How to Look Happy

by Stacey Wiedower

  “We’d have lived in that neighborhood eventually,” he goes on. “I was one, maybe two years, tops, from a VP position. We’d have joined the club. Michelle would’ve played tennis with his wife. They would’ve gone shopping together, traded fucking nanny stories.” His voice is drenched in bitterness, and he takes another long, slow pull on his scotch.

  I reach to the table in front of me to pick up my own drink, a glass of deep red zinfandel. Before taking a sip, I ask, “What’s going to happen now?”

  “Oh, hell. I don’t know. I guess he’ll set her up in a new place, support her kid? I don’t even know if the wife knows about any of this. I wouldn’t be surprised if the dickwad’s living a double life.”

  “Mmm, that’s awful,” I murmur. I’ve been listening to Brandon talk about his ex-fiancée for a solid hour now—not exactly how I envisioned this night proceeding. Before tonight, I’d had the impression that Brandon hated her for what she’d done to him, but now I realize he hates her because he actually still loves her, and she doesn’t feel the same way.

  I know what a kick in the gut that is.

  “Yeah.” He stares down into his drink, and I feel a prick of sympathy.

  I reach up and lace my fingers into his—he has one arm slung across my shoulders against the back of the antique, tufted velvet sofa. “You’re better off without her.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and I glance up at his face. We had a good time together earlier in the night, at dinner and then the show. But then we came to Mollie’s, and he put back three glasses of whiskey in quick succession… Now he’s looking at me as if he’s seeing me for the first time since we got here.

  Something jumps inside my stomach, and I can tell he’s going to kiss me before he moves his head.

  Sure enough, in the next second his lips are against mine, soft and with the honey-sweet tang of his drink. He moves away briefly to set his glass on the table, and he takes my glass too. And then his lips are on my lips, and my head is so fully immersed in his kiss that I forget how bored I’ve been for the last hour as he treated me more like his therapist than his date.

  His right hand slides onto my leg, up my thigh, and pushes up my skirt, making me squirm a little, aware that we’re in a public place. “You’re a good kisser,” he breathes into my cheek, pausing to nuzzle me under my ear and then kissing along my jaw until he reaches my mouth again. I’d just been thinking the same thing about him.

  My breathing hitches when he moves his lips back to my ear. “Let’s get out of here,” he whispers, his breath rustling my hair and tickling my cheek. We’ve already paid our bill, so he threads his fingers through mine and stands, pulling me toward the door as if I don’t have a say in the matter.

  In the car, which I insist on driving, I find out he’s been living with his parents since he got back to town, so he wants to go to my house. This penetrates the sexed-up haze that’s overtaken my brain and makes me start to second-guess myself again. He’s been back for, what, two months? Much as I love my mom and dad, I can’t imagine any life circumstance that would compel me to move back into their house at age thirty-one. But then I rationalize that his heart’s been broken, and he’s hit rock bottom, and I squeeze his hand in the darkened car. The look he gives me gets me all charged up again.

  When I park his car in front of my house and walk up the steps with Brandon behind me, I’m remembering our last date, when I was seventeen, and thinking this night has a strange shroud of nostalgia that feels almost like a do-over.

  We’d gone to a theater that night too—a movie theater, not a live show—and ended the night as usual on the sectional sofa in his parents’ playroom. His parents weren’t home. There was a babysitter and the low drone of a TV downstairs, and his two younger brothers were in bed down the hall, but they weren’t asleep. Every few minutes a yelp or a giggle pierced the quiet. Brandon had the playroom TV on but on mute to give us warning if anybody approached. I was taut as a drum as he unbuttoned my shirt and slid it from my shoulders, my heart beating a hard, staccato rhythm as we moved around the bases faster than we ever had before.

  He’d wriggled my panties down and had his fingers inside me, kissing down my jaw and my neck just like he had tonight at the club. I was trembling, terrified, as he shrugged out of his boxers and guided my head into his lap. Just then a door opened down the hall—one of his brothers—and a few seconds later, we both froze as we heard the babysitter’s steps on the stairs. Brandon grabbed a blanket and covered us up, stuffing our clothes under the blanket with us. He turned the TV volume to a barely audible level so we could hear what was happening outside.

