Kittenfish: An Enemies-to-Lovers Romantic Comedy

by Brenda Lowder

  Kya’s phone rings loudly in the now-quiet room, and she answers it. “Hey! Yeah.” Her casual, familiar tone says it’s Tarek. But then she does something that raises all my Kya-alerts to high. She looks me in the eye, looks away, and then turns one hundred eighty degrees around so her back is to me.

  Her voice drops, but I can still make out what she’s saying. “Yes, she’s here. Yeah. With Blaire and me.” Big pause. “She’s going to wonder why we’re not going together. Uh huh. Yeah. Um. Oooooh.”

  I creep up on Kya. “What’s he saying?”

  She jumps and shoots me a guilty look. “Nothing.”

  Oh, it’s something. Worry gnaws my insides with giant woodchuck teeth. “Give me the phone.”

  “No.” She turns back around and hunches over. “No, it’s Marissa. I know! I know! Of course not. I—”

  “Let me talk to him.” I try to angle around her, but she pivots so her back remains toward me. We end up turning in a complete circle with me still unable to face her or grab the phone. The woodchuck of fear in my stomach is growing into a grizzly bear.

  Finally I resort to grade school tactics. I tap Kya on her left shoulder and, as she turns away, I come at her from the opposite direction and pluck the phone from her right hand.

  “Hey!” Her expression is so panicked that liquid dread drips into my gut. I put the phone to my ear. Tarek is still talking.

  “Just keep her busy for as long as possible and act normal until I fix this.”

  “Fix what, Tarek?” I ask.

  “Shit.”

  Big pause. My heart slams against my rib cage in the silence.

  “Hello? Tarek?”

  A labored sigh on his end. Kya’s watching me, her eyes large with fear. She has given up on getting the phone and is instead chewing her fingernails.

  “I’m here,” he says at last in a toneless voice. I can picture him swallowing and looking off in the distance, his strong jaw clenched against the words I want to yank out of him.

  “What’s going on? How is everyone?”

  “Fine. It’s fine. Everyone is beyond great. Really great.” His voice, which is strained at first, becomes falsely bright. “And you guys, huh? How’s your night going? I know Ky got some hot guy lined up to strip for you all. How’s that going?”

  “Um…good. It didn’t go exactly as she planned, I think, but it’s been a nice night.” I glance at Kya. She smiles and nods encouragingly. But with visible fear. Like you’d smile at someone who was figure skating at the Olympics but was just about to skate into the wall.

  “That’s wonderful. See! You’ve got lots of things in your life to live for.” He gives a small cough.

  A chill climbs up my spine despite the heat of the room. “Tarek, what the hell? What’s going on? Has Liam had a heart attack? Is he hurt? In the hospital? Tell me right now.” I squeeze Kya’s phone so hard I think it will crack and break in my hand.

  Tarek takes a deep breath and exhales so slowly I have time to breathe in and out three times before he speaks. “Duchess. No, he’s fine. I just sort of…lost him.”

  I laugh, relieved beyond measure. The grizzly bear slashing worry in my belly calms. “Is that all? He’s got his phone on him, right? When he sobers up I’m sure he’ll GPS his way home.” It had just better be in time for the ceremony tomorrow.

  Tarek doesn’t laugh.

  The worry starts gnawing again.

  “Tarek?”

  “I’m here.”

  I shake my head at whatever he’s not saying and a strand of hair falls over my eyes. I tuck it behind my ear. “Just how did Liam get lost? What aren’t you telling me? Was he kidnapped?” I pause, thinking. Will I have to come up with ransom money? I do the math between my checking and savings accounts and what Liam has put away that he thinks I don’t know about.

  “Not…really.” I can picture the grimace on his face—an expression I’ve seen every time he’s had to do something he doesn’t want to do since he was eleven years old.

  I grit my teeth and grind out some words. “Tarek. Tell me right now what the hell is going on with my fiancé.”

  “Rissa…he…” Tarek swallows, and I swear to myself the next time I see him I’m going to wring his neck for keeping me in suspense. “He ran away with a stripper.”

