“She’s going to be a total mess tonight,” Emilie predicted.
“Can you blame her? She’s about to make a huge mistake. And she knows it.”
Emilie nodded in agreement and, after applying dark red lipstick to her mouth, stepped back to examine its effect against the flirty amethyst dress she had slipped on. If the manic glint in her eye was anything to go by, Lana suspected that Emilie was determined to tap into her inner vixen tonight in an attempt to drive Ethan out of her mind.
This would have been fine if she didn’t seem so completely miserable about it.
Absently fluffing her glittery pink coif, Lana tentatively broached the subject they had been skating around since last night. “How are you, Em?”
Emilie shrugged in a deliberately nonchalant manner, lifting her guarded gaze to Lana for a brief moment before averting her eyes and briskly running the flatiron over her already stick-straight hair. “You know me! I’m always fine, Lan.” Her cheery tone rang patently false.
“Emilie, you are not fine,” Lana gently contradicted. “You’ve been staring at the phone for a week, when you should have simply picked it up and called Ethan yourself.” Lana put her hand over Emilie’s mouth to halt her denial. “Why are you already assuming that things with Ethan are bound to go south?”
“Too late,” Emilie muttered under her breath as she jerked away. “That ship is already well on its way to the ocean floor.”
“Only if you want it to be,” Lana insisted with a roll of her eyes. “I know that the Leo situation threw you for a loop, but even if he hadn’t turned out to be a giant narcissist with a fiancée and a disturbing frog fixation, we both know he was never your type.”
After a half-hearted glare, Emilie pursed her lips. “Okay, so what is my type, oh-wise-one?”
“How you continue to remain so completely oblivious to your own desires, I will never know.” Lana hopped up on the bathroom counter and rolled her eyes again. “Your type, my dear, is a tall, occasionally overbearing, sinfully handsome man with a kind-of-cute-but-sort-of-obsessive fascination with all things Emilie,” she said with fond exasperation. “A man who bought you the home of your dreams, who makes you laugh and cry and act crazy because you have no control over how he makes you feel. Most importantly, Em, your type is someone who’s smart enough to know that you are lovely and sweet and worthy of the extra effort it will clearly take to win back your trust.”
Trembling with suppressed emotion, Emilie continued to flatiron her hair with the single-minded persistence Lana’s mother got when she was preaching abstinence over safe sex. After a few taut moments of silence, she carefully put down the hot iron and leaned against the sink as if she was bracing herself for a blow.
“What if he doesn’t come back?” she asked in a small voice.
“He will, Emilie. Ethan loves you as much as you love him. Maybe he’s botched things up a bit, maybe he’s a tad uncertain about the phone protocol for new rekindled relationships.” Lana tucked a strand of hair behind Emilie’s ear and smiled at her bemused expression. “But, sweetie, you’re one of the most forgiving people I’ve ever known. I don’t understand why you’re so determined to push him away without even giving him a chance.”
Emilie abruptly narrowed her eyes. “Why are we talking about this?”
Lana sighed at Emilie’s evasiveness. “Because you’ve been telling me for months that the answer to finding my own happiness was right in front of me, and I kept ignoring you because I was afraid. I didn’t think I was worth anything more than Brian had to offer,” she admitted softly and happily accepted Emilie’s brief hug.
“You’re worth only the best, Lana!”
Lana smiled at Emilie’s mulish expression. “Yeah, yeah, I know. It was your voice that was constantly in my head, telling me to be strong.” At Emilie’s pleased grin, Lana went in for the kill. “So, please, let me be the voice that tells you that you are strong enough to let Ethan love you.”
Emilie’s face immediately fell. “What if I’m not?”
“Emmy, you can do anything.” Lana nudged her playfully. “Even train a big manly man like Hot Ethan to fall at your feet and beg for mercy.”
Emilie rolled her eyes, but her smile returned. “That’s really sweet.”
“I know Ethan hurt you, so I get why you’re afraid to trust him.” The return of her woebegone expression was the only indication that Emilie was still listening, and Lana felt like a jerk for poking at Emilie’s sore spots, but she did anyway because the only way Emilie was ever going to be happy was if she faced her demons head-on. “Em, you have every right to tell him to hit the road if that’s what you really want, but please don’t do it because you’re afraid of what might happen somewhere down the line.”