  The sitter never opened the playroom door, and his brother went back to bed. We lay there together, unmoving, until we didn’t hear another sound, but it didn’t matter. As soon as the coast was clear, I quickly pulled my clothes back on and asked if he could take me home.

  He broke up with me less than a week later.

  I’m still thinking about this once we’ve moved up my porch steps and crossed the threshold into my living room, bathed in a warm, golden glow from the lamp I left on beside the sofa. Simon barreling into the room quells my nerves, and I spend a few seconds squatting to pet him—awkward in my sexy shoes—before looking up and asking Brandon if he wants a drink.

  “Sure,” he says. “Got any scotch?”

  I shake my head. “All out,” I say in a dry voice. I’ve never even tasted scotch, let alone stocked my home bar with it. “How about some wine?”

  He nods and looks around. “Nice house,” he says.

  I’m wondering if he’s being polite or if he means it—with Brandon, it’s hard to tell. But I do have a nice house. Maybe not worthy of my profession, since I can’t afford a lot of the products I sell my wealthy clients, even at cost. But it’s comfortable, and I have a few nice pieces I’ve scored in my years as a designer—an Eames leather chair and ottoman given to me by a client who was moving and downsizing and a gorgeous original abstract I bought at a charity auction a couple years ago that hangs above my white-brick fireplace.

  While pouring the drinks, I take my phone out of my purse and swipe it open out of habit. I see that I have a new text. Even though the screen reads “Todd,” it takes me a minute to process who it’s from. We’ve never texted each other before, so when I click into the message it’s a brand new thread.

  How was Jersey Boys?

  I stare at the screen in surprise, an involuntary smile curling my lips. Just then, Brandon comes up behind me and puts his hand on my arm—I hadn’t even heard him approach, and I jump, the phone clattering out of my hand and onto the granite counter.

  “Need some help?” he asks in a low, gravelly voice. His lips on my neck leave me feeling confused, my head swirling with images of him and me tangled on his parents’ sofa, his hand on my leg in Mollie Fontaine, Todd’s unanswered text waiting on my phone’s screen.

  Why is Todd texting me?

  I glance at the phone, which landed facedown, and say, “Here, I’ve got it.”

  I hand Brandon his drink and pick up my own, glancing at the phone once more before turning away from it, leaving it there. Brandon takes a long swig from his glass and then runs his hand down my arm and laces his fingers through mine.

  “How about a tour?”

  I smile wryly, knowing there’s only one room in my house Brandon is interested in touring. My stomach gives another tug, and suddenly my hand is sweating in his. “Sure,” I say, my voice glib. I turn intentionally back toward the living room, buying myself as much time as possible to make sense of the thoughts swirling in my brain.

  “This is the living room,” I announce as we step from the hallway. His fingers release mine, and his hand moves to my back. I glance up at him. “You’ve already seen it, I guess.” My voice wavers just enough to punctuate the sentence with my nervousness.

  “Mmm-hmm,” he says. His lips twitch at the corners as he tugs down the zipper on the back of my dress about
an inch, turning my home tour into a striptease. My pulse is beating in my throat, and now the back of my neck is damp.

  “And this is the guest room,” I say as we weave through another door and turn down my back hallway. He barely spares it a glance, tugging harder on the zipper of my dress. We keep walking, and, my breathing erratic, I gesture to another room. “This is the laundry room.”

  “Yeah,” he says, and his voice is husky, low. The only place left to go is either up the back stairs or out the back door, and I fight my flight instinct to do the latter. The only rooms upstairs are two more bedrooms, including mine, and two baths. I start up the stairs, and he follows. I don’t even bother to point out my roommate’s old bedroom, which is still empty except for a few things I’ve shoved in there, out of the way.

