her finge
rtips.
I wavered and Emily squeezed my arm. “Laney, you can ignore Oliver. You can be a coward with him—”
“Hey—”
“You are. You’re being a coward. You’re hiding and running away,” she said, and I reluctantly no
dded. “But Ursula’s right. You need to give her an answer. Will you stay?”
“I will,” I said finally.
“You will?” Ursula choked out.
“I promise,” I said, crying. “I do.”
“Good. I do, too,” Ursula said, and then, “
Now
let’s get married.”
“What about your makeup? Don’t you want to fix it?” I asked.
Ursula waved a hand and said, “You’ll love me no matter how I look, right? And so will Michael?”
“Yep,” Emily and I said, and then she said, “Then fuck it. I want to move on to the
partying as fast as possible.”
I stood across from Delaney during the whole ceremony, willing her to look my way, but she didn’t do it even once. I walked over to the reception table where she was manically giggling with Emily and Ursula, wondering if I’d gotten it wrong and the three of them hadn’t just gotten married. They kept hugging each other and laughing. “Hey,” I said, and lifted a champagne flute in the general direction of Delaney. “We were going to talk.”
Emily smiled and patted me on the back, and then so did Ursula. “You talk,” Emily said, and they wandered to the dance floor to join
drunk Michael, lip syncing to Tina Turner with his beer bottle as the microphone.
“Oliver, before you say anything,” Delaney started, “I need to tell you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you.”
“Oh?” I put my glass down on the table. “Go ahead.”
“I ran away from you when I saw Mia standing in front of your door. I knew she was exactly what you needed, and so I ran away.”
“That’s not true,” I said, but Delaney shook her head and said, “Let me finish.”
“I know you’ve got a hero complex. You need to fix everyone, and I thought, for a while, that you fixed me. You really saw me. You called me beautiful. You made me feel whole. You wanted me to show off the parts of me that made me feel vulnerable. I fell co
mpletely and totally in love with you.
“But don’t worry,” she said, putting her hand over my shaking one on the tabletop. “I understand now. I didn’t even understand what it meant to really love someone. I kept running away from the hard parts, so I never got the chance to figure it out, but Ursula explained it to me. When you really love someone, it’s not just about feeling fixed or whole. It’s about sta
ying even when you don’t feel fixed or whole, when things are ugly and sad and miserable and broken and lost. I thought love was this beautiful thing I couldn’t have, and didn’t have, but love isn’t like that. It’s ugly and it’s common and it’s every day. It’s not a rare bird of paradise. It’s like a pigeon, so common we don’t even pay attention to the fact that it’s really a dove with iridescent rainbow feathers.
“What I’m trying to tell you is that I thought I was in love with you, and so I ran away. But I realized som
ething.”
“Oh?” I said, smiling at her.
Delaney loved me.
“I’m not in love with you,” she said. “I’m not ru
nning away.”
“What?” I blinked rapidly, and then she removed her hand from mine and gave me a patronizing smile.
“You’re not in love with me, so you’re not running away.”
“Those are two separate and independent clauses. I’m not in love with you. I’m not running away,” she said.
I nodded, feeling cold and tired all over. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
“And I’m going to move back into my apar
tment,” she said. “And I want us to start over. As friends. Real friends, like me and Ursula and Emily are. I took your friendship for granted because I wanted more from you, but now I realize my mistake.”
I swallowed and looked into her chocolate brown eyes. “You want to be my friend.”
“I want to be your friend. Your very good friend, Oliver.”
“Then we’re friends,” I said as the tiredness wrapped itself around me, pulling me under.
I was carrying my bike up from the basement when it was suddenly lifted off my shoulder. I turned around to see Oliver smiling at me, hauling it to street level. “Thanks,” I said.
