by K. L. Kreig
“This is awful,” I lament, studying the little white misshapen flowers that are scattered on it. “Where did I even get this?”
My mother. It has to be from my mother. Christmas. Three years ago. Ah yes, it’s all coming back to me now.
“It’s cute and summery.”
“It’s revolting. And it’s February.”
“These will look adorable with it.” She hands me a pair of plain ivory Sketchers with matching silk laces, as if I haven’t said a word in protest. Dammit, I hate that she’s right. They would look cute. On someone else.
“Carmen, no.” I toss them to the floor. “I am perfectly capable of dressing myself.”
“Laurel…” She turns me around, so my back is to her. She starts to lift my shift up and over my head. Like a child in defiance, I shove my hands across my body and beneath each opposite armpit, a death grip now on the silky fabric.
“Oh my God, stop,” I demand.
“I refuse to let you out of this house looking like you’ve walked straight from the pages of a comic book. Dios mios.”
Not giving up, Carmen abandons my dress and moves to my leggings, and because my hands are otherwise occupied, she successfully strips them down to my ankles in one fell swoop. I screech and fight her, but they’re like soft, stretchy shackles holding me prisoner.
“I’m not even going to comment on the undies. Gross.”
“Except you just did,” I tell her.
While Carmen wrestles with my pants, mumbling something in Spanish, I catch our reflection in the mirror.
Carmen’s midnight-black hair is tousled, now wild and out of place. The ruby-red lipstick she applied with perfection is smudged on the two pristine-white front teeth she’s dug into her lower lip. Her eyes are bugged and crazy. My dress is bunched in a wad beneath my utilitarian white bra, which matches the white grannie panties settled neatly over my belly button. They are gross, but dammit, they are comfortable.
I look so ridiculous; we look so ridiculous that I start to laugh. I laugh so hard that Carmen, still fierce and determined, joins me and gives up her fight with my leggings. I laugh so hard Meringue runs from the room, hissing her displeasure. I laugh so hard, I eventually lose my balance and topple to the floor, luckily missing the corner edge of every piece of furniture in my pint-sized bedroom on the way down. I laugh so hard I pee myself a little.
“I think I dislocated my shoulder,” Carmen whines between giggles and hiccups.
“You’ll live.”
“You’re heartless.”
“I love you,” I tell her, turning my head to face her. Carmen has been my best friend since college. I am an introvert and keep my circle intensely small, but when I met Carmen in an elective drama class in a failed attempt to “open up,” she stomped her way right into my life and locked the door behind her.
She clutches my hand in hers. “Te quiero tambien, hermana.” Sister. She’s the closest thing I have left to one.
I squeeze my eyes shut, remembering the smattering of freckles dotting the bridge of Esther’s nose. She would have liked the dress. And that’s always the point, isn’t it?
“Hand it over.” I am resigned as I hold out my hand for the butt-ugly dress that’s fallen on the other side of her, just out of my reach. I turn it over in my hands, keenly aware the tag is missing. Another of my mother’s tricks, so I can’t return it. “Did you get this from the back of my closet?”
“Of course.” With ease, she pops herself to her feet, not bobbling at all on her strappy cream wedges. She extends a hand to help me up. “That’s where all the good stuff is.”
“You mean Candice’s collectibles?” That’s what I’ve named my mother’s attempts at changing my wardrobe to her liking instead of mine.
“Hey,” she says gently, placing a hand on my shoulder. “You be you.” She knows the struggles I’ve had with my mother over the years, this being one of many. “Lo siento. I’m sorry. If you want to wear that—” She pauses, visibly choking the words out. “You should.”
“Nah. You’re right. It’s…what did you say?” I toss my gaze up to the ceiling, pretending to think. “Comic-bookish?”
She winces. “That may have been rather harsh.”
“But true.”
With a few ballet-like moves, I rid myself of leggings that could be seen from the space station. In short order I don the new dress and try not to pull at the stretchy fabric that I think shows too much cleavage and clings too tightly to my full hips. I tie my shoes quickly and primp my hair, more for effect than concern. Finally, I remove the large hoop earrings and stick a classic pearl stud in each ear.