  By the time we move inside my room, my zipper is all the way down, and his hand is inside my dress, skimming my back and moving to the edge of my panties. My skin is flushed, on fire, and my head is filled with a static buzz I can’t think through. I turn, which causes his hand to slip out of my dress, and see that he’s unbuttoned his own shirt, missing a button in the middle so it doesn’t open all the way.

  “And this is my room,” I breathe, my mouth dry as cotton. Then his lips are on mine, and wine sloshes from my full glass—I’m coherent enough to be glad I picked a white. I back out of his embrace and set the glass on my dresser, and he walks over and does the same thing with his empty glass, his gait unsteady. I try to calculate how many drinks he’s had.

  “I like it,” he murmurs, pulling me back to him and sliding my dress from my shoulders in the same movement. He peels it down until it falls in a puddle at my feet, leaving me standing in front of him in a nude, strapless push-up bra, matching lace panties, and my four-inch heels. I feel like a different person entirely—like this is a scene from a movie, not happening in my actual life.

  “God,” he says, his breath heavy on my neck. “You are so much hotter than you were in high school.”

  My jaw drops, and I push against his chest with one hand, pressing him away from me. He’s so unsteady that he staggers back a step, stunned. And then he flashes me that slow, disarming smile. “You know what I mean,” he says, his voice slurring slightly. “I’m drunk. I’m not saying this right.” He lurches toward me a step, and I cross my arms, which has the effect of deepening my cleavage. I realize this because his eyes are trained there rather than on my face. My skin is hot now for a different reason.

  “You’re beautiful,” he says and reaches for me. After several seconds, I reluctantly let him pull me back against him, and when he kisses me again it’s as good as before, as good as the club, and I kiss back in spite of myself. Within a couple of minutes, he’s stepped out of his shoes and fumbled open his pants, which drop to his feet as he pulls me down onto my bed.

  I have to help him manage the last button on his shirt, and I trace my fingers down his rock-hard stomach, thinking he must be in the gym every day to get abs like this. Not even my vain, weight-obsessed ex-fiancé has a body like Brandon’s.

  My pulse is pounding, and my thoughts are fuzzy again when he asks if I have anything, to the point that it takes me a second to realize what he’s talking about. “Oh,” I say. “Oh.” I push back from him and off the bed and move into my bathroom. I open my medicine cabinet, where a box of condoms has rested untouched for probably more than a year, since I’m on the pill and Jeremy’s and my frequency had diminished anyway in the last two or three years—because he was getting it elsewhere, I realize, not because he was tired, as he claimed.

  There are four condoms left in the box, and I rip one off, glancing at myself in the mirror as I do.

  My cheeks are flushed with red and so is my chest, where Brandon’s five o’clock shadow has rubbed angry-looking streaks into the sensitive skin. Even in his drunken state he managed to unhook my bra, so I’m nearly naked—and out of the God-forsaken heels, which were making me feel one step away from the champagne and strawberries scene in Pretty Woman.

  I start to walk away but then turn back for one last glance. I take a long, shaky breath and ask myself if this is really what I want. I have no answer, and my imploring eyes in the mirror are no help at all.

  I leave the room and try not to think about anything, anything at all, as I move back toward Brandon and my bed.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Two Steps Back

  “What?” Carrie shrieks as I pull the phone from my ear. “He…just…what??”

  I explain what happened again, calmly. Last night I felt the same way Carrie does now, but I’ve had time to process this turn of events, get over it, and, if I’m being honest with myself, realize it’s for the best. After all, not even I knew what I wanted last night.

  “So you didn’t… He couldn’t?” She can’t even say it, and I can’t help myself—I giggle. After a couple seconds, she starts giggling too, even though this is so not funny.

  “No, we definitely didn’t,” I say. “And he definitely couldn’t.” I pause for a couple seconds, a jumble of embarrassing images in my head. “I mean, he could, or he did, but he just couldn’t, um…seal the deal.” I shake my head, my cheeks going pink even though this is Carrie I’m talking to. “Can we just use real words? This is making it worse.”

