“Right…” I decide to leave it at that.
When I step outside to let Felicity see she says, “You look like a warrior pin-up girl.”
“I don’t know how I feel about that combination,” I say. “But the leather is so soft and I love this color.”
“It makes your eyes look super light. Plus with your dark hair, you look gorgeous.”
Then I look at Felicity. I have to bat my eyes to make sure it’s really her. She’s opted for a pretty blush pink satin halter dress that reminds me of a 50’s movie. She looks displaced in time with her full lips, long lashes, and curly hair. The dress makes her brown skin look even richer.
“Now
you
look gorgeous.” I’m almost speechless. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but why don’t you dress like this more often?”
She looks down to her bare feet on the red shag floor. But then I know the answer right away. Sometimes it’s easier to hide in the background, to not let people put you in the light and expose you.
“I’ll get this dress,” I say, “If you get that one.”
She laughs, going back into her dressing room. “I can’t afford this. I’m just having fun.”
“Listen,” I say through the curtain that separates us. This is nice, shopping with another girl, especially someone as nice as Felicity. As much as I’d hate to admit it, not having many friends is my own fault. I just always wanted to be alone. I used to want a sibling, but as I got older and my resentment towards my mother deepened because of teenage angst, I prayed that she didn’t get knocked up. Having Felicity around the last few days has been nice. True, I felt like a stranger when I first set foot in my mom’s condo, but Felicity tried to make me feel welcome.
If I don’t have a sister, I’ll settle for a new friendship. Because being alone kind of sucks. “If Stella asked us to dress a little nicer, then she’s picking up the tab.”
A cheer goes up at O’Huggin’s Tavern on Boylston Street by Fenway. I don’t recognize the team colors playing the Sox, but it doesn’t matter because everyone in the bar is wearing their Sox Red. Even Bradley and Sky have on their baseball caps. I bury my face in my Boston summer lager. It’s sweet and tangy, and has the tiniest hint of orange.
Bradley grabs me around the waist and hoists me up, making me swallow the beer down the wrong hole. I kick him in the shin and he drops me.
“What the hell, Luck?”
I point to my throat, coughing on him for good measure.
Sky gives him a long sideways glance. He scratches the back of his head, his blue eyes glazed over, and smiles. He pounds his fist on the bar and shouts at the bartender. The bartender, a thick girl wearing a black tank top and jean shorts stares at him while she cleans a glass with a rag. I can tell by the twitch in her eye that she’s either going to punch Bradley in the face or punch Bradley in the face.
“Sit. What do you want to drink?” I ask him, pulling his shirt to sit him back down.
Sky keeps glancing at the door. I feel a tightness wind itself in my chest. It doesn’t take a degree in psychobabble to realize there’s something wrong between them.
Bradley checks the time on his new watch. Sky looks at it as if the watch stole her lunch money and pushed her in the dirt for good measure.
“Jame-oh! Jame-oh,” Bradley chants. The bar groans as the visiting team gets a home run. “Oh, you fucking gay bitch!”
“Bradley!” Sky and I both yell at him.
Sky shouts, “That is
not
okay!”
He puts on puppy dog eyes and kisses the top of Sky’s head. “I’m
sorry.
I didn’t mean anything by it. Baby, I’m just
drunk
.”
“Don’t.” Sky smacks away his touch, clearly pissed off. I cringe because Bradley is acting like such a douche. Worse than a douche. What’s gotten into him? He knows Sky’s uncles are gay,
and
they’re supposed to go to their wedding this summer in the Hamptons. She sighs heavily and takes a long drink from her iced tea.
I knew coming out wasn’t the best idea, especially since the tasting is tomorrow. But the major things are done. The guest list is ready to go—though Bradley is coming, and I don’t know how he’s going to eat all that food on a hungover stomach. The wine is ready to go. The construction is on pause until the day after tomorrow. I still don’t have a plan about what to put on that stupid empty wall, but I’ll come up with something. According to Felicity, the menu is all set. James even took off that green mousse and substituted it for a fried king crab dumpling that I haven’t tasted.
James. Fucking James Hughes who hasn’t texted me or called me since he stormed out of the restaurant. I shake my head at no one. Actually, no, I shake my head at myself because I know better. I wave at the bartender and she comes right over to me.
