“Cain?”
One blue eye cracked open. “I fell asleep,” he growled, and let me go to roll onto his back and cover his eyes with his arm.
“We don’t have to go tonight. You seem really tired.”
He moved his wrist away and studied me. “No, we should go. You got all dressed up and I thought this would be a good way for you to meet people.”
“You were thinking about me?” Thump, went my heart, and I covered it with my palm. “That’s nice of you!”
“You’re always with people at home. In Tennessee,” he corrected. He patted my hip. “Let me up.”
I didn’t want to. I wanted to put my hands on his chest and hold him there, right on my soft mattress. Then I’d straddle him and undo the buttons on his shirt, one by one until I could see every cut of every muscle. I’d run my palms up over his skin—
“Aria?”
I got off the bed and went into the bathroom again, this time to blow cold air from the dryer on my face.
“I’m sorry we had to park so far away,” Cain said to me a while later. He’d changed out of his work clothes and looked even cuter, if that was possible. The whole process had taken him about five minutes. Now, we were trudging blocks, and blocks, and blocks, because there was no parking in this whole city.
“It’s ok. You offered to drop me in front of the building,” I reminded him. “I didn’t want to go in alone.”
“And I didn’t want you to stand outside by yourself.” He glanced back at a guy who had been behind us for a block or so and I tried to walk faster. He took my arm and hooked it through his own. “Blayden should have gotten valets. He says that he’s making a point that we should all take public transit and do our part to reduce traffic. That’s what he says, anyway, but he’s really just laughing at everyone who doesn’t have a driver on staff.”
That didn’t seem very nice. And how many people had a driver? Or a staff? “Um, how much farther is it?” Because I wasn’t even wearing the bad shoes, but my word! This was a hike. I didn’t want to sound like the ex-girlfriend, though, the one who couldn’t go places because of her wardrobe choices. I was going to be a good sport until the soles of my feet bled!
“There. Not much farther.” And finally, we did get to the building he’d pointed to, although by the time we did, I was dragging on his arm a lot.
The huge house was packed with people. Cain led me through the door and we walked into the crowd together, with me fighting off the need to hang onto his sleeve and hide on his shoulder. Everyone was staring at us, and it wasn’t my imagination—their heads swiveled around like owls. He was in one of his dark suits, but I had worn what I usually did when I went out: a pretty dress (with some sparkle) and pretty shoes (also with sparkle). I’d carefully done my hair, taming away all the natural wave into perfectly coiled curls that fell over each of my shoulders and down my back.
I looked nothing like any of the women here. They were dressed like they would have blended in at Cain’s house, in black and grey and a few flashes of white. There was absolutely no sparkle in the room, except for what reflected off me. Their hair was either long and straight or short and straight and clearly no one had dipped into their makeup bags like I had. I swallowed.
“Do I look ok?” I murmured. I needed some assurance.
“Fine,” he said briefly. “There’s Blayden.” He pointed to a small, dark-haired man on the far side of the room. “Come meet him.” Cain put out his palm and I grabbed on like he was saving me from a sinking ship.
“Hey, stranger,” his friend said, and Cain let go of me to shake his hand. “I didn’t think you’d ever get back from…Texas?”
“Tennessee.”
“What were you doing dicking around down there?” Blayden asked him.
Taking care of his aunt, who died! My mouth fell open, but Cain turned to me and shook his head. “I didn’t tell anyone why I went,” he said quietly, so that his friend couldn’t hear.
“Who’s this?” His friend Blayden stared at me, curiosity all over his face, and I waited to hear how Cain would explain our situation.
He didn’t really do any explaining. “I got married. This is Aria,” he said briefly.
Clearly, Blayden hadn’t expected that. He was so surprised it looked like someone was giving him stage directions, like in the plays Aubree had done in high school: make your eyes as big as saucers, almost drop your drink, clutch your heart like you’re having a medical event, stagger backwards and yell, “What?!”
He did all those things and attracted quite a crowd around himself. He also yelled, “Married?” in a voice that was high-pitched enough to belong to one of my nieces. “Who is this woman?” he asked Cain.
“Aria McCourt,” Cain said, and at the same time, I said loudly, “Aria Miller.”
“Aria Miller,” Cain’s friend repeated in a calmer voice, and looked me up and down. “Nice to meet you.”
I wasn’t sure that it was. He was staring at me like maybe I smelled a little, which I did not. Climbing all the stairs in the park had been hard but I’d used plenty of deodorant and I’d definitely showered afterwards. But then many, many other people were wanting to meet me, and I shook a lot of hands and told a lot of people that it was a pleasure, which it really was not. They were all staring at me in such a rude way—hadn’t their mothers ever told them that it wasn’t polite? It sure wasn’t, and it made me feel like I was in a fishbowl!
I adjusted my dress to make sure it was doing its job of coverage and put a careful hand over my hair to feel if the curls were holding up, which they were. Cain got pulled into a conversation with someone and I was stuck on my own with three women, pretty, sleek, fancy-looking women whose clothes looked very funeral-ready to me.
“Aria?” one asked me. “Like a piece of music?”
