Save the Date

by Carrie Aarons

  After he’d cupped my face and tasted me, my head swimming from the situation and alcohol, we’d laughed it off awkwardly. Then we’d finished our drinks while talking about the latest episode of Game of Thrones, and had said goodbye outside of our respective Ubers.

  I’d texted him this morning to have a safe flight, and he’d sent back a thumbs-up, but I couldn’t help but feel like something had changed last night. Reese wasn’t even in Philadelphia anymore, and yet I felt his presence everywhere.

  I open Photoshop, ready to lose myself in editing photos of my favorite summer sandals that I’d snapped over the weekend. But as I flip through the pictures, trying to pick the best, I find myself studying the same one for fifteen minutes. Kind of like when your mind is elsewhere and you read the same sentence in a book eight times.

  That kiss was going to hang over us forever now. We’d managed to tamp down any flirtations or close calls for eighteen years. We’d gotten through puberty and our drunken college days without slipping up. And now, why now?

  I’ll tell you why. Because Reese had to go on and bring up that dumb pinky promise, and it was putting pressure on us.

  Worse … I had liked the kiss. That was weird, it felt wrong. He was like my brother. He was my best friend.

  But it had felt so right. I half-hated that it did. But the other half of me was so confused that I wanted to try again. And now he was back in Dallas with his sort-of girlfriend, and the fact that I was sour about that confused me even more.

  Overall, I was just very fucking confused.

  I lose myself in editing for a while, checking my Instagram to make sure the photos and blog posts I was preparing really matched the overall theme of my brand, and went through my email. I’d been at this blogging game for two years, and was only just now, in the past six months or so, being approached about deals with companies to represent products or post advertisements.

  I’d sunk my own money and time into the clothes, shoes, makeup, photo shoots and more over a year and a half to make my blog relevant and trending. It was honestly pretty fucking cool that all of my hard work was now being rewarded, and if it kept up, this could sustain me as a full-time career. I was already making more on my blogging than my shitty paycheck from The Journal, and as I read through my email, two new clothing companies wanted to partner with me.

  My brain could only be distracted for so long, and soon I was on Facebook, typing in Reese’s name after stalking on my timeline for a bit. I clearly had a problem, as did the rest of the world, with my social media addiction.

  His page popped up, and I immediately clicked over to his photos section, to see if there were any recent pictures of Renée. Part of me wanted to see him making out with her in a nightclub or something, just so I would know that that kiss meant nothing and he was back with his girlfriend of the moment.

  But, alas, no such pictures. Which only made my thoughts stew more.

  My phone rang and I jumped, alone in my apartment, wondering if Reese had been reading my mind.

  But it was only Morgan, my sister, calling for the fifth time this week. She lived twenty minutes from me, and yet we talked each day as if we didn’t see each other twice, or sometimes three, times a week.

  “My feet look like sausage patties. And my ankles, lord, they don’t even exist anymore. Can you remind me that I’ll look fabulous someday after this?” Morgan whines into my ear, not even bothering to say hi.

  My older sister, by two and a half years, was six months pregnant and not enjoying one single second. She and her husband, Jeff, had finally made the decision to have a baby after six years of marriage. And while I knew she was going to be one awesome mom, she was having a hell of a pregnancy. Terrible morning sickness, back pain, and now she’d started peeing herself whenever she sneezed. It sounded like the best kind of birth control to me.

  “After you have the baby, you can come to Pilates and barre with me until you look like Jillian Michaels. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you when you need to lose the weight.”

  And I would, because we had the kind of relationship that was brutally honest. We’d always been close, never had that kind of sister rivalry that separated some siblings. But after our parent’s divorce five years ago, we’d made a pact to never let anything get between us. And with that, came brutal honesty. If I was being too much of an asshole, or she was whining too much, we let the other know.

  “Thanks, Er. Did you get my picture of that unicorn blanket, though? So freaking cute!” This was the fun part of her having a baby girl. The clothes and decor.

