She's With Stupid

by Amanda Dennis

  “She and Ethan were totally doing it.”

  “We were not!” Emilie threw the pizza crust at Kate’s face as her blush spread down to her arms and chest.

  Kate’s mouth dropped when the crust hit her squarely on the nose. She picked it up and used it to point accusingly at Emilie. “You are such a little liar! You were practically naked.”

  “What?!” Lana screeched.

  Emilie gritted her teeth. “We were not doing it.” Kate gasped and Emilie held up her finger. “We had already done it. Several times,” she added with a smug smile.

  Lana and Kate burst into laughter at the prim look on Emilie’s face.

  “What can I say?” Emilie shrugged sheepishly. “He had an overwhelmingly convincing argument for our reconciliation.”

  “Eww,” exclaimed Kate. “I so did not need to know that!”

  “Oh, shut it, Katherine.” Emilie laughed in spite of herself. “We talked things over and I decided to try to trust him. Try being the operative word.”

  Lana let out a delighted shriek and leaned over to give Emilie a big smooch on the cheek. “That is so great, Emmy! Only it kind of bursts my bubble.” She threw a glance of rebuke Kate’s way.

  “Sorry.” Emilie bit her lip contritely. “Tell us your news! We’re dying to here it, aren’t we, Kate?”

  “It’s been a day full of wonderment and surprises.” Kate stretched her legs out in front of her and shrugged. “Why shouldn’t Lana get in on all the fun?”

  Emilie lifted herself onto the couch beside Lana and gave her an encouraging pat on her knee. “Go on, sweetie, spill it.”

  Lana spread her arms out. “I did it!”

  “Did what?” Emilie patiently prodded.

  “I ditched Brian.” Lana grinned at her friends, who were now looking at her with a mixture of doubt and hope.

  “Is this another fake-out?” Kate asked with narrowed eyes. “Because every time you have a big fight or bad sex you vow that you’re making a clean break, only to change your mind about ten seconds later.” At Lana’s open mouth and Emilie’s pinched expression, Kate threw her hands up in the air in exasperation. “What? I’m sorry, but it’s true! Someone had to say it.”

  Pointedly ignoring Kate, Emilie placed her hand on Lana’s arm. “Tell us all the details.”

  Lana smiled gratefully and gave them the bare bones of her day, finishing with, “So then I went to his apartment to surprise him, only to find him being serviced by the slut who works in the tattoo parlor on the first floor.”

  Emilie and Kate obligingly gasped in unison. “What an ass!” Kate placed a conciliatory hand on Lana’s foot.

  Emilie’s fist pressed into her thigh with righteous indignation. “Especially when he knew you were coming over later,” she said. “That is just sleazy.”

  Lana spoke again before they could get off on a tangent about deplorable men. “I totally agree, but can I finish, please?” Chastened, Kate and Emilie made a show of zipping their lips and throwing away the key. Satisfied, Lana went on. “I was more than a little upset by the image I walked in on, so I decided that the mature thing to do would be to discuss his hurtful actions in a calm, dignified manner.”

  “What did you do instead?” asked Emilie.

  Lana grinned evilly. “I threw a ceramic pig at his head.”

  “Ooh,” breathed Kate. “Did the impact of said pig cause the skank to clench her jaw?” She leaned forward, and Lana was briefly taken aback by the avid interest in her expression.

  “When did you get so bloodthirsty?” Using her right foot to shove Kate back onto her heels, Lana chuckled fondly. “Never mind — yes, she did bite down. I didn’t stick around to find out, but I’m hopeful Stupid Brian will hereafter be known as the Eunuch of East 14th Street.”

  The girls snickered.

  “But the amazing part is what happened after I got out of there.” Lana paused for a moment, allowing the suspense to build as Kate and Emilie leaned into her legs and waited for her to continue her most excellent story. “I waited and waited for that itchy dread I always get when Brian and I have a fight to set in, but it never came. All I felt was done.”

  “Done as in done or just kinda, sorta, almost done?” Emilie tentatively asked.