“Can I get a Jameson, a Jack, another summer ale, and Irish nachos?”
She gives me a smile, like she thinks I’m pathetic. I’ve given that smile to lots of my bar patrons over the years. There’s always the regular who shows up at 5 p.m. and orders a beer every half hour for three hours. There’s the girls who order cosmos in crowded bars, then complain that they spilled it and want another one. For free. There’s the lonely college grad checking his phone for every five minutes because he’s waiting on a date who never shows, so he tries (unsuccessfully) to flirt with me by giving me $5 on every cocktail. Sure, I take the money, and on a certain level that makes me a shitty person, but after so many years I have zero patience or sympathy for drunks.
Even drunk me.
“Are you sure you don’t want a drink?” I ask Sky.
Bradley has made his way over by the pinball machine. He slams his fist on the top of the glass, which elicits a warning finger from one of the bouncers.
“Designated driver,” Sky says with a half-smile.
“You seem down.” I take a deep drink from my beer. The bar collectively gasps, then winces as the guy running around the bases is out. Stupid blurry TV screen.
“Can I ask you something and you’ll answer me honestly?”
I look into her soft hazel eyes. I’m instantly jealous of her thick black eyebrows and thick black eyelashes. I look closer and confirm that she’s not wearing mascara. Bitch. “Shoot.”
“Does Brad seem weird to you lately?”
I find my best friend in the crowded bar, now trying to fish a stuffed animal from the claw machine. He feeds the thing more dollars and presses the buttons unsuccessfully.
“Yes.”
Sky stares at her French manicure. “I know he’s your best friend, and I’m sorry if I’ve been a jerk to you lately. I just don’t want to lose him. He’s been acting so weird. He’s always late for our dates. He didn’t go to class two days in a row. He’s spending all this money on stupid things like shoes and watches.”
“I thought the watch was a gift?” My question gets lost in the fury of cheers and dudes hugging each other.
“What?” she asks, cupping her hear against the noise.
My chest gets hot like when you’re caught in a lie. Except I’m not the one lying, Bradley is. “I said guys are stupid. They don’t know how to act.”
Sky smiles, her pink lips an ethereal brush on her face. “The chef?”
I can feel my face turn as red as her jersey. The bartender sets the plate of Irish nachos in front of us. Someone bumps into me and apologizes.
“Leave it to some bar in Boston to come up with Irish nachos,” Sky says. She pulls out a thin wedge of potato drenched in melted cheese, chives, bacon bits, and tons of sour cream.
“It’s genius,” I say, hoping we can change the subject. I shove potato in my mouth, breathing out the piping hot steam and chewing carefully so as to not give my tongue third degree burns. Not that I’ll be using my tongue for anything exciting tonight.
“I saw the paper,” Sky says. “I didn’t want to say anything, but, well, I’m lying. I’ve been dying to know.”
I fake-laugh. “It was a stupid accident.”
Sky smirks knowingly, “But there’s
more
.”
I sigh. I’m pretty good at holding stuff in. If I don’t have to deal with it, then it doesn’t exist. I’m like an ostrich, digging my head into the sand to avoid the world. So I tell her. I tell her that James makes me angry. That I don’t know if I want to kiss him or punch him in the gut. I tell her that we hooked up—letting the vagueness of it linger. That my mom invited the reporter to the tasting. That the reporter is James’s ex. That aside from all of this, there’s something else he’s hiding. That I don’t know if I’m attracted to him because he’s hard to decipher or because he’s actually a good guy.
“I know exactly how not to pick ’em,” I say.
“Shit.” She shakes her head. “I think you picked just right. So what if that’s his ex? He clearly doesn’t want her there, and she’s
obviously
so obsessed with him that she follows his drama all over town. He should get her fired for being a fucking stalker.”
“So why won’t he text or call me?”
Sky pulls a wedge of potato and dips it in the blob of sour cream in the center of the plate. “Have you tried to text or call him?”
I try to think on it. “No.”
“I’m not saying you should go all out and chase a guy. Not all guys are worth chasing. But I’ve known you for two years and I’ve never even seen you care. Not like this. A text isn’t going to kill you. Plus, you’re basically his boss.”
“Chefs and managers are pretty much on the same level.”