  I was excited to be an aunt, as long as I could give the little squirt back when she started crying. “Adorable. I was in this secondhand shop the other day and found the cutest little dress from the seventies. It has fringe and is this mustard yellow color. I wanted to die it was so cute. Of course I bought it.”

  I think I’d spent about a million dollars on this baby already. But I couldn’t help myself. Every time I saw something girly, I picked it up and stored it away for her.

  “You’re insane. This girl is going to be so well-dressed. Maybe she’ll even start a rival blog. Baby Shoes in the Bassinet. Or oh! How about Rock-a-Bye Birkin?” Morgan laughed, cracking herself up.

  “And this is why you’re not my marketing officer. Leave it to the wannabe-Instagram celebrities like me, okay?” I was nothing if not self-deprecating.

  “Fine. How was Reese’s Pieces?” Morgan used her nickname for my best friend.

  A sour feeling moved down my spine. I got that sick churning in my stomach, like when you get nervous and have to poop. Was I going to feel this way anytime I thought about Reese now? What a stupid thing we did. Why had I let him?

  “He was good. Went to dinner after his interview.” I kept it short and simple.

  And Morgan saw right fucking through me.

  “Why are you being weird?” She sounds distracted, like she’s walking around their brownstone on the Main Line cleaning.

  She probably is, anxious and annoyed that the doctor told her to take it easy. Jeff was a computer engineer, high up in a Fortune 500 company and the sole earner between the two of them. Morgan never needed to work a day in her life if she didn’t want to, could just putz around the swanky townhouse they’d bought in the wealthy part of Philly. But, she loved her job as an accountant, and planned to go back after having my niece.

  “I’m not being weird.” The pitch of my tone was too high. Fuck.

  “You are so being weird. Oh, Erin, did you buy another pair of shoes you can’t afford? Don’t tell me I have to return another pair of Manolo’s because you’re too embarrassed …”

  “That was one time!” I cried, annoyed at her.

  I’d gone on a drunken shopping spree once after a boozy brunch, maxing out my credit card at Nordstrom. And I’d been so embarrassed the day after, I made Morgan go take six of the pairs back. Yes, six … whatever, retail therapy made me feel better. Especially after three Bloody Mary’s.

  “Shit, I have to pee again. Hold that weirdness, we are going to talk about this. I love you, bye!”

  And with that, she hung up on me, not even bothering to hear me bid her farewell. That’s how we were, the two of us. Sisters. Push and pull, fight and love, able to read the other’s mood and thoughts.

  For not the first time in my life, I cursed my sister’s ability to read me. Because it meant that, eventually, we were going to have to talk about that kiss.

  And I still wasn’t even sure how I felt about it.

  Six

  Reese

  “Hi, Mom,” I say as soon as she picks up the phone for our weekly Monday night call.

  She and Dad still live in the town I grew up in. Just twenty-five minutes outside of the city, Chester sat right on the Delaware River. It was an ideal place to grow up, and I grew homesick just hearing their voices. Thankfully, I’d be back there soon.

  After hearing from Joann just a week after my interview, I needed to make the decision about
whether I was going to take the job she’d offered me.

  A prestige position in the country’s leading NICU, I could further my career and learn techniques and medical procedures that I’d only dreamed about. This was the job to end all job searches. But … I liked my life here. I really liked Dallas.

  And then there was the matter of Renée. Who I’d yet to have a real conversation with about my move, even as I packed one of the last boxes in my apartment to ship to Philadelphia.

  You know, because I’d decided I was moving back home and taking the job.

  “Chris! Come down here, Reese is on the phone!” Mom screams into the receiver, trying to get my dad in the same room as her so they can both be on speaker phone.

  “So, I got the job at CHOP.” I can’t wait to tell them. I never was any good at suspense or surprises.

  “Yeehaw, partner! I’m so happy for you, bud.” Mom’s voice rings through my phone.

