Plot Twist

by Bethany Turner

He scooted his chair closer to mine and grabbed my hands again, and then he began laughing. The laugh was slightly unhinged and extremely frantic. It seemed to originate from his toes and increase in intensity all the way up. I’d never heard anything like it from him before, and it was the sexiest sound imaginable.

  “I’m not the impetuous, spontaneous type, you know?”

  I smiled so widely I worried my face might crack. “Yes, Liam, I know.” How well I knew. How well I knew him.

  “But do you know what day it is?”

  I didn’t. Not a clue. “Wednesday?”

  The laughter ceased as he stared at me, amused, and then it—everything—was replaced by warmth. “No, it’s Sunday. But I meant the date.”

  “Um . . . February 3?”

  “It’s the fourth.”

  “It was the third when I left Rome, I think. Or maybe it was the fifth—”

  “Olivia!” He silenced me as he scooted his chair closer and placed his hand on my knee. “Don’t you realize? It’s Ironic Day!”

  It was a miracle that my jetlagged margarita brain didn’t seem to dampen his enthusiasm. And it was a miracle that I didn’t spontaneously combust beneath the feel of his fingers on my leg.

  “It’s the day you met Hamish MacDougal,” he continued. “It’s the day we broke up. It’s the day you realized who he was. It’s the day . . .” He faltered for just a moment. “It’s the last day I saw you, before you left. And now here we are.”

  Fiona would understand. She would have to understand. She’d been dating him for a few weeks, but what Liam and I shared was a history.

  He didn’t wait for me to speak, and that was a relief. I would have failed spectacularly.

  “When you have a moment—a moment like this, years in the making—if you don’t just go for it, you might regret it for the rest of your life. It can’t just be a coincidence that you sat here inhaling margaritas until this moment, and it can’t be a coincidence that I bought a ticket to Bandaranaike International Airport, of all places! It can’t be a coincidence that we’re sitting here together now, Olivia. It can’t be, can it?”

  I shook my head and struggled to breathe, and I watched his lips and tried to make sense of everything that was being spoken by them. But the more I watched, the more I wished they would stop making noise and instead find other ways to engage themselves.

  “That’s crazy!” The manic laughter returned. “Bandaranaike! This is the moment, and it needs to be seized.”

  Okay, so I didn’t grasp the details of much of what he was saying, but I knew it meant he loved me. I knew it meant he was about to kiss me. He was going to kiss me good. And I knew it meant we were about to fly away together to . . . to . . .

  “I’m sorry. Where is Bandana, Bananarama, whatever International Airport?” Not that it matters, I thought as I realized that wherever this place was, it was the new romance capitol of the world as far as I was concerned.

  He erupted in delight. “Good to see your geography knowledge wasn’t corrupted by a year in Europe. It’s in Sri Lanka, Olivia. Sri Lanka!”

  Sri Lanka. Hmm. Sure. I could work with that.

  “It’s warm there, right? As long as it’s warm.” What was I saying? I’d have Liam to keep me warm. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

  Except he suddenly looked disgusted with me. “Have you forgotten?” I suppose the clueless expression on my face was the first indication that I had indeed forgotten whatever it was I was supposed to remember. “‘We’ll always have Sri Lanka,’ right? Isn’t that what Hamish MacDougal yelled at you as he drove away?”

  Oh! Yeah, okay. That’s what he was talking about. Though, actually, I still had no clue what he was talking about. Just shut up and kiss me already, Liam!

  But he kept talking. “I’m just saying, it’s more than a little ironic. Don’t you think?” He winked and then began glancing behind me nervously. Was he afraid Fiona was going to buy a ticket to Iceland or somewhere and sneak up on us? Did I need to be afraid of that?

  No, she’ll understand.

  “I just want to make sure we’re on the same page here. You agree, don’t you, that when a once-in-a-lifetime moment comes along, you need to go for it?”

  “Of course!” I practically squealed. This was it. He wasn’t making a lot of sense, but that didn’t matter. I was ready to go for the once-in-a-lifetime moment. With Liam. Finally.