Emilie looked distinctly uncomfortable. “It’s really nice of you to say all this, Lana, and I know you’re super sincere. But he hasn’t called all week and—”
“Why are you always waiting for him to make the big decisions?” The vehemence in Lana’s tone made Emilie wince, and Lana endeavored not to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. “If you want to talk to him, Emilie, call him. You’re not a little girl anymore.”
“If he wanted to talk, he would have called me,” Emilie said defensively.
“That is such a load of crap, and you know it!” Lana shook her head at Emilie’s willfulness. “What makes you think that he doesn’t have just as much insecurity about this relationship as you do? You’ve made it painfully clear that there’s a very real chance you’ll never forgive him for something he did when he was seventeen. He has to be terrified that he’ll spend his whole life trying to win you over, only to have you break his heart in the end.”
Emilie opened her mouth to deny this possibility, and then shut it again. She seemed to be trying to reconcile her ingrained impression of confident-to-the-point-of-cocky Ethan Drake with the idea that he might actually have insecurities too. After long, silent moments Emilie blinked and stared at Lana.
“All of this is beside the point,” Emilie said mutinously. “The real problem is me. I don’t want to need him.”
“Yeah, well you can’t always get what you want.” Emilie’s scowl deepened, but Lana ignored it. “The fact is you do need him Emmy.” At Emilie’s gasp of denial, she quickly amended, “Not to be happy or complete. But maybe you need him to feel, I don’t know, completely you.”
With a sigh, Lana grabbed Emilie’s hand. “I’m not sure if I believe in soul mates or fate or all that hokey crap, but I do know that I’ve never seen you so happy as when you were sitting by that buggy lake all wrapped up in Ethan’s arms.”
“That was a long time ago,” Emilie said faintly. “It’s not like I haven’t been happy without him.”
“Not the same kind of happy, Emmy.” Lana stared at the floor, hating the hurt in her friend’s eyes and hating herself a little for putting it there, but it was long past time that this was said. “You were different after he left.”
“I was?” Emilie asked tentatively, visibly startled by Lana’s sudden gravity.
“Yeah, you were. Distant, more cynical, less inclined to forgive.” Lana pulled Emilie closer so she could throw an arm around her. “And every time Kate mentioned his name, you’d freeze up and get all sad and moody for weeks at a time while you holed up in your room listening to depressing country music. The entire Patsy Cline songbook is taking up valuable space in my brain, and I hold you entirely to blame.”
Emilie glared at the reminder of her ballad drenched bouts of melancholy. “Well, excuse me for breathing.”
Lana grinned at Emilie’s offended expression. After a moment, Emilie smiled back. “Okay,” Emilie reluctantly admitted. “I was sad and moody over Ethan. That doesn’t mean he’s the catalyst for all my major life decisions.”
“No,” Lana agreed. “But it does mean that, whether you like it or not, you never really got over him.”
Emilie fiddled with the skirt of her dress. “I’ll admit that he an
d I have a seemingly unbreakable connection, and yes, a huge part of me wants to fall completely into him and just hope for the best.” Her shoulders slumped. “But am I not allowed to have some doubts after all these years that he might not still love me the way he did then?”
Lana occasionally marveled at Emilie’s strange thought-processes. “Of course he doesn’t love you the way he did then! He’s a man now, not a little boy.”
“Fine,” Emilie threw her hands up in frustration. “He’s a man. Great. Why does everyone feel the need to keep throwing that stupid man in my face like he’s the only man on earth?”
“Because you didn’t think men were stupid before he broke your heart and left you and made you so completely afraid of love!”
If Emilie’s stunned expression was anything to go by, she had not expected Lana to go there.
“We’ve always had Stupid’s,” Emilie said weakly.
“It was an occasional joke before that summer, Em. But after Ethan left, you really believed what we were saying about the inherent stupidity of men. All of us did — because anyone who could make you cry like that, anyone who could have walked away from you and left you so devastated had to be stupid.”