  Ever since I moved to Dallas, she thinks I live in some kind of honky-tonk Western movie. I’ve tried to tell her multiple times that Dallas is just like Philadelphia, just a little warmer with more accents and country music. But essentially, a city is a city no matter how you look at it.

  She still doesn’t get it though, and will speak to me with a bad Dolly Parton impression on our weekly phone calls. I’m nothing if not a mama’s boy, and talking to my parents every Monday night has become a ritual. I’ve been in Dallas for almost three and a half years, and while I think it was essential for me to move away from home, the job at CHOP is my chance to go back to my roots.

  “Oh, I’m so happy I’ll have you home! And think of how excited Erin will be! She was over here last week, after visiting Barbara. She is so gorgeous, you know?”

  Of course she mentioned Erin straight off. It wasn’t obvious or anything that my mom had always wanted my childhood best friend and I to end up together. For years, she’d been telling me that we were just biding our time as friends until life constructed the perfect moment.

  Maybe she was right after all. Not that I was going to tell her what had happened when I’d come for the interview.

  “How is Barbara doing?” I avoid the Erin subject altogether.

  We’d texted on and off the past month that I had been back in Dallas, never once bringing up the kiss. So yeah, we were really mature adults.

  Mom sighs into the phone. “It’s been almost five years, honey, and still she is so broken up about it. How can you do that to the partner you swore to spend your life with? How do you just fall out of love with someone? I just don’t understand.”

  Barbara and David Carter had been the picture-perfect idea of marriage when I was growing up. Unlike my parents, who clearly loved each other but enjoyed bickering, they held hands all the time, sang songs by the piano at Christmas, and kissed each other in the driveway before they left for work. I’d admired them my entire childhood, and had been jealous of Erin’s seemingly perfect family.

  It had always been a point of pride for the two of us, how intact our families were. How long our parents had been married. And then, hers fell apart.

  One day, shortly after Erin’s twenty-fifth birthday, David came home and told Barbara that he didn’t love her anymore, and that he wanted a divorce. At the time, I’d been living in New York City, and I’d come home after receiving a call from Erin. It was only the second time in our entire friendship that I’d heard her cry, the first being when she’d broken her arm in tenth grade. And as I drove, the phone on speaker, it was more like hyperventilating than crying coming through the other end, my best friend having a complete meltdown.

  I remember holding her, falling asleep on the couch in her childhood basement as her tears dried on her cheeks. I think that was the moment it all changed. The moment where my feelings for her hit me like a full-on tidal wave.

  Sure, they’d been quietly brewing in the back of my heart and mind for years. I’d had the schoolboy crush, and then the jealousy. I thought of her while I was away at college, and there were those two times that we’d taken it too far and then never addressed it.

  But in that basement, my entire world shifted. I’d held her, her soft breath fanning out on the damp part of my shirt she’d just sobbed into, and I just knew. Knew that someday, maybe not then, but some day, I would be the one to protect her from the worst times. I’d be the one to hold her in the best of times. I felt it so fiercely in that moment that it scared the shit out of me.

  And I ran. I moved to Dallas a year later after scouring the country for a job that would take me away. That would keep me from fucking up the only good relationship with a woman I had ever had in my life.

  But now I was coming back. And I could sense the shift in the air.

  “I don’t understand either, but I’m just glad I’m moving home so I can be close to you all again. I miss cheesesteaks and the Phillies.”

  “We’ll have to get tickets to a game this summer, just you, me and your father, like old times.” I could hear Mom clap her hands.

  I chuckled, remembering our last baseball game. Mom had wanted food in each inning, just like a ten-year-old, and Dad had gotten annoyed that she was interrupting his box score following. She’d even gotten mustard on his notebook, and he was so surly that I’d gotten two extra beers just to get through innings seven through nine.

  That was my family though, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

  “All right, honey, you get to packing so I can see you so soon. I have to take the casserole out of the oven. Dust off those boots, ya hear?” Mom laughed at her own bad southern joke.