  “Okay, then.” He beamed. “It’s February 4, I’m holding a ticket to Sri Lanka, of all places, you’ve just spent a year in Italy working on your screenplay . . . and Hamish MacDougal is in that men’s room right behind you.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but then it closed again. I didn’t turn around or jump up or feel a rush of excitement. My mind was utter pandemonium. “I’m sorry . . . What?”

  “Go for it, Olivia. When he comes out, go tell him who you are. So you’re six years early. So what? What are the odds of this? Oh, man . . . Fiona is going to be so upset she missed this. You have to jump at this opportunity. It’s your day. It’s his day!”

  Opportunity?

  I didn’t have a screenplay. Instead, I’d spent a year in Italy pining for Liam and writing as many greeting cards and freelance articles as I could so I could afford to keep running away from him. February 4 wasn’t my day or Hamish MacDougal Day. It was Liam Howard Day. I didn’t care about a connection with a Scottish stranger or the potential career breakthrough awaiting me in 2013. I only cared about Liam—and every February 4 seemed to pull me further and further away from him. I had allowed myself to believe that being with me was the opportunity he couldn’t allow to pass by, but no. It was all about grabbing Hamish’s attention as soon as he finished relieving himself.

  “Oh, Liam, I don’t know,” I said as I let out a shaky breath, willing myself not to cry.

  “Hey, hey,” he whispered. “There he is. Go say something to him.”

  I couldn’t make myself care enough to even turn around. “I don’t have a screenplay, Liam. I have nothing. Italy was miserable and lonely and not at all inspiring. This was . . .” The sobs bubbled from my chest and throat and threatened to break free. “This was the worst year of my life, and I am nowhere closer to having a completed screenplay than I was a year ago. What could I even say to him? ‘Congrats on the superstardom. Oh, me? Yep, still at Heartlite.’”

  “Just say hello, Olivia. You have to.”

  That made me huffy. “No. I don’t have to. There is absolutely no point in it. He won’t remember me anyway. Why would he? To him, it was probably just—”

  There he was, walking past us with his carry-on over his shoulder, coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other. His hair was a lot shorter than it had been the day we met, but that wasn’t the most noticeable difference.

  “Holy muscles, Batman!” I exclaimed.

  “That is possibly the lamest thing you have ever said,” Liam accurately observed. “And there is quite the selection to choose from.”

  “Well, just look at him! What the crap? He looks like he could bench press me!” And that was after a year of tiramisu every night for dessert.

  Liam stood and gathered my things for me. “He has that new movie coming out soon. He’s a Greek god or something.”

  “No, Scottish,” I muttered as I mentally warned myself not to drool.

  I was flooded with memories of his arm around my shoulders. His laugh. His warmth. And whereas before each of those memories had been strictly platonic—a gentle reminder of a pleasant encounter with a pleasant man—my thoughts of Hamish MacDougal were now heading in a decidedly different direction. Perhaps somewhere between friendship and love there existed a February 4 consolation prize for my troubles. Liam was right. It was ironic beyond belief—and I’m not talking about needing a knife and being presented with ten thousand spoons or something. This was irony at its best.

  Hamish MacDougal could be the greatest consolation prize in the history of all mankind.

  “Make sure to tip Jo
sh, alright?” I made a mental note to pay Liam back for my bar tab, which was probably only slightly less than a flight to Bandaranaike International Airport, and then I wandered off in pursuit of my destiny.

  He had a pretty good lead on me, but people kept stopping him to ask for autographs, so I figured I might have a chance. I knew I didn’t look my best—after nearly twenty-four hours on planes and in airports and, at the risk of sounding repetitive, massive amounts of tequila—but if destiny had control of the wheel, it wouldn’t matter.

  “Hamish!” I called out when I thought I was close enough for him to hear. But there were ten other women and a few photographers calling out his name at the same time.

  “Thanks, everyone,” I heard him say over the crowd. “I must run now, or I’ll miss my flight.”

  “Hamish! It’s me! Olivia Ross.” Oh, wait, he doesn’t know my name. “We’ll always have Sri Lanka!”

  It only took a moment before I realized that with that statement, I had captured the attention of the wrong ears. Many, many wrong ears.

  “You know him?”

  “She is an actress! I knew I’d seen her in something.”

