by Brooke Moss
“I’d like to propose a toast to my future wife.” Gabe straightened the vintage Armani tie I’d given him for his birthday, and smoothed his starched button-down shirt. A lump formed in my throat as he raised her tiny hand to his mouth and kissed it.
This was too much. I was going to be sick.
My mother laughed nervously. “For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together.” Image was everything to my ex-beauty-queen mother, and it was clear that she didn’t want anyone else to catch on that I was crying at the dinner table.
Gabe’s smile softened a bit as we shared a brief moment. If he saw that I was crying, he didn’t acknowledge it. He raised his glass to me, his action barely noticeable to the chattering crowd around us. I grinned wide, showing as many teeth as possible, as if that would prove my loyalty to him. When he turned to his aunt, my facade faltered, dropping from my face as quickly as I’d plastered it there. I looked at my lap and noticed that my melting makeup had left several dark spots on my circle skirt.
This can’t be. This just can’t be…
Gabe took his seat and leaned over to kiss his new fiancée on the cheek. I sniffled, thankful the chorus of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” covered the sound of my meltdown. While wiping my running mascara, I caught Nora’s eye.
Her face was not what I would have expected from the mother of a happy, newly engaged man. It was somber as her eyes locked firmly on mine. Her mouth had turned down, and her eyes were wide and sad. As Nora Parker sat there among all of the celebrators, champagne being poured, she mouthed three words to me that I never expected.
“I’m so sorry.”
Chapter Three
October 1, 2006
There were so many times growing up when Gabe and I were there for each other in a way that no one else could be. When his grandpa died, I was the one who held him for an hour while he sobbed. And he was the one who made me countless playlists for my iPod to drown out the sound of my mom, aka the former Miss Texas, entertaining a new boyfriend.
I left the Parkers’ house shortly after, stumbling to the door while everyone called out pie preferences. My chest was cracked open, leaving my heart raw and exposed. Every daydream I’d ever had about my future now lay sliced into pieces like the Christmas turkey.
The typical Christmas-in-Seattle rain was coming down in sheets now, matching my mood. As soon as I was a safe distance from the front windows of the house, I’d dropped a long string of expletives and stomped along the sidewalk, casting sprays of icy rainwater all over my legs. I’d gotten a block down the street before I’d heard the familiar, deep voice calling my name. “Hey, Vi!”
I swung around to see Gabe jogging toward me. He wasn’t wearing a coat, so his button-down shirt was soaked, and his arms and chest were visible through the fabric. It looked like a scene out of a chick flick. He was practically moving in slow motion.
I glanced at my reflection in the window of a car parked along the street and groaned another handful of swear words. The rain had drenched my hair while I’d struggled to open my umbrella, and it was now hanging around my neck in clumps. My face was bright red from crying, and my makeup was reduced to streaks running down my cheeks. I looked like a scary clown.
Gabe took my shoulders in his hands. “Why are you leaving? What’s wrong? My mom won’t cut the pies without you.”
I lifted the umbrella high enough to cover his head. “I’m…I just have a stomachache.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Gimme a break—look at you.”
“Gee, thanks.” I wiped at my stained face with the sleeve of my coat.
He released that deep laugh that always made my toes curl. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, you’ve been crying.”
“Oh, yeah…well…I…” I looked away and pretended to scan the street for the bus.
“What gives?”
I should have known I wasn’t going to escape Christmas dinner in tears without being interrogated.
I forced a weak simper. “The flu, that’s all.”
The sound of the rain on my umbrella nearly drowned out his voice. “Are you upset about Alicia and me getting engaged?”
“I…I just…” My emotions bubbled back up to the surface. Shock, despair, and anger churned in my gut like a stew. “Okay, seriously, Gabe. The last time we talked, you didn’t mention the fact that you were even considering proposing to Alicia. In fact, you sent me an e-mail saying you were ending things with her. What the hell?”
Gabe looked down at the wet sidewalk. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“We tell each other everything.” I glared. “Why wouldn’t you tell me something as major as this?”