“You look great,” Carmen tells me, adding on a catcall for effect.
I stare at myself for a full ten seconds. I actually do. Sleek yet casual. Dirty mustard looks good on me. Not sure how I feel about that.
“Guess I’m ready.”
While Carmen beelines out of my bedroom, I slip my hands between my legs to check the status of my underwear. Damp. I should probably change them, but…nah, they’ll do. Not like anyone’s going to be up in them anyway.
I quickly follow her to the door and swipe my cross-body purse as I pass the island. I lock my apartment door behind me with a snick. Carmen throws an arm around my shoulder as we head to my car. I like to drive. I like being in control of my own destiny, or the illusion of it anyway. We each slip into our respective sides. Carmen immediately puts down the sun visor and opens the mirror. She smooths her hair back into place and reapplies her lipstick, removing the stain from her teeth. She then grins from ear to ear.
“You ready to meet tu amado?”
Your beloved.
“Carmen.”
“What?” She is as transparent as saran wrap.
“I thought this was a girl’s night?”
“It is.”
Carmen may be a brash, sassy, rough-around-the-edges Puerto Rican woman on the outside, but inside she’s all goo. A romantic at heart. She’s been with her boyfriend, Manny, since she was sixteen. They’ll marry, but she she’s making him earn it. “Don’t propose to me until your credit score is at least seven-hundred and fifty,” she always tells him. He thinks it’s in jest. I know otherwise.
She wants me to have what she does. I don’t know that I ever will, because the love that Carmen and Manny share is uncommonly rare. It’s both sickening and enviable. I have had one serious relationship in my twenty-eight years. Johnny “Ace” Wallace. I dated him for precisely six months and two weeks in my junior year of college. He had a big ego and even bigger gambling problem. You’d think the nickname would have been a dead giveaway. Things sort of fizzled out when I discovered he’d stolen and pawned my dead grandmother’s three-carat emerald ring, which was handed down to me. I got the ring back. He got prison time. I’ve been pretty gun-shy since then.
“I have a good feeling about tonight, Laurel.”
Carmen and her “feelings.”
“I’m glad someone does,” I drone, my skin suddenly a bit too tight for my body. Isn’t there a liquor store on the way to the restaurant?
“You’ll see.”
Carmen fiddles with the radio and starts singing along with Michael Bublé’s smooth jazzy beat on “Haven’t Met You Yet.” She croons at the top of her lungs and sways to the music.
She keeps singing, turning to me as if to say, “See? It’s serendipity. Today is the day.”
Arguing is pointless. Two can play this game.
I ease out of the parking lot and take a left, heading in the direction of downtown Nashville. I love this city that I’ve called home for the last nine years. It vibrates with life and vitality. It also vibrates with tourists trying to get in a one-night stand before they fly cross-country back to their fiancées or wives. No thanks. Hard pass.
“Don’t try to hook me up, Carmen. I mean it.”
“Would I do that?”
I press the brakes a bit too hard at the four-way stop, and our seatbelts kick in as the f
orce of gravity drives us forward. “Yes. Yes, you would. You have. You do it All. The. Time. I am happy alone.”
“No one is happy alone,” she counters, believing what she says to be true.
“I am.” I poke my finger into the middle of my breastbone a little too hard. Ouch. “I am happy alone.” Mostly. Sometimes. Fine…someone to cuddle with could be nice once in a while. Definitely not on the regular.
She shrugs, but those large dark eyes belie her If you’re happy, I’m happy speech.
We stay this way, our gazes locked in a duel, until the impatient honk of a horn behind us forces me to move.
I skip the liquor store, eyeing it longingly as we drive past. Our twenty-minute ride to the Gulch ends up being filled with meaningless chatter, and by the time I pull up to the valet outside of Sambuca, I’m feeling marginally better. We quickly spot our friends, Wendy and Yvette, whom I absolutely adore. They gush over my outfit and the touch of rosy posy matte lipstick I swiped on earlier, and I relax even more.