  I laugh, my worries popping and disappearing like soda bubbles. “Very funny, Tarek. Since when do they have strippers at Topgolf?”

  “We didn’t go to Topgolf. We went to a strip club.”

  My gut freezes. “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not joking, Duchess. I wish I were.” There’s a plaintive quality to his tone that reaches through the phone and grabs me by the throat, convincing me Tarek’s telling the truth. He sounds like he did the day he broke his arm riding his skateboard and I stayed with him while Kya ran to get my mom. He was so hurt, he could only be real. He’s like that now, only at this moment, he’s hurting for me.

  “He what?” A cold, brittle numbness creeps up my arms and across my heart.

  “He ran off with a stripper—one of the ladies he met here tonight.” Now that he’s said it once, he seems to have no problem saying it again. I wonder how many details he’ll now be willing to elaborate on and how little I’ll want to hear.

  “Wo-ow.” I choke it out like I’ve been kicked in my frozen gut. Because I have.

  Tarek rushes to speak. “But there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Tomorrow will go on without a hitch. I mean, you’ll still get hitched. You know what I mean. Tomorrow we’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. Everyone will be fine. A few of us are going after him now, we’ll bring him back, it’ll all be good.” Tarek’s voice knows it will not all be good, but he’s an investment banker by trade, and he’s in full salesman mode. He wants to convince me.

  I look at Kya and see she already knows. And, unlike Tarek who is prepared to take action to fix this, her face has already decided this is something that can’t be fixed.

  I hand Kya her phone back while Tarek is midsentence and walk to the closest dark corner. I sink to the floor and bury my face in my hands. The tremors that shudder through my body do nothing to break me from this ice cube I’m now encased in. There’s no way. Just hours ago—moments, it feels like—Liam was in my arms as we faced our future together. What happened since then that would cause him to leave me? The pain squeezes itself all through me, searching for an outlet as I realize the truth.

  Liam didn’t run away with a stripper.

  He ran away from me and the life we were going to have together.

  I’m abandoned. Alone. Half of the whole I was supposed to be.

  Because of Tarek.

  Chapter Four

  It’s been about a week since my happily never after. After donating my reception dinner food to a homeless shelter, my floral centerpieces to a maternity ward, and the four cases of champagne to my Grandpa Eddie’s retirement community, I’m done. I’ve taken the week to wallow. One week which I thought I’d spend on white sand beaches in the arms of the man I loved but have instead spent living on the floor. I’ve embraced—literally—the worn tan carpet of my living room and decorated it with a puddle of tears that’s only growing. Just give me time.

  Being vertical is overrated. And something broken in me won’t let me sit on the couch or lie on my bed. No. For a feeling this bad, a pain deeper than I’ve ever felt before, I must be as physically low as I can get. My cheek pressed against the carpet fibers. My hip bone digging into the hard subfloor beneath it. It hurts. Good. I hope I get a bruise. Then maybe my body will start to show a speck of the colossal internal pain squeezing my heart, wringing it inside out.

  I pull our engagement picture from under the chair where I hid it earlier this week during Mom and Kya’s mad purge of all things Liam. I run my fingers over the matte surface of the print itself—I took it out of the frame days ago, seeking any way to get closer to him, closer to us, closer to that moment when he still loved me and there was no reason on this bea
utiful earth to believe that he’d ever stop.

  Stroking his face in the picture, I search for some clue in the wide smile, the bright eyes starting to crinkle at the corners, the flop of hair over his forehead that skims the top of his eyebrow. Some inkling that picture-Liam knows what’s going to happen. That days, hours, minutes, what feels like an instant after this picture is taken, he’ll shove the dumb woman—me—away and push the detonator that will explode my life.