“I didn’t…” He paused and scrubbed his hand across the back of his neck. “I didn’t want to surprise you. And I knew that if I saw you or talked to you, I would blurt it out.”
“You thought it would be better for me to find out over a plate of stuffing with twenty people around?”
His face turned red, and he looked up at me with those light-blue eyes. “I’d hoped so.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I glanced up the street, focusing on the peaks of my mother’s roof visible behind the trees. Anything except Gabe. “You’re my best friend. Why wouldn’t you want to talk to me about this, of all things?”
He put his hands into his pockets, and his shoulders slumped. “I thought that considering our history—”
“I would take the news better in a crowd?” Wrapping my arms around myself, I willed myself to stop trembling. I’d cried enough for one holiday.
“Look…I know you don’t like Alicia, and I didn’t want to hear your opinion about it.” Gabe touched my elbow and stepped closer to me.
I grimaced. Of course he didn’t. Gabe was the one person over the past twenty-five years who’d never hurt me on purpose. He was my one constant in a life full of changes and disruptions. And we were always honest with each other. Well, mostly.
“I know.” My breath caught when I saw how earnest Gabe looked. I swallowed back the speech I’d planned before Christmas dinner, and how much I wanted to press my lips to his, and prove to him how much we were meant to be together. I just couldn’t do it. He was so happy, and so…in love. “And…I’m happy for you,” I said, my voice low.
His sigh sounded grateful. “Do you really mean that?”
“Of course I do.”
Alicia poked her head out the front door and waved at me, and the lump returned to my throat.
I gave Gabe’s chest a gentle push. “You’ve got to go back. Alicia is looking for you. Go have some chocolate silk for me.”
He squeezed my arm. “You sure you don’t want to come back? Pie is good for bellyaches.”
“That would just make things worse.” The last thing I was capable of was watching Gabe feed his birdlike fiancée bites of my mother’s chocolate pie. “I should go.”
“All right…but we always spend Christmas together. It doesn’t feel right without you.”
I nodded. I already knew that. Just then, the bus peeked over the hill and grumbled toward us. “I’ve gotta go. Give your parents a hug for me.”
“Okay, then.” Gabe started to walk backward, his world-famous knee-melting smile returning to his face. “Merry Christmas, Vi.”
I watched him turn and dart through the rain. It felt like he was dragging my heart on the sidewalk behind him. I walked to where the bus was idling and released a long, guttural sigh. This would go down in the record books as my worst Christmas ever.
I cursed myself for loving a man who was in love with someone else. “Merry Christmas.”
Chapter Four
September 28, 2005
Even as I cleared out my locker and plucked Gabe’s photo from the door, I could still see the anger on his face when it occurred to him what had gone on. Or what he thought had gone on. And once I saw that S.O.B. Cameron Hakes, leering at me from the end of the hall, that was enough. I ran from Wallingford High School as fast as I could. Never
looked back.
In a few short months, I was going to watch the man I loved marry Alicia Von Longorial, the model-slash-waitress. I would have to find a way to watch the ceremony without knocking the bride over and trying to pull her hair out. I knew it wouldn’t be difficult to beat her up. She really was very skinny.
I rubbed at my chest, which felt gutted like a jack-o’-lantern. Burying my face in my pillow, I groaned. I didn’t want to feel like this forever. This dull ache had to go away eventually. Maybe there was something to what Betsy and Kim were suggesting. Maybe moving on and—gulp—dating someone who wasn’t Gabe was just the thing.
Anything would beat lying around sniffling over a man who’d chosen someone else.
Kim pounded on the bathroom door. “Why won’t you come out and talk to us? We have ice cream.”
“And spiked eggnog!” Betsy shouted from the living room.
I sighed heavily and opened the bathroom door before plunking back down onto the toilet seat, a dozen wads of tear-soaked tissue gathered around my feet like snowballs. “Gabe proposed to Alicia this morning.”