It had been three weeks since Ursula and Michael’s wedding, three weeks since my friend decree, and I’d spent part of almost every day with Oliver. We’d gone out for burgers and Dairy Queen, we’d watched two NOVAs, he’d sat at my kitchen counter eating pie, and I’d subjec
ted him to three in-depth analyses of the unrealistic
Law & Order
plots, and not once had he seemed nervous, uncomfortable, or the least bit romantically interested in me.
It sucked.
“You off on another ride?” Oliver said as he adjusted the chain on my bike.
“Just off to the grocery store.” I pointed to my bac
kpack. “I’m out of butter, and I need to make an emergency pie.”
“Emergency pie?”
“It’s a hormonal thing.”
“Ah,” he said, thankfully not asking any other que
stions. “I’m off to work.” He smiled briefly and I was punched in the stomach by his beauty. It was so unfair that beautiful people could be nice, too.
“You’re working a lot.”
“Yeah, well, that hero complex of mine needs feeding.”
I winced. “Sorry. But in my defense, you’re the perfect hero. Ma
ybe even a superhero archetype.”
“I am?”
“Sure. You’re gorgeous and everyone likes you, you come from a rich family and you’re smart and talented. You’re like Bruce Wayne, or Tony Stark, but with a medical degree. So you’re better than them, really.”
“I couldn’t be Clark Kent or Peter Parker. They were socially awkward nerds.”
“I could be Clark Kent, then,” I said with a smile.
“No. You’re not any kind of alter ego.”
My face fell but I tried to hide it with a laugh. “I’m not?”
“No. Alter egos have to blend in with their enviro
nments. Even Bruce Wayne blended with his rich corporate cohorts. You don’t blend. You stand out,” he said, staring at me, his jaw twitching, his hands fisted at his sides like he wanted to hit something.
“I don’t blend?” I said. “I sure don’t.’
“I have to go.” A muscle in his jaw twitched and jumped before he turned away.
“Have fun.” I awkwardly waved as his long body walked away from me, knowing that whatever he was d
oing pretending he was my friend was about to end, and soon.
I rubbed my eyes, then ran my hand through my hair. I was exhausted, overworked, and hungry. I hadn’t slept well in longer than I could remember, because every time I lay down, I pictured Delaney saying she wanted to be my friend, and smiling at me sweetly.
I wanted to be her friend. I did. I understood everything she said, and why she wouldn’t want an
ything more from me, and so I was respecting her boundaries. I was sitting at her kitchen counter, eating apple pie, steadily building an unattractive gut while I pined for a woman who didn’t want me any longer.
But if all I could be was her friend, that would have to be enough. It would be enough. I’d make it so. But it was awful. Every second was awful, smiling at her and pr
etending. I felt like my skin was on inside out every time she blithely smiled back, happy without me. This was Hell, not the version with a smiling devil with a forked tail. This was a Hieronymus Bosch painting version of Hell.
I groaned and looked back at the monitor.
I was filling out a chart when I heard the sirens, and Anton walked by, tapping the back of the monitor to say, “Trauma. Car hit a bicyclist. Wanna help?”
“Hmm?”
Then I looked up and saw her rolling by me, and passed out.
***
I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lighting in the exam room. Michael was lea
ning over me with a frown. “You okay?”
“What happened?”
“Well, the nurse, Liam? He said that first you must have vomited all over yourself, and then you passed out, and they dragged you in here. They checked your vitals, but everything seems fine. You were only out for a few minutes.”
“You read my chart?” I said.
“I was bored.”
“And they called you?”
“I’m your emergency contact. Of course they called me,” Michael said, clearly offended.
“That’s right. You are. Good.” I
laid back down on the pillows. “The weirdest thing happened. I haven’t been sleeping well, but I swear I saw Delaney in the ER wheeled in here on a gurney. She looked like she was dead, covered in blood and unmoving. It was awful. I need to get a nap.” I smiled at him and shook my head as I laughed, but Michael’s face went pale.
“There’s something else I have to tell you, O.”
“Oh God,” I said, sitting up again, and swinging my feet off the bed. “Where is she?”