“I really want to be with him, Lana,” Emilie finally whispered.
“Then why aren’t you?”
Emilie sagged against the sink. “Because this fear I have every time I’m not with him, this fear of loving him only to have him walk away again…it’s paralyzing. I know I can’t go back and change what happened, but I’m terrified to move forward. So instead I’m just standing still.”
Lana placed a bracing hand on Emilie’s shoulder. “To paraphrase a really old dead guy, the only thing you have to fear right now is fear itself.”
A reluctant grin tugged at Emilie’s lips, and Lana noted with relief that the tension seemed to be leaving her shoulders.
Emilie met Lana’s gaze and was possibly about to have an emotional breakthrough, when Kate burst into the room like a bunny rabbit on speed.
Lana and Emilie jumped at Kate’s entrance and wondered guiltily how long they had been engrossed in their conversation. Given Kate’s current state of gaiety, Lana feared it had been long enough for her to down that last pitcher of margaritas all by her lonesome.
Jumping up and down with glee, Kate pranced merrily around the bathroom. This enthusiastic bouncing caused her blue camisole to slip alarmingly low. Any minute now, her boobs were going to come spilling out.
Kate laughed heartily at her predicament, giving her top and the waistband of her jeans a tug and the two dollar veil slipping down her forehead a shove. “Come on, you slow pokes! We have to go now — it’s time for my par-taay!!!”
The moment gone, they laughed at Kate’s antics and allowed her to drag them down the hall towards the door. As they passed the low wall that separated the kitchen from the living room and hall, Lana made a quick grab for the list of dares they had drawn up for Kate to complete tonight: things like kissing a stranger, dancing on a table, and generally making an ass out of herself. Lana was fairly certain that, given Kate’s current state of alcohol-induced jolliness, she was going to happily perform every task they asked of her tonight without a whisper of complaint.
Casting a mischievous grin Emilie’s way, Lana saw that she was stuffing a camera into a small-for-Emilie black purse — they intended to obtain photographic evidence of any and all shenanigans Kate got into tonight and later catalog everything into a scrapbook to hold over her head in the years to come. When Emilie smirked back at her, Lana breathed a sigh of relief that she wasn’t mad after their conversation.
Kate was frantically tugging on Lana’s arm now, bringing her attention back to the star of tonight’s festivities. “Move it, ladies!”
“Hold your horses, will you?” grumbled Lana.
Once she had jammed all their ID’s into her purse, Emilie approached Kate and, with a sigh, allowed her to yank on her arm again and pull her out the door.
“Finally,” said a way-too-hyper Kate. “Let the games begin! WHEEE!”
“Good grief.” Emilie rolled her eyes and swiftly locked the door behind them. Then she rushed to catch the elevator Lana was patiently holding while Kate danced a jaunty jig. The elevator doors closed behind them, and off they went into the night.
The girls piled into Emilie’s car — though Lana unceremoniously confiscated her keys and got in the driver’s seat to avoid whiplash from Emilie’s “speed issues” — and headed for a karaoke bar across town to start the evening’s festivities. Since there wasn’t all that much town to traverse in New Bern, they arrived at the popular local spot ten minutes later and found tables near the back where a few friends from high school and some of Kate’s grad school pals were already waiting. When Kate caught sight of them she threw her hands in the air and charged over to the tables, roughly thrusting aside several innocent passersby as she went.
“Katie in the House!” she declared before yodeling an almost-certainly-offensive Indian war cry as she launched herself into a group hug. “Hello party-people! I am here! This is going to be so awesome!”
After grabbing someone else’s drink and tossing it back with a grimace, Kate grinned and yelled for another. Trailing behind in Kate’s wake, Emilie and Lana observed her antics with identical frowns of concern.
“Wow,” commented Lana.
“I don’t think she plans on leaving this party with any of her dignity intact,” Emilie muttered.
With a resigned sigh, Lana pulled Emilie over to a table near the back, where a few girls they purposely hadn’t seen since high school graduation were shrieking a greeting.