  A garbled cry that’s probably me rumbles up from the floor, and I shove the picture back under the chair. I think of other pictures, older pictures. Pictures of me from middle school that would show a slightly chubby girl with braces and an overbite. A nerdy girl who’d cut her own bangs—badly. A girl who dreamed of love and snuck romance novels until she was humiliated when her best friend’s brother Tarek found one—The Duchess of Desire—and read a certain salacious scene aloud to her entire seventh grade class. Maybe not the entire seventh grade. But every Washington Middle School student who was in the hallway between classes when the book fell out of my backpack and at Tarek’s feet. Sure, he was the one who got detention, but I was the one who got the shame and the nickname.

  Did Tarek somehow show Liam those pictures of unlovable me? Did he somehow convince him that I’m still that pathetic creature? That I never was the beautiful, organized, everything bagel Liam thought I was?

  The phone rings near my head, and I answer, both cursing the stupid surge of hope that swells within me and praying it’s justified. Please be Liam.

  “Honey, are you doing okay?”

  Not Liam. My mother. I swallow down my sob.

  “What was that?” My mother’s voice, which had already sounded alarmed, rises in volume so she’s almost shouting. “Do you need me to come over there?”

  “No! No, Mom, I’m fine.” I’m not fine, but it had taken four days of the last week to get my mother out of my apartment in the first place. I can’t afford a relapse. Not unless I want an emotional, smothering presence protecting me from the ex-fiancé nobody can even find.

  I must do well enough at reassuring her because she moves on to what seems to be the real reason for her call.

  “You know how your father and I worry about you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we love you. More than anything.”

  “Yes. I love you both, too, Mom.”

  “I know you do, sweetie, and that’s why we know you’ll want to help keep your wedding from being a complete loss for your father.”

  This was almost enough to make me sit up and become vertical again. A complete loss for Dad? “What?”

  My mother takes a deep breath, and I can tell she’s strapping on her emotional armor. “It’s just that I talked to Rockmount Hall, and you know how Uncle Joey hosts all those interstate bridge tournaments there? Well, he spoke to them for us and although they won’t refund the rental fee, they’ll let us switch to another date—for free—if it’s in the next ninety days.”

  She pauses hopefully as if I’ll rush in to say that I’ll be able to conjure up Liam in that time frame, surely.

  “Three months won’t help, Mom.”

  She sighs like I’ve deflated her. “You still haven’t heard from him?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Honey, maybe you could have a party with your friends. Your father and I don’t expect you to get engaged again right away and manage to have another wedding planned.” Although I do think that’s exactly what she hoped a moment ago, and at my refusal is regrouping like a good general.

  It’s only been a week since the wedding of my dreams didn’t happen. I’m not yet ready to walk down the aisle. Or throw a party celebrating the fact that I didn’t.

  “Mom, I don’t want to go to a party.” I flop over onto my stomach with a grunt and stare at a tuft of matted beige carpet in front of me. It takes a minute, but I manage to comb out some of the fiber strands with my fingernails.

  “You don’t have to decide right now, right this minute. You could give it a week, say, and then we could plan the party. I think your father would be really happy to know the money wasn’t completely wasted. You could put a nice spin on it. Call it your liberation celebration.”

  Technically, Liam was the one who got liberated.

  “I’m not going to want to plan a party in a week either, Mom. I’m sorry.” I must sound pathetic enough because she pauses. After a moment she sighs, and I wonder what angle she’ll try next.

  “Kya called me yesterday. Tarek feels just awful about what happened.”

  “So do I.” I’ve separated three strands of the carpet fibers and now decide to braid them. It’s difficult while holding the phone, so I set it on the floor and just kind of lay my ear on it so I can have both hands free for the attempt at a teeny tiny carpet braid. Maybe I should get shag carpet. Braiding it would be so much easier.

  “Of course you do, but isn’t it nice that Tarek feels so responsible when anyone can see it had nothing to do with him?”

  No, Liam leaving me for a stripper the night before our wedding had nothing whatsoever to do with Tarek. Except that Tarek had lied about where he was taking Liam, introduced the home-wrecking stripper to my fiancé, and, according to Kya, purchased the lap dance that made Liam “fall in love.” Yes, something must have been hideously wrong in our relationship and with me as a person and as a woman for Liam to want to leave me like that, which is the reason I’ve taken to living on the floor. Where altitude is low and expectations are even lower.