  “What happened in Sri Lanka?”

  “It’s so hard to recognize them when they’re dressed like normal people.”

  About twenty women were surrounding me, pressing me for information, happy to at least talk to someone who knew the object of their affection if they couldn’t talk to the man himself. I stood on my toes and tried to look over their heads, determined not to lose track of him before I could break free. But as they swirled around me and heat rose to the top of my head and I quickly surveyed the distance to the ground—preparing myself to pass out in spectacular fashion—I realized that romance movies do us a disservice by always treating someone’s destiny as a good thing.

  My destiny was that February 4 was always going to suck.

  February 4, 2008

  “I’m sure Fiona will be here any minute, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell,” I said as I glanced nervously at Liam, who was glancing at me the exact same way.

  “Darling Liv,” Mr. Mitchell began with a smile as he sipped his coffee. “You’ve known us your entire life. Why do you still insist upon calling us Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I laughed and smoothed out the cushion beside me on the couch. “Probably because I’ve known you since I was six. It would have felt pretentious to call you Landon and Jocelyn when you were helping us earn our Brownie badges.”

  “Well, I think it’s time. Fiona doesn’t still call your parents Mr. and Mrs. Ross, does she?”

  “No.” I stood and began gathering the empty saucers and cups in front of everyone except Mr. Mitchell, who was still working on his coffee. “But in all fairness, Fi has called my parents Henry and Susannah since well before it was appropriate to do so.”

  There were stark differences to be found in being reared by Henry and Susannah Ross as opposed to Landon and Jocelyn Mitchell. Though my family was not nearly as well-to-do as the Mitchells, I did grow up as part of the comfortable middle class. But the differences were more philosophical than that. Fiona’s parents are kind, but not overly warm. Mine, on the other hand, are affectionate to a fault. At least I thought so as a child. As an adult, I found their devotion to one another comforting. But when I was young? Not so much. They’ve always been madly in love with each other, and my brother and I were in a near-constant state of “Eww!” and “Yuck!” throughout our childhood.

  Fiona, meanwhile, thought my parents were wonderful and romantic, and while I ewwed and yucked, she oohed and aahed. “You’re lucky, Livi,” she would say. “It’s a good thing that your parents love each other so much.”

  Many years removed from my embarrassment, I knew just how true that was—and I couldn’t help but be impressed by the wisdom shown so early by young Fiona Mitchell.

  “Here, let me help you.” Liam grabbed half of the dishes from my hands and followed me into the kitchen.

  “Where is she?” I whispered as soon as we were alone.

  “I don’t know.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and glanced at it as he had countless times during the hour we had been sitting with the Mitchells. “With traffic, we’re going to be pushing it as it is, and after what I had to go through to get this reservation . . .” He stuffed his phone back into his pocket with an exasperated sigh.

  “If she doesn’t get here soon, we might have to go without her.”

  “That does sound like a fun evening,” he replied sardonically. “What can make an evening with your girlfriend’s parents even more fun? Why, your girlfriend not being there, of course.” He unbuttoned the cuffs of his dress shirt and rolled up his sleeves as he filled the sink with water to wash the dishes. I’d never seen him wash dishes before that day—also, we had a dishwasher—so it was pretty obvious he was just attempting to delay his return to the living room. “Do you think she’s doing it on purpose?”

  “Not a chance. You know how much she has been looking forward to finally going to Matisse.” I grabbed the dish towel, preparing to dry—stalling every bit as much as he was. “Why would she do it on purpose?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. She said something this morning about how she thought I could stand to make a little more effort with her dad.”

  “More effort than an overpriced dinner in Santa Monica?”

  “Yes. What is wrong with people these days? When did we as a society decide it wasn’t enough to buy people’s affection?” He handed me a wet plate and washed another one before he spoke again. “I thought I was putting forth a pretty decent effort, actually. I can’t help it that we don’t have anything in common. What am I supposed to talk about with him?”

  My eyebrows rose. “You’re kidding, right?”

  He shrugged, clueless.

  “Sheesh, Liam.” I stopped drying and looked at him. “He has a law background, he went to Yale—”

  “I went to Brown and Harvard.”