“If you can’t beat her you gotta join her, I guess.” Lana grabbed two of the tequila shots lined up on the table and passed one to Emilie. “Bottom’s up.”
She downed the shot in one gulp and stared expectantly at Emilie as Kate appeared at her side and gave Emilie a wet kiss on the cheek. At Kate’s goofy grin and Lana’s encouraging one, Emilie hesitantly tilted the burning liquid into her mouth.
The people at the table laughed at her choking cough and then pushed more drinks into their hands with instructions to catch up and pick a song. Lana thumbed through the book and caught sight of an old pre-pubescent favorite. Grinning evilly, she wrote down her choice and tossed it into the basket being passed around.
“What’d you choose?” Kate gazed at Lana with an eager, sloppy expression that thoroughly complimented the rest of her appearance — the tacky veil was missing a rhinestone from its tiara, and the candy necklace Emilie had slipped around her neck earlier already had several missing pieces, courtesy of the big, scraggly bearded cowboy at the bar.
“You’re gonna love it, I promise,” Lana assured her. “It’s a group number, so Emilie and I will back you up.”
“Huh?” said a suddenly alarmed Emilie.
Lana patted her hand. “Trust me.”
Soon Kate was belting out those classic Spice Girl lyrics, “If you wannabe my lover, you’ve gotta get with my friends,” and twirling around in her veil to numerous guffaws from the crowd while Lana and Emilie swayed behind her and sang along in between numerous giggle breaks. By the time the song ended, they had made a valiant, mostly successful attempt to slam their bodies down and wind them all around.
After making their way back to their seats to healthy applause and numerous slaps on the back from the bar patrons, Kate grabbed her fresh margarita and took a big gulp. “This is SO much fun!” she yelled over the growing din of the bar. “We used to do this all the time in college, Em. Why don’t we do it more often now?” She practically gargled as she poured the rest of the drink down her throat.
“I can’t imagine,” said Emilie with a sigh of overdramatic regret. “It’s a real shame we’ve been missing such delightful ambience.”
Lana snorted into her diet coke.
Emilie smiled and sipped her martini. This was actually kind of fun — though she could have done without Kate’s newfou
nd quest to drink all the alcohol in the tri-state area. It was barely eleven o’clock, and she wasn’t sure how Kate was still upright.
Still, at least Kate was having a good time, occasionally disappearing from view as she made her way around the room to tell anyone she met (be they friend or stranger) that she was The Bride.
An hour into the festivities, Emilie spotted her near the front of the bar, whispering into the ear of the slightly skeezy-looking karaoke DJ. When he grinned and nodded enthusiastically, Kate threw her arms around him and appeared to be squealing with glee. Then she was running back to their table, dodging several waitresses as she went.
Kate seemed quite pleased with herself when, gasping for breath, she reached Lana and Emilie. “That dude is nice!” Kate exclaimed, causing Lana’s eyebrows to nearly touch her hairline. Normally, Kate was not quite so friendly with strangers, especially unwashed ones.
Her openness was explained ten minutes later when the DJ gave Kate the thumbs up and the opening riff of a pop song came over the loudspeaker.
Kate’s eyes lit up with delight as she jumped up and began waving her arms frantically in the air. “Woo-hoo! I LOVE this song!”
“We noticed,” Lana said dryly.
“Come on!” Kate laughed loudly. “Let’s dance!”
“Um, this isn’t really a dance club,” said Emilie, but Kate was already shimmying her way to the bar.
Emilie looked on in alarm, but Lana shrugged complacently and said, “If she wants to dance, let her.”
“Isn’t this song about orgasms?” Emilie asked with a grin.
Lana tilted her head and listened for a moment before nodding. “Or, the chick that sings it just has really intense feelings about the rubbing of bottles in the right way.”
“Classy,” said Emilie.
They glanced toward the bar area in search of Kate and were shocked into silence when they found her. Her butt was wiggling in the air as she attempted to not-so-gracefully crawl on top of the bar with the help of two highly entertained frat guys and one burly bartender. She finally managed to clamber onto the bar, where she held up her arms in breathless victory and started to swivel her booty in time with the song.
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