She grunts with a mouthful of Irish nachos. “Whatever, you know what I mean. Don’t sabotage it because you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared.” I take my shot of whiskey and down it, as if that proves my non-existent fear of James. It burns going down, but fills me with the first moment of calm I’ve had in two days.
Sky grins and nods. “
Sure
you’re not.”
“Sky, if you knew a guy was holding something back and didn’t bring it up because you were hoping that he’ll come clean on his own—how foolish does that make you? And just so we’re clear, by ‘you’ I mean ‘me.’”
As she thinks, Sky looks both lovely and sad. It’s as if she’s coming to a realization of her own. I really wish I could give her peace of mind when it comes to Bradley, but I’d just be backing up his lies. Even now, my silence makes me feel shameful.
“Most people don’t come clean until they’re caught,” Sky says. “My dad would get caught cheating on my mom pretty much every three months. But he’d deny it. He’d deny it so hard that I think he believed he was innocent. Still, my mom saw what she wanted to see. When you’re in love, you’ll always be a little bit foolish. It’s not the other person that has to come clean. You have to be able to come clean to yourself.”
As the Sox knock it out of the park, Sky and I sit in a strange quiet solidarity. When the food is all gone and my beer is empty, Bradley’s shot of whiskey is still on the table. We turn around and search for his mop of blonde hair, but nothing. I see the worry cloud Sky’s face. Fucking Bradley… I can’t even process him right now. Sky calls him, sticking her finger into her free ear to hear better.
“Where are you?” she yells. Her eyes are wide and furious. “What do you mean you left? Don’t tell me to calm down. We were six feet away from you. Don’t—What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I want to bury my head in the sand for Sky. She throws the phone into her purse, holds the ledge of the bar for support. She blinks hard. I wait until she’s composed herself before I put my hand on her back.
“Ready to go?”
She nods. I leave money on the bar, downing Bradley’s untouched shot. There are two things you shouldn’t spill over guys: tears or good whiskey.
Freshly showered and under my covers, I start drifting off when my phone buzzes.
It’s a Boston area code. I normally don’t pick up numbers I don’t know, but ever since I got the company phone, I have to. If it’s that same liquor rep calling about his special wine, I swear—
“Hello?”
I can hear something drop on the other line and a quiet “
shit.”
Then, he clears his throat. “Lucky?”
I throw the covers off me, my skin prickling from the sudden exposure to air-conditioned air. “James?”
I smack my forehead at how eager I sound.
“The very same.”
We’re both quiet. I feel like I have a thousand words stuck in my mouth and I don’t know how to form them into coherent statements. “Can I help you? Or are you just going to breathe into the phone, which, I gotta tell you, is a little creepy.”
“No, dumbass,” he says, and it makes me smile because at least he’s being normal.
“Well, jerk face, what do you want?”
“Am I not allowed to call my boss at midnight the eve of the big tasting?”
“You changed your number.”
“Yeah,” is all he says. We fall into that white noise silence.
“Please don’t tell me you blew up the kitchen or something,” I say. “Because I’m this close to having a heart attack.”
“I just—I’m in your lobby. Can you come down?”
I hang up and grab a robe from the closet. Of course it’s silky and lacy and looks weird against my sweat pants and tank top, but it’s faster than looking for a bra on the mess of clothes on my floor.
The doorman waves when he sees me, but my eyes are trained on James. He’s in the waiting area of the lobby. There’s a fireplace and plush couches. He sits with his elbows propped up on his knees.
“Hey,” I say.
He stands. “Hey.”
“We can’t talk here.” Without waiting for him, I go outside and down the street. At the corner, manicured trees line the sidewalk. From here, the view of the harbor, the twinkling Boston lights, is pretty beautiful. It’s cold as hell, but when James offers me his jacket, I shake my head. From the look on his face he didn’t exactly come to make out.
“I’m sorry, Lucky—” he says.
Why is it that your body turns hot when you’re waiting someone to finish a sentence after that? It’s like I’m walking on a tight rope across a volcano and my skin is on fire.
“I’m sorry I’ve been a dick.”
“Okay. Do you want to explain why you’ve been a dick?”
“When Stella called me into her office I knew we were in trouble. Or rather, I knew I was in trouble. She had that shit paper on her desk, and then Stella said she invited Clarissa to the tasting—”