“He what?” Kim’s voice was so shrill it practically made our windows rattle.
“Shhh, Mr. Landski is going to beat on the floor with a broom again,” Betsy said.
“Oh, let him.” Kim’s footsteps were heavy as she strode from the bathroom to the kitchen. “I thought they broke up!”
I forced myself up and followed her. “Well, they made up. And now he’s marrying her.”
Kim opened the freezer and presented me with a container of ice cream and a spoon. “The bastard really proposed to her?”
“She’s all wrong for him.” I peeled the lid off the fudge ice cream and climbed onto the stationary bike we had in the corner of our living room. “Good Lord, she’s a poster child for eating disorders. And she’s such a…snob. A snoot, too.”
“I think that’s the same thing.” Betsy never took her eyes off the television screen. She and Kim were watching a rerun of Little House on the Prairie when I’d barreled through the apartment door and made a beeline for the bathroom.
“Wait, wait. Didn’t you tell me she volunteers in a soup kitchen?” Kim asked.
Betsy pushed up her glasses. “And reads to blind people in an old folks’ home?”
I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “Ugh. Who cares? She’s horrid. Nobody’s caught on to it yet, that’s all.”
When my roommates exchanged a raised-eyebrow glance riddled with doubt, I added, “Do you know what she had to drink at the dinner tonight? A cup of hot water with a lemon slice. She looked right at her future mother-in-law, who was standing there with a bottle of Taittinger, and asked for a cup of hot water with lemon. What, is she seventy-three years old? Is she saving her voice to sing the national anthem tomorrow? Is she freakin’ Aretha Franklin or something?”
Kim snorted. “Well, maybe she’s thin and frail because she’s actually an old lady in disguise, and one of your stepdad’s best Botox patients.”
I almost chuckled. My most recent stepdad, Curtis, was my mother’s fourth husband, and the one who’d stuck around the longest. I’d never be sure if my mom kept him around because he was the love of her life or because she got free face-lifts. It didn’t matter. Curtis was a good guy. So I tried not to complain.
I scoffed. “She’s thin and frail because she is a model.”
Kim peeled her eyes from the television screen. “Gabe’s marrying a model? He must be so proud.”
I shoved another bite of ice cream into my mouth and hit the tension button on the bike’s display. “She’s a model-slash-waitress. She’s apparently working the dinner shift at Mizithra’s between modeling gigs.”
“Oooh, good manicotti there.” Betsy rubbed her tummy. “Think she can get us in without reservations?”
“Not helping, babe.” Kim patted her girlfriend’s leg. “Violet always finds something wrong with all of Gabe’s girlfriends. You know…’cuz they’re not her.”
“That’s clearly an exaggeration.” I stopped pedaling long enough to pluck the lump of chocolate off the front of my dress and lick my fingers. “I guess I learned my lesson. I should have told him how I felt a long time ago.”
Betsy slapped her hand down on her knee. “You see? Haven’t I been telling you that for years?”
“Don’t gloat,” I grumbled. Kim and Betsy’s faces were turned back to Little House on the Prairie, the sound of the closing credits playing softly, both of them somber now that Laura and Pa had enjoyed their bonding moment.
I climbed off the stationary bike and sat next to where they were cuddling on our leopard-print couch. “Okay… You guys were right, and I was wrong. I should have told Gabe that he deserves to be with someone who would always treat him like gold.”
Kim looked at me pointedly. “What’s to say that Bulimia Betty won’t treat him like gold?”
“He should be with someone who knows him inside and out. He should be with…” My voice trembled, and I stopped speaking.
“You?” Betsy finished.
I nodded sadly. “Yes. But he doesn’t love me back anymore. Not that way.”
Kim’s spindly arm pulled me close. “Why didn’t he tell you before it happened? Don’t you two tell each other everything?”
Betsy snorted. “To a sickening degree.”
The relationship between Kim, Betsy, and Gabe had never exactly taken flight. They thought he was pompous and overconfident, and he thought they were loud, brash freaks.