  I rolled my eyes. “Be home soon.”

  Seven

  Erin

  The GrubHub delivery person buzzed up to my apartment, and I got so excited about the Chinese food about to be in my belly that I did a little dance to the door.

  As I swung it open, forgetting about the new clarifying mask I was trying for a blog post, the twenty-something kid gave me a look like my hair was on fire or something.

  I reached up, touching my cheek, trying to explain. “Whoops. Hazards of the job. Thanks!”

  Suddenly famished and a lot embarrassed, I hold out a ten-dollar bill that he grabs in exchange for my bag of food. I see him peer inside, probably thinking that there has to be more people here. But nope, just me. Eating too many containers of various Chinese food that would be enough to feed a small gathering.

  After he’s gone, I set my spread up on the coffee table, un-pause Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, my latest guilty pleasure watch, and sit cross-legged on the floor. Yes, I have a kitchen table, but what single person actually uses one of those? I’m usually eating on the floor or on the couch, in front of the TV, or in my bed before nodding off.

  Just as I’m about to shove the first chopstick full of lo mein into my face, my cell buzzes with an incoming call.

  One of the only girlfriends I have, Jillian’s name lights up the screen and I groan. It’s a Saturday night. She’s probably out somewhere in the city, just starting her night, and wants me to come out. How do I know this? Because she does this every Saturday night. And every Saturday night, I typically decline.

  For being a lifestyle blogger, I don’t have much of a lifestyle. Unless you count testing beauty products on date night while eating fried food in my granny-panties. But seriously, I never go out anymore. If I drink more than two glasses of wine, I get a massive hangover in the morning. I could no longer put up with small talk or bad pickup lines.

  Welcome to almost thirty.

  I pick up the call anyway. “Hey, Jill.”

  The background noise of a bar infiltrates the speaker in my ear, and I cringe at the loud sounds. “Erin! Come meet me, I’m at Jive!”

  “I’m in my underwear. With General Tso’s chicken. No way.” Plus I hadn’t showered in two days and my hair was mostly made up by dry shampoo at this point.

  “So, throw a cute dress on, shave your armpits, and get out here. Come on, you’re a lifestyle blogger
. Come take some cute going out pictures! I’ll even photograph you in portrait mode so you have some good content.”

  Damn, she knew how to get me. A good Instagram photo op was my downfall. And I did have that new LOFT jumpsuit that would be totally easy and cute to throw on. My hair could go in a top knot … shit, I was already visualizing an ensemble.

  Dropping my chopsticks with a sigh, I relented. “Fine. Give me an hour.”

  I hung up, not bothering to make any more pleasantries with Jill. She understood. She was one of my rare and only friends from college. She got me, and I think that’s why I actually bothered to keep in touch. We both had the same sarcastic, semi-detached attitude. A love of fashion. Valued honesty.

  The only difference was, she was a hopeless romantic, and I thought that love was a silly notion peddled by Hallmark.

  * * *

  An hour and a half later, I was already a glass of wine in, weaving my way back to my bar seat from the bathroom.

  I had to admit, it was the right decision to come out. It had been too long, I was beginning to become a shut-in and I couldn’t damn well run a successful entrepreneur fashion blog if all I had to write about was the newest nail polish I’d painted on my toes while binge watching Jessica Jones.

  “These came out so good!” Jill squealed as I slid in beside her.

  Jive was a cool bar/lounge just twenty minutes from my apartment, with blue and purple lighting and rhythmic house music that gave it an ethereal feel. We’d been chatting and sipping at the bar, too old for the loud dance floor at this point.

  Oh, and Jill was trolling for single men in between snapping photos for me to post. I’d already loaded my Instagram Story with bites of my drink on the bar, a hot cleavage baring selfie, us dancing in a Boomerang … you know, basic bitch kind of stuff.

  “Thanks for convincing me to come out of my bat cave,” I joked, taking a drink of my new glass of rosé.