A round of hugs and kisses later, I enter one of my favorite restaurants in the city, all but forgetting the man I haven’t met yet.
2
Nice To Meet Ya
Laurel
Ten Years Earlier
February 9, 10:48 p.m.
* * *
I sit comfortably in a worn and oversized armchair that doesn’t match any of the others around me. It wobbles and protests every time I move, and I wonder how many people have sat in it before me, enjoying the wash of smooth jazz flowing through their blood the way I am.
We’re so close to the stage, I could reach out and touch the pianist. He’s good-looking and I’m feeling so sassy in my mustard yellow dress that I might even flirt with him if he were paying me any attention. But he’s not. It’s Carmen who has his eye, though she’s doing nothing to overtly encourage him. She has her Manny and while men may fall at her feet, she does nothing to bring them to their knees. They do that all on their own.
Wendy and Yvette left us after a fabulous dinner. Wendy teaches Sunday school and has to be up at the crack of dawn and Yvette has a two-year-old at home, with another on the way. I was tired and looking forward to getting home early myself, but Carmen insisted that ten o’clock is when the party starts, not ends. Sometimes it’s easier to give in than to argue, so here we are after leaving Sambuca, at one of the best jazz clubs in Nashville in my opinion.
“What can I get you?”
I take my attention from hot piano man to the petite waitress now standing over me. Her skirt is short, and her bulb cheeks are flushed. It’s clear she is hurried and stressed. Her gaze bores into me urgently, making me feel as if I don’t order right now, I will forfeit my right to order a drink altogether.
“Water.”
“Water?” she repeats with no shortage of contempt.
Suddenly I feel pressured. This venue is small. She’s likely living on her paltry tips to pay her rent or perhaps her father’s medical bills, and even though I limit myself to one drink when I’m driving, a free water isn’t going to help her in the least.
“Ah…a lemon drop martini?”
“You sure?” She blinks rapidly. I know she knows she’s capitalizing on my distress.
“Do you have beer instead?”
She heaves a sigh and cocks a hip, clearly annoyed at my stupid question. “Yes, we have beer.”
“What kinds do you have?”
She rolls her eyes toward the ceiling and with an overexaggerated sigh starts reciting your standard list of domestic beers: “Bud, Bud Light, Coors, Coors Light…” None of which I am interested in. I don’t even really like beer.
“Is the martini not good?” I ask after she finishes her beer dissertation, indecision on the best cocktail weighing me down. To my right, Carmen is snickering with a shake of her head.
I do this all the time. I will agonize over a meal or a drink or a pair of sandals before I am forced to make a decision. Which may be the real reason my closet hasn’t seen an influx of new items except for my mother’s in nearly a decade.
“The martini is fine.” The waitress, sans name tag, glares down at me. She’s about over me. I don’t blame her. “Best martini in town,” she adds, unconvincingly, before throwing a glance to a table about six feet to my right. They are starting to get impatient waiting on me to make up my mind so they, too, can get their drink on, though it appears they’ve had a few too many of those already.
“You know what, just surprise me.”
“Surprise you?”
Wow. You’d think I’d asked her to donate her only remaining kidney to a serial killer.
“Yes. House special is fine.”
“Okaaaay.” Without a second glance, our brusque waitress bounces off on her high heels, relieved to be rid of me. I’m slightly worried what she’ll bring back.
“What’d you go with?” Carmen asks me, voice pitched low as to not interrupt those around us.
This isn’t a traditional downtown Nashville bar. There aren’t throngs of people packed wall to wall like sardines. There is no drunk groping or girls puking in bathroom stalls. There aren’t hookups in dark corners on rooftops or dirty dancing around the stage to music so loud you’ll end up hoarse by the end of the night trying to scream over it. Rudy’s Jazz Club isn’t what I’d call classy, per se, but it is eclectic and intimate and, in my opinion, the best place in town for Louisiana-style red beans and rice and incredibly talented musicians who simply love their craft.