  But considering Liam still hasn’t spoken to me since running away, I’m still waiting on the list of my shortcomings.

  That’s something to look forward to.

  Using what little knowledge about the situation I have, I’ve been working on my own list, which so far has one item:

  I’m not a stripper.

  Maybe that’s my problem in a nutshell.

  My mother’s still talking. “For Tarek to take so much on himself is just so admirable, don’t you think?” Mom sounds breathy as she waits for my answer to what I’d foolishly hoped a second ago was a rhetorical question. She’s always had a bit of a crush on Tarek, as has everyone else’s mom all the time ever. #thingsyouwishyoudidntknow

  “No, Mom, I don’t think it’s admirable. I think it’s deserved.”

  “But Tarek’s not the one who left you at the altar with an eighteen-hundred-dollar nonrefundable dress, not to mention the cost of the caterers, banquet hall, servers, flowers, centerpieces, DJ, bartender—”

  “I know, Mom,” I interrupt her before she can read me the itemized statement. “That was Liam.” Breaking our trust and breaking my heart. But my mind circles back to the night Liam showed such admiration for Tarek’s way with the ladies after he went home with those two waitresses from Open Market. Liam got really close to Tarek after that, and I can’t shake the feeling that it was Tarek’s bad influence that gave my fiancé ideas he wouldn’t otherwise have had.

  “That’s right. It was Liam, the dirty pig who broke my daughter’s heart so she’s just a shell of the woman she once was, and no one else will ever marry her before her thirty-year-old eggs are shriveled and useless and unable to produce my grandchildren!”

  Helpful comments like these are the reason I don’t want my mother here.

  Against my will, though, stupid moisture gathers in my eyes at the thought of these grandchildren of hers, the children Liam and I won’t be having. I’d already pictured them, of course. A little boy and a little girl. Both with my nose, his cheeks, and ears we couldn’t decide on since his and mine already looked so similar.

  “Mom, I’ve got to go.” I undo the tiny carpet braids which are too short to be braids and are really more like intentional tangles. Dreadlocks?

  Mom sniffles. “Why? Is the pizza guy there again?”

  “No. I’ve got friends coming over.”

  “Oh, okay.” I can tell she doesn’t really believe me. My mom is smart.

  “I do.”


  “I know. I heard you. I believe you, sweetie.”

  “Okay.”

  “Because you’d never lie to your mother.”

  “Right.”

  “So I’ll send Kya over to check on you, and you’ll be telling me the truth. And eating pizza. Which isn’t good for you, but I know you must mourn in your own way.”

  “Mom.”

  “I know. You’ve gotta go. I love you. Bye.”

  “I love you too. Bye.”

  I push the button to end the call and briefly consider getting up from the floor. I rule against it as being too ambitious. The bottle of chardonnay next to me is already empty. Standing up to get another one seems like too much trouble. Maybe I’ll be lucky and Kya will show up with another bottle when she gets here.

  There’s no point in my mother calling Kya and telling her to come over, though, because she’s been here every day since the incident anyway. She’s in full best-friend-support mode, showing up with ice cream and chardonnay, talking trash about Liam, and generally trying to bolster my spirits.

  I think a part of her feels like Tarek really does hold some responsibility for this, and she’s trying hard to make up for it. Or keep me busy so I don’t notice.

  Blaire has also been around and has tried to be helpful in her own special Blaire way which has included offering to fix me up with one of her many exes and giving me a homemade coupon for a free lap dance from Magic Matt whenever he’s recovered enough to return to the stage. She suggested I run off with Magic Matt after my lap dance to even the score with Liam, since Magic Matt is technically a stripper. Somehow I don’t think it would have the same impact.

  A loud knock on the door makes my head pound. It’s probably only a normal-volume knock, but I’m still on the floor and my head is near the door. And then there’s the drinking.

  “Come in, it’s open.” I don’t move, but I think about it. I should at least pretend I’m trying to get up so Kya thinks I’m making more of an effort.