  “Ivy League. Same thing. He reads big, boring books and watches Ken Burns documentaries, he loves the Red Sox—”

  “See! I’m a Dodgers fan.”

  “It’s baseball! You have baseball.” I got back to drying. “I can confidently say you have more in common with him than all the other men Fiona has ever introduced to them combined.”

  “They make me nervous.”

  “Every guy is nervous around his girlfriend’s parents.”

  “I wasn’t nervous around your parents.”

  My breath caught in my throat, but I quickly released it. He’d been doing that more often lately. Nonchalantly referencing our past relationship. Liam had completely moved on and had no reason not to believe that I had as well. As far as he was concerned, I’d moved on years ago. The landmines had been carefully avoided for years, but in the past few months he had begun romping through the field with absolute certainty that everything had been defused.

  How nice that must have been for him—to possess the freedom that comes with knowing the threat is gone.

  “Well, my parents make you forget they’re parents.”

  He laughed. “That’s true.”

  “I love the Mitchells, but the authority-figure air never quite goes away with them.” I lowered my voice even though at our new apartment in Studio City Fiona and I had walls thicker than matzo crackers for the first time in our adult lives. “I used to think they had a superiority complex, but they don’t. They just legitimately are the coolest, most accomplished, most brilliant people in the room. Every room. In case you ever wonder where Fiona gets it . . . there you go.”

  The volume of his voice matched mine. “I feel like I do okay with Landon. I mean, nothing in common—apart from everything, according to you—but he doesn’t put me on edge like Jocelyn does.”

  “For the first ten or fifteen years Fi and I were friends, Jocelyn called me Penny.” I replied to his baffled expression with a shrug. “Yeah, I don’t know why.”

  �
��I don’t think that woman and I have said more than three words to each other in the last year, and yet with each of those three words she somehow stole a piece of my soul.”

  I laughed much louder than I meant to, which led to us both silently approaching the kitchen door and listening intently to make sure we hadn’t been overheard. He hid behind the door while I poked my head out.

  “You guys doing okay? Can I get you anything?”

  Landon was flipping through television channels, and Jocelyn was thumbing through Fiona’s newest Harper’s Bazaar, and they looked about as relaxed as I had ever seen them. California agreed with them. There was something about going out without a jacket in February that people rarely got to experience in Stoneham, Massachusetts.

  “Don’t worry about us, sweetheart,” Jocelyn replied with a smile.

  “Any word from Fiona, Liam?” Landon asked, and Liam accidentally hit his forehead against the door he’d been eavesdropping against.

  I swallowed down the threatening giggle as he awkwardly made his way around the door in a way that I knew he hoped made it appear as if he’d been across the kitchen. “No, sir. Not yet.”

  They both returned to their distractions without another word, and Liam and I returned to the four or five dishes left in the sink.

  “You’re so smooth,” I whispered, and he laughed softly.

  We washed and dried side by side in silence, until he nudged me with his elbow and said, “So, how’ve you been?”

  I tilted my head and smiled at him quizzically. “You mean since we last spoke ten seconds ago?”

  “Nah, it’s never just you and me much anymore. We don’t get to talk about things. So . . . how are things? How’s work? Are you seeing anyone? How’s the screenplay?” He offered me a saucer, but when I went to grab it, he didn’t let go. “Hey! It’s Hamish MacDougal Day, isn’t it?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I thought we were calling it Ironic Day.”

  “What you choose to call it is between you and destiny. Makes no difference to me.”

  He smiled and released the saucer into my hands, and I groaned. After the last few rounds of February 4, I’d contemplated petitioning Congress or the United Nations or the Calendar Council or whoever was responsible for such things to strike the date from the records—sort of like how sometimes buildings didn’t have a thirteenth floor. A year prior I hadn’t become fully coherent until Liam and I were already through security and sitting at baggage claim, Liam on one side of me, Fiona on the other. He’d managed to convince the TSA officers that I was just jetlagged, but I for one was pretty convinced that I had just experienced a complete mental and emotional break. A whole lot of sleep and water improved that part of the outlook somewhat, but I was so embarrassed. Even still, a year later. Of what had happened, sure. But even more about what I’d thought was going to happen.