  Lana sighed with resignation. She really couldn’t blame her friends for being just the teensiest bit wary of jumping aboard her Happy Train. Over the last few months, they had seen Lana have several brief bursts of bravado coupled and the determination to ditch Brian, but thus far she had not demonstrated any talent for follow-through.

  “Completely, utterly done,” Lana assured them with a firm nod. “It’s the strangest thing… But I just know that if I never see him again it will be fine with me.”

  Kate stared at her through narrowed eyes. “How do you know this feeling is going to last beyond tonight?” she asked, still not convinced.

  “I don’t know that I’ll never want to talk to him again,” Lana answered honestly. “I only know that I won’t. He’s not worth it, and if it took seeing him get a tongue bath from his building’s resident ho to get me to realize that glaringly obvious truth, then so be it.”

  She stretched out her arms for a hug with an expectant pout and Emilie laughingly threw her own arms around her.

  Kate looked at the pair of them for a few moments, and then reluctantly smiled and put her arms around the two of them. “For your sake, I hope you’re right,” she said into Lana’s shoulder.

  Chapter 19

  One week later, Lana was remaining steadfast in her decision not to speak to Brian. She had successfully avoided the temptation to answer his calls and fall back into old habits, and she was feeling pretty proud of her newfound resolve.

  Emilie was swamped with wedding minutiae and pretending not to wait by the phone for stupid Ethan to make a stupid phone call. She was also being bombarded by a renewed slate of phone calls from Leo, who, apparently buoyed by the fact that he hadn’t had the stuffing knocked out of him in over three months, was proving harder to shake than she had previously hoped. Emilie had already decided that, should Ethan ever decide to grace her with his presence, she was going to ask him to scare the living daylights out of Leo again. Maybe that would make the freak leave her alone once and for all.

  Kate, meanwhile, was keeping herself busy by trying to justify her recent bad behavior as a simple case of pre-wedding jitters. Her rationalizations were currently reserved for her ears alone, since she was at present standing under a painfully hot stream of water in a dingy shower stall. The hotel room was not the dirtiest one she had ever been in, but it was certainly not going to be winning any awards for cleanliness in the near future. The man sleeping in the next room was not Will, which made her life so much more complicated than it needed to be.

  Allowing the water to hit her back and hair, Kate, for what felt like the hundredth time, methodically catalogued all of her recent mistakes. In order of stupid to stupidest: for the last three months she had been shirking her school work, abandoning Emilie and Lana and forcing them to deal with all the errands and problems incurred from her fast-approaching wedding, and sneaking away from Will at every opportunity to see her former boyfriend, Jase. And by “see” she meant engage in lots of hot monkey sex. Kate felt a vague sense of shame for lying to her fiancé about her recent deeds, but if she was being completely honest she did not feel nearly as bad about her conduct as she knew she should.

  Mainly, she felt guilty about withholding her disgraceful activities from her friends. She had tried to tell them on several occasions, knowing that they would try to be as understanding about her behavior as they could. Lana’s newfound independence notwithstanding, neither of them had exactly been models of romantic wisdom in recent months. But Kate still had not managed to come clean, mostly because as her personality flaws kept piling up so too did her embarrassment. Just the thought of admitting to her friends how right they were about her relationship with Will made her physically ill.

  It’
s not like it mattered anyway. The wedding was a fait accompli, no two ways about it, because her parents would kill her if she blithely informed them that she was planning on throwing fifty thousand dollars down the drain because she may have made an itty bitty mistake in agreeing to marry Will in the first place. Thus, it didn’t really matter when she confessed her sins to her friends because there was no way she could not go through with the wedding.

  Kate had gotten herself into this pickle in the first place by thinking that a brief, no strings attached relationship like the one Lana had had going with Brian would be just what she needed to cure her cold feet and diffuse the prickly sensation of dread in her chest. Jase had been an excellent choice for such an undertaking because, although Kate had dated him on and off for three years while she was an undergrad, he had never been a permanent fixture in her life. In college, they’d slept together, occasionally shared meals and laughed together, but they’d never spent a lot of time outside the bedroom together.