I shrug in response to Carmen’s question. She smiles that engaging smile of hers before fishing her phone out of her clutch. By the way her entire being lights up, it has to be Manny. Her fingers fly across the lit screen, clearly replying to a text, and as she easily slips the phone back into her purse, she swings her eyes to me.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing, chica. Everything is fine.”
She taps her fingers in a quick rhythm against her leg. I know that particular fidget. And I generally don’t like what follows it.
I squeeze my eyebrows together, my forehead bunching up as I scrutinize her. “What are you up to?”
“Why do you always think I’m up to something?”
“Because you always are,” is on its way out of my mouth, but there is a lull in the music at the tail end of Carmen’s reply as the band ends one song and starts up another, and Carmen’s high-pitched “something” echoes off the walls in those few empty seconds. I sense eyes from the entire room fall upon us in judgment. Someone whispers a rather uncalled for, “Shut up, bitch,” and Carmen slowly turns around in the general direction our little scolding came from.
Uh-oh.
This is the thing about Carmen. She grew up in the one of the roughest parts of Miami referred to by the locals as “down south.” Her father was killed in a bar fight when she was eight years old. Her three older brothers are all currently doing prison time. One for drug running, his fifth count. One for domestic assault. And one for first-degree murder and attempted robbery. Carmen’s mother was chronically ill, but she still worked odd jobs in an attempt to bridge the gap of what the government couldn’t provide and the basics of what was needed for her family to survive. Though Mrs. Morales was not about to let her only daughter travel down the same path as her three older brothers, no one escapes that type of environment unscathed. Carmen was molded straight from that Miami neighborhood where she grew up and when she feels attacked in any way, shape, or form, she quickly morphs back into the girl who ultimately won every street fight she was in and has the scars to prove it.
But while Carmen could absolutely hold her own, I would just as soon avoid getting the snot beaten out of me in some alley after we leave. Reaching across the space that separates us, I grab Carmen’s hand, attempting a not-so-sly diversion.
“Hey, where do you think our drinks are?”
The band has been playing on, but a quick sweep of the room shows that we have now become everyone’s entertainment,
instead of the best jazz and R&B in all of Nashville.
“It’s been a good fifteen minutes, I’m sure of it,” I blather on. It hasn’t. It’s been a good fifteen seconds. Still, I pretend I’m searching for our waitress, but instead I make eye contact with the table of girls who stared me down earlier for taking too long to order and mouth, “I’m sorry.” Luckily, all but the one with pencil-thin lips and a bride-to-be sash seem to be aligned with me in avoiding an all-out catfight. Three sets of hands land on the woman who told Carmen to zip it—she’s half Carmen’s size. What was she thinking? As they yank her back down, I jerk on Carmen’s arm until she rips her attention back toward me, a string of Spanish expletives rolling fluidly off her tongue.
Suddenly I’m grateful for my earlier indecisiveness. I could use that “house special” about now. I scan around and lament, “Where is she…” but my voice fades into nothingness when I spot an insanely magnetic man with the most intense smoldering stare, I’ve ever seen.
And he’s watching…me?
No.
Why would he be watching me?
Everyone is watching you, Laurel. You’re nothing special; you’re a spectacle. That’s all.
Self-conscious, I ignore him, turning my attention back to the band. But try as I might, I sense his eyes on me. Assessing. And I begin to fidget like I have fire ants nesting in my granny panties. I smooth down my skirt. I cross my legs. I uncross and cross them the opposite way.
Those eyes. Wow.
I twist a chunk of hair into a corkscrew. I shake my foot and lick my lips.
Don’t look. Don’t. Look.
I don’t. But I do pick at my peeling nail polish. I do chew off a hangnail on my left ring finger. And I do resist the urge to validate that the gorgeous man has moved on to someone else.
Because why wouldn’t he?
Mi amado.
My beloved.
Could it…?
Nooo. It can’t be. He’s not. Don’t be ridiculous, Laurel.
I scratch a nonexistent itch on my knee.