Kim’s voice shook me out of my thoughts. “This really is happening fast. They’ve been dating for what? Two months?”
“Four.” My stomach clenched. “Four months, two weeks, and three days…not that I’m counting.”
“Maybe now’s the time to try getting to know her.” Betsy offered me a shrug. “Since he’s marrying her and all.”
I shook my head vehemently. “She already hates me.”
Kim started flipping through the television channels. “I thought she was nice to you.”
“She is. But I can tell that she doesn’t like me.” I plucked a stray pink feather off the pillow. “It’s there. Under the surface. Waiting to come out.”
I remembered the day Gabe introduced me to Alicia. Though no one else had noticed it, Alicia’s eyes narrowed to slits when his hand touched me, or when he laughed at one of my jokes. I recognized that glare. I’d been through it a time, or two, or seven. It was another case of Gabe’s hot girlfriend who secretly loathed the outcast he called his best friend.
Betsy sucked in a sharp breath. “Okay, so when is the blessed event?”
My eyes filled, but I swallowed the lump in my throat. “My mom already texted me. They announced the date over pie. May fifteenth.”
“The rat bastard is getting married on your birthday?” Kim hissed.
I nodded, my shoulders slumping. “It’s the only time her parents can get off work, or some stupid family crap like that. And don’t call Gabe a rat bastard.”
Betsy rubbed her temples tiredly. “Well, he’s getting married on his best friend’s birthday. Oh, and it happens to be the best friend who is also in love with him. Yes, he is a rat bastard.”
“What was he supposed to do?” I asked. “Tell his fiancée that he can’t get married on the date she picked because his best friend needs him available for her pizza party? I don’t think so.”
She cleared her throat and looked at me with a humorless expression. “All right, then. So he’s getting married on your birthday. Fine. When between now and your birthday do you plan on telling him that you love him?”
I gave her a one-shouldered shrug. “Well, obviously…never.”
Kim bolted upright. “You mean to tell me that you’re going to let the man of your dreams marry someone else, on your damn birthday, without ever letting him know that you’ve been in love with him for, like, a million years?”
I wiped my nose. “I’m not about to take away from Gabe’s happiness just because I ha
ve something to get off my chest. What if it was you two getting married and I decided to profess my love for you in the midst of your wedding plans?” I jumped up from the couch, not waiting for an answer. “He’s in love. He’s deliriously happy, and right now I need to be the best friend he’s ever had.”
“It’s different with you and Gabe. I’ve seen it in his eyes, too. I swear I have.”
I shook my head defiantly and headed for my bedroom. “I appreciate the fact that you guys want to help me so much with this, and I love you for it.”
“Does that mean you’re going to fight for him?” Betsy asked.
I pictured Gabe holding Alicia’s hand, grinning like the happiest man in the world, and my chest felt heavy. “I don’t know if I can.”
Kim raked a hand through her short hair. “But what about you? Who’s going to support you while you watch him marry someone else?”
I turned around and pointed my finger at them. “You guys are.”
“Ugh. Yes, you know that we’re going to support you,” Betsy replied. “And it’s going to suck.”
“I realize that.” I smiled at her weakly. “There will undoubtedly be gross amounts of ice cream consumed.”
She eyeballed the empty Häagen Dazs container across the room. “I don’t doubt that.”
“What you really need is to move on,” Kim said. “You need to get out there. Make out with someone new. Maybe go to bed with a few guys—”
“Good Lord!” I laughed despite my watery eyes. “Just because my heart is broken doesn’t mean I’m going to start bed hopping.”
Betsy elbowed her girlfriend. “What she means is…Violet, you need to give some thought to dating other people.”
I bit my lip. “I know.”
She nodded knowingly. “We’ll find someone for you. You can start slow, with a coffee date. Then work up to lunch.”
“Let the record show that I do not support your decision not to tell Gabe that you love him.” Kim growled. “I stand firmly against that decision.”