  So when she had run into him back in January while wandering through a tiny specialty bookstore in search of Lana’s birthday gift, Kate had been unable to ignore the temptation to have some horizontal fun before she forever tied herself to the most boring person on the planet. The fact that Jase looked exactly the same as he did in college, with his crew cut and his nicely chiseled abs and his heavy-lidded hazel eyes and his obscenely sexy old faded jeans, was just icing on the cake.

  Ten minutes after their unexpected reunion, Kate had found herself ensconced in a red vinyl booth at the funky little diner they had frequented back in the day with Jase’s fingers tracing interesting patterns up and down her inner arm. He had noted the ring on her finger almost immediately, and seemed unfazed when she had breezily mentioned that the wedding was in May.

  With a speculative glance, Jase had continued to idly stroke her. “You’re not all that thrilled to be getting married, Katie.”

  Jase had made it a statement, not a question and when Kate realized that he was much more interested in drawing circles on her wrist and arm than he was in hearing her make excuses or refute his observation, her relief had been palpable. She had gotten so used to defending herself that it was nice to be with someone who simply didn’t care. As Jase had tickled a particularly sensitive spot, Kate had also been vividly reminded of why she had once been so fond of him in the first place: he was a devastatingly physical creature with no qualms about embracing that fact. So, when his hand had made its way to her thigh and lightly traced a path along the inseam of her jeans, she had gotten a very strong hunch that Jase would have no problem letting her use him for purely physical reasons.

  When Kate had bluntly asked if he would like to have a casual fling with her, he had given her body a ten second analysis before lifting his gaze to her face. Then he had made a big show of kissing her hand, saying simply, “It would be my pleasure.” Kate had practically purred with delight.

  Shivering with cold, Kate came out of her reverie long enough to turn off the now icy water. She grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her head before picking up another and briskly drying her skin as she walked across the tiny space to rifle through her schoolbag, pulling out clean underwear and a comb.

  This had become her routine over the last four months, ducking out of whatever obligation she was currently shirking, rolling around with Jase until her body ached and her mind went numb, then washing it all away and pretending it never happened. It was all starting to make her feel tremendously sad. Confused, too, because at this point she wasn’t even sure why she kept coming back to this dingy room to meet Jase, especially since the sex wasn’t even that great anymore.

  At first it had been exciting to sneak around, with the adrenaline rushing through her veins and the fear of getting caught making every moment seem more intense. However, she was starting to realize that she should have taken into account how unhappy Lana was with her strictly physical relationship with Brian and how guilty Emilie felt over even taking Leo’s phone calls when he was engaged to another woman. Now Kate had to deal with being unhappy and guilty, and she didn’t even have the luxury of venting to her friends about it. Aside from the awkwardness her affair would cause Lana and Emilie, who had been hard at work trying to make her wedding come together, she was fairly certain they would be somewhat resentful about all those long-winded lectures Kate had been doling out in recent months. Lectures that may have included a few jabs about the stupid choices Lana and Emilie were making in regards to the men in their lives.

  A loud bang against the bathroom door startled Kate out of her pity party. “What’s going on in there?” slurred Jase.

  Sighing, she stood and opened the door to find a shirtless Jase leaning against the door, tapping a bottle of vodka against his thigh in what she was sure he thought was a sexy pose. He often referred to himself as the Brad Pitt of the West Side — a stretch even by her less than choosy standards.

  “I was getting ready to go,” she said with a tolerant smile.

  A faint grin spread across his face as he reached forward and grabbed the front of her towel to pull her into his arms. “It’s still early. We’ve got time.” He ran a finger along the top of her breasts and gave her a hopeful smirk.

  “Well…” Kate felt herself wavering. What would another hour hurt, really? “I kind of thought we had already done what we came here to do.” Her actions belied her words when she obligingly bent her head to the side so that he could nibble on her neck.