  She laughs again. “No, no. That’s okay. I don’t think I need the details.”

  When I walked back into my bedroom last night, Brandon’s eyes were closed, and his mouth was open—he was an inch away from being completely passed out. I guess I was in the bathroom a couple minutes longer than necessary, and he was definitely drunk, but still. After being so worked up, it was a shock to find him in that state. Not to mention insulting.

  I sank onto the edge of the bed, and he stirred, reaching over to me and pulling me down beside him. We kissed and messed around for a little while, but the fire wasn’t as hot as it had been before. And when the time came to move beyond kissing, he lost his…ability to make it happen.

  At first I felt stung, rejected, but he was so apologetic and ashamed that I couldn’t feel anything but sorry for him. Slurring his words, he mumbled that it happened sometimes when he’d been drinking, and it wasn’t me, which made me wonder what exactly had happened in his almost-marriage. And then he passed out for real, and I covered him up and went downstairs to sleep in my guest room.

  When I woke up this morning I heard him snoring upstairs, so I tiptoed into my room to change and then left to buy fruit and eggs from the market around the corner from my house. When he came down around 9:30, showered and dressed in the clothes he’d worn last night, I was making French toast with blueberries and humming to myself, feeling oddly like I’d gotten away with something, though I wasn’t sure what it was.

  Brandon came up behind me and kissed me on the back of the neck. “I’m sorry,” he whispered in my ear. “I’ll make it up to you.”

  I leaned around and looked over my shoulder at him, skeptical. “Do you even remember what happened last night?”

  He flinched slightly and pulled away from me, turning his head to avoid my eyes. “I have a pretty good idea.”

  Breakfast came with a side of awkward small talk. I couldn’t wait for him to leave, and I know he was eager to go, but neither of us wanted to be the one to admit defeat. Finally, he got up and walked toward the door, and I followed, Simon on my heels. I couldn’t believe it when he turned to me, kissed me until I was breathless, and said, “Can I have a do-over? Next Friday night?”

  My mouth opened and then closed again. I had no idea what to say, and still, after forty-five minutes of thinking about it, I’m not sure what I should have said. But what I did say was, “Um, okay.” He kissed me again and then ran out my front door and down the porch steps, and I closed the door and ran for my phone.

  I’d intended to call Carrie, but the instant I picked the phone up I remembered the text I’d received from Todd the night before. I opened the thread and smiled to myself, then carried my phone over t
o my couch and curled up in one corner. Simon jumped up after me and stretched out over my feet, happy to have me to himself—he’d disappeared last night after Brandon walked in, which was weird. He’s usually not skittish around strangers.

  I read the text again—How was Jersey Boys?—with the smile still on my lips.

  Without really thinking about it, I typed back, Awesome. You should go.

  I waited several minutes for a return text, scrolling through Facebook in the meantime. I saw that Brandon had posted a selfie we’d taken in the theater just before the show started and tagged me in it. It was a great picture, especially of him, and it already had fifty-three likes—most of them from people we went to high school with.

  I can only imagine the gossip that single photo is inspiring—it almost makes what happened last night worth it.

  Almost but not quite.

  When ten minutes passed with no return text, I gave up and called Carrie. For some reason I didn’t tell her about the text from Todd, and for some reason I still don’t want to. Instead I tell her that Brandon asked me out again for next weekend.

  “You said no, right?” she asks, her voice wary.

  “Weeeell,” I say, and she groans.

  “What?” I continue, defensive. “Last night you were practically pushing me into bed with him.”

  “That’s because you needed it,” she says. “And you didn’t get it. I know you said you feel sorry for him, but I’m not sure he deserves a second chance. You can do better.”

  This was his second chance, I think, my mind turning again to Brandon’s and my last high school date. Last night wound up being more of a re-creation of that date than I could ever have imagined. Apparently Brandon plus Jen equals sexual frustration—not the answer I’d have picked on a multiple choice test.