I nodded. “I’m not going to sing one!” I told them with a smile, but they just looked back at me. It didn’t seem like they even blinked. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” I said to the one who had spoken.”
They all repeated them and again I forgot to remember. Darn it.
“How do you know Cain?” the one on the left asked.
“We were neighbors as kids. When I was a kid,” I said. “How do y’all know each other?”
“That’s so funny. Y’all,” the middle one giggled. “People really say that!”
“We do,” I told her.
The middle woman giggled again. “We met at Stanford,” she said. And then they all made the same funny movement with their fingers, like I’d seen in movies. Gang signs?
“I don’t know what that means,” I said, pointing to their hands.
“We were in the same sorority on The Farm,” the one on the right announced, and then they all recited together, “Zeta delta kappa,” and made the finger movements again.
I guessed they weren’t throwing gang signs but I had no idea why they’d be on a farm. They didn’t look like outdoors kind of girls—more like a stiff wind would blow them all away. “That sounds so fun! I always thought if I went to college, I’d want to rush. I had a friend who went to Bama and she talked all about it, the parties and the clothes.”
The three of them looked back and forth at each other. “It was an academic sorority. It wasn’t about parties and clothes.” Left smirked a little.
“You didn’t go to college?” Middle asked me.
“No. Not yet,” I added for some reason, although I knew in my heart that I never wanted to and never would, so that was a lie. I started to blush.
“And you’re married to Cain Miller?” Right asked, like she doubted it. She looked down at my fingers, which I was not fidgeting even though I really wanted to, and I wished I had the proof of a ring.
“I am,” I said firmly. “I’m his wife. Lawfully wedded,” I quoted Gary from the ceremony. We’d signed everything, too, so it really was fully lawful—except for the consummation part. Was that legally necessary? Oh, my word, I hoped not.
“We used to date,” Middle told me. She was the prettiest.
“You’re with Blayden now,” Right reminded her. “Cain’s been with everyone,” she remarked.
“Not me,” Left said. “I got cut out by Demetra. Next it was going to be my turn.” She and Middle exchanged another look.
“Well, now you’ll never have a turn, because he’s a married man,” I answered, trying for a pageant-pleasant tone. I didn’t exactly get there. How many women did “everyone” mean?
“It seems really…” Lefty pursed her lips and thought. “It’s so unusual that Cain left for a few weeks and came back with a wife. He’s so young to settle down.”
“He’s thirty,” I told them, but they all nodded like I’d proven their point, so I didn’t mention anything about my own age. “Cain and I have known each other forever. We were next-door neighbors. There’s nothing unusual about marrying your neighbor.” Except in our relationship, where most of it was unusual. Please, I prayed, please make my blush go away.
“What’s that accent?” Middle asked in a terrible drawl. Was that how I spoke? “Where are you from?”
“Tennessee,” I said, and they all narrowed their eyes. I wondered if they’d heard of it. “Cain and I are from the same little town in Tennessee. I moved to Chattanooga after high school because I always wanted to live in a big city like that.”
“A big city like that,” Middle murmured, and I heard one of them snort.
“You must have been so excited to get to come to California,” Righty said, and the other two now nodded.
“It’s very different here,” I acknowledged, which was not a lie.
“I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” Middle stated, in a voice that sounded like she was praying in church.
“Were you born and raised in San Francisco, then?” I asked, feeling so sorry for her. I couldn’t imagine being a kid and running around on sidewalks instead of grass. From what I’d seen of the parks, there was a lot of trash there. And poop.
Middle didn’t answer right away, so Lefty stepped in. “I think my life really started the day I stepped foot on The Farm.”
“What farm?” I had to ask, and they all stared at me like I couldn’t be lower.
“Stanford University,” they said together.
I felt even stupider that I didn’t understand why there was a farm at that school. These girls didn’t seem like they would know what to do if they got dirt under their fingernails, but maybe there was a class on how to remove it.
“Please tell me you’re not talking about your college days again,” a voice said over my shoulder. “I stopped when I graduated. I did graduate, eventually.”
I turned to see who it was, but I didn’t think I’d been introduced to him yet. He smiled at me, though, and I smiled back.
“Have they told you about their sorority yet?” he asked me. “Or did they mention how much better it is here in the Bay Area than anywhere else on this planet that we call Earth? Besides talking about The Farm, those are the main topics of their conversation.”
“You’re an asshole, Sebastián!” Lefty announced angrily. “You know you’d never live anywhere else.”
“Yeah, I would, if I didn’t have my family here. That’s something funny that I realized a long time ago,” this guy, Sebastián, said back to her. “My roots have been here long before this was the state of California. It’s the recent arrivals who have the most to say about how perfect it is. You showed up for college, but you grew up somewhere else,” he told her. “Where are you really from again, Astra?”
“Ohio,” she muttered, but the three of them were already walking away.
“The Furies,” he told me. “That’s what I call them.” I must have looked confused, because he explained. “From Greek mythology.”
“Oh!” Had I learned that? “Well, they were very angry at what you said to them.”