  Jase chuckled and suggestively nudged his pelvis into hers. “Relax, Katie. We’ve got all night.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “I don’t want you to think.” He casually moved her hand where he wanted it. “I want you to feel.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  She did not, however, remove her hand from his unbuttoned fly.

  He grinned and continued to rub her damp shoulders, unmistakably confident in his ability to persuade her. She never wanted to leave and go back to Will, and Jase usually didn’t need to work all that hard to convince her stick around longer than she intended.

  “Come on, Katie. We’ll have a few drinks.” He gestured to his half-empty bottle of vodka. “We’ll have a little fun.” He turned her body and pushed her backwards towards the bed. “There’s no harm in a little fun, is there?” He gave her a shove and she slid onto the tangled bed sheets.

  Kate didn’t reply. She was too busy reaching for the bottle while Jase yanked the towel off of her and tossed it over his shoulder.

  The phone started ringing at 2:12 a.m.

  Emilie ignored it at first, thinking it was probably a drunken Leo calling to declare his endless devotion. Again. Because it obviously wasn’t Ethan, who had managed to validate all of her worst fears about the dangers of trusting his oh-so-fervent declarations of love by being incommunicado for the last week. Changed man, my round rear end, Emilie thought crossly as she drifted back to sleep. She really could kill him.

  By 2:20, when the phone persistently trilled again, Emilie roused enough to check the caller id, but when she didn’t recognize the number she groaned and put a pillow over her head to dull the sound. She also chose to ignore the irritated bellow and thump that came from the other bedroom where Lana, in sleepy delirium, must have thrown a shoe at the wall.

  When the phone rang again at 2:28, Emilie blindly reached for the receiver with the full intention of telling the caller to take a long walk off a short pier. Kate’s Bachelorette party was scheduled for tomorrow evening and both Lana and Emilie were trying to rest up, so she didn’t appreciate this new round of late night stalking.

  “What?” she growled into the phone.

  Instead of a coherent reply, all she heard was hysterical giggling. Pulling the phone away from her ear, Emilie reluctantly sat up and glared sourly at the offending piece of plastic. A glimpse in the mirror over her dresser revealed hair that was flying at odd angles around her face, the red startling against her skin, which was excessively
pale from lack of sleep. With a wince, she resolved to definitely throttle whoever was on the other line.

  The laughing seemed to be getting louder instead of softer, so Emilie put the phone back to her ear and shouted “WHY?” into the receiver.

  More giggling ensued, followed by a gurgling song that stirred a vague memory in Emilie’s sleepy brain. “Ohhhhh, Emmmmy Looooou Whoooo! Where aaaare you? You’ve got some work to doooo now!”

  Oh, dear.

  “Who is that, and where can I find them so that I may painfully torture and murder them?”

  Emilie glanced up to find a grumpy Lana leaning against her door frame, yawning widely till her jaw let out a pop. Her Curious George pj’s were rumpled and her carnation pink hair was flattened in the back and standing on end in the front. When Lana rubbed her eyes and wandered listlessly into the room, looking exactly the same as she had when she was six years old, Emilie smiled in spite of her annoyance with the voice on the other line.

  She put her hand over the phone and wearily sighed. “I have no idea where the idiot is,” Emilie said dryly. “But the giggling female in question just serenaded me with her gone but sadly-not-forgotten Emmy Lou Who Scooby song. Any guesses?”

  Lana groaned and climbed on top of Emilie’s bed, throwing herself onto her back with a dramatic groan. “How drunk is she?”

  Emilie held the phone out so Lana could hear the incessant twittering and chirping. Lana laid her head down and stretched.

  “Find out what her major malfunction is so we can go back to sleep. And tell her if she’s calling for a ride, I’m going to wring her neck.” She pulled one of Emilie’s pillows beneath her head and closed her eyes.

  Emilie gently pinched Lana’s arm to make sure she stayed awake before putting the phone back to her ear. “Kate? Kate! Settle down, will you? I need you to tell me what the problem is…” There was a long pause and Emilie rolled her eyes. “Because until you tell me what the problem is, I cannot fix it, Katherine.”