He laughed. “I’m Sebastián. You’re Cain Miller’s new wife, the one he brought back with him from Texas.”
Give me strength. “Tennessee,” I pronounced carefully. “It’s the other T-state. In alphabetical order, it does come first.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Aria from Tennessee.”
I liked that—it had the ring of a superhero. “Cain is from there, too,” I told him. Those three furious girls seemed not to have cared about that when they’d been making fun of me for being a hick.
“You’d never know it, though. He comes across like an enigma. A beautiful mystery,” Sebastián explained. He gave me a once-over. “You, not as much. It’s the big hair and overdone makeup.” He made a face like something pained him. “And definitely, it’s the clothes.”
I flushed, from the roots of my overdone hair to my toes in the silver shoes. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”
He laughed. “You just don’t read very San Francisco. You’re quite vibrant.”
I looked him over, too. He had on a multicolor jacket that looked like it had been pieced together out of rags, and he was barefoot! “And you’re not vibrant?” I challenged him. “You’re like a dang parrot.” I immediately felt terrible. “Oh, I’m sorry! That was so rude. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings.”
He laughed harder. “It would take a lot more than that.” He gestured to his strange outfit. “I can get away with this, because I’m different. Just like Cain—different.”
“What’s so different about him?”
“He didn’t go to college on The Farm like the Furies, did he? He didn’t go at all and he built some kind of minor empire.”
“You don’t have to go to college to be smart. He’s done well without it,” I said, feeling a gush of pride.
“But most people do go. Most people here, anyway,” he said, and waved his hand in a big circle that included everyone in the room. “Then they go to parties and talk about their sorority and their major and their friends and how they played D-3 lacrosse and slept with their grad student teaching assistant. Ten years down the road, they’re still talking about that bullshit, like anyone cares.”
That was really what college was about? Maybe I hadn’t missed much. “So? What are you trying to say about Cain? There’s something wrong with him?” Pride changed to my own fury at that idea.
Sebastián grinned. “Nothing’s wrong with him. He’s practically perfect.”
He was. I looked over at where he stood a head above most of the other men, his shoulders broader, his features sharper. They looked unimportant next to him, like someone had rubbed over them with an eraser.
“It’s a badge of honor that he didn’t go to college and that he was successful in his own way. Get it?” Sebastián asked me. “He’s different. People here, like Astra and her friends, they love it.” Now he circled his hand over me. “They won’t love this.”
“Why is my difference bad?” I looked down at my dress, which, until now, had been one of my favorites. Very flattering in the construction and I’d always thought that hot pink was a good color on me. It made my hair less bright in comparison.
“You’re obviously trying,” he said. “You’re making such an effort. It’s cheap.”
My jaw dropped. “I look cheap?”
He shrugged. “Come on and get a drink,” he invited. “Blayden won’t spend on valets, but he always has good booze.”
I was cheap? I was obviously trying? Well, of course I was trying! Was I supposed to go roll around in a mud puddle and come to a party? Confused and upset, I followed him over to the bar set up in a corner of the room, noticing as I did that the bottoms of his bare feet were filthy. Maybe he really had been out in a mud puddle or maybe he’d been in a sty on the farm that the women had been bragging on.
The bar table was covered in so many bottles of liquor that it was hard to see what the labels read. Also, it was really dark in this little corner. “I don’t drink,” I said, looking around at the shelves that surrounded us. They were stuffed with books, making the bar seem like a tiny, drunk library. I lean
ed closer to read the titles on the spines and—
“Oh, my word! This is all porn!”
Sebastián nodded. “Blayden likes to keep it right out in the open. He loves to shock people but it gets harder every year.”
Not for me. I was totally shocked. That book’s title was the dirtiest thing I’d ever seen in my life, and it was just words.
“Now outrage is back, though, so it’s good to pretend that you’re horrified.”
I wasn’t pretending to be horrified—this was real. Did people actually do what that title said? Wouldn’t they have gotten arrested?
“You’re going to have a difficult time with Blayden,” Sebastián mentioned, tilting his chin towards another corner of the room. “He covets your husband.”
My husband. I looked around until I saw him again, his short blonde hair a flash of light in the darkness. “What do you mean by that? Covets?”
“I mean, he discovered Cain. He gave him the seed money for his business and he takes credit for his success. He’s not going to like you being on the scene.”
Now I looked the way Sebastián had signaled and caught Blayden watching me. I turned quickly away. “He’ll have to get used to it,” I announced, and Sebastián laughed again, loudly.
“I like you, Aria from Tennessee. You should come to my art studio.”
“You’re an artist?”
He nodded and handed me a glass of wine that was as large as a communion cup. But back at home, ours was always filled with grape juice. I held it but didn’t take a taste. “I’m a painter. Blayden collected me, too, just like he did to Cain,” he said. “He pays the rent on my studio and promotes my work. I’m grateful.” But he twisted his face as he said it, like it might have been a lie.
“That’s fortunate for you.”
“Sure.” Sebastián took a napkin from the bar and took something that looked like a crayon from his pocket. He started making strokes on the cloth with it, lines that were blending together into a familiar shape. “How long have you been married?”
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