He was sitting on the deck when I told him, in one of the modern style armchairs that had been put out by the groundskeeper for the summer. It boggled my mind that we had real furniture outdoors, and not just patio stuff.
When I finished recounting the incident at the rehearsal dinner, he blinked at me, eyebrows raised. “Well, I didn’t expect that.”
“It’s totally cool now. We worked it out, and agreed to just dislike each other maturely.”
“I can’t say I’m thrilled at the idea of my ex-girlfriend and my fiancée arguing over who can manipulate me more skillfully.”
Neil leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands hanging loosely from his wrists. “It hurts my feelings,” he said finally.
I hugged my cardigan tighter around myself. “I know. I didn’t want that. It was shitty of me to say those things, and I’m so, so sorry.”
He gave me a tight smile. “I suppose if I reframe it, it could be flattering. You were trying to protect our relationship. You were just going about it in a way that was mildly insulting to me.”
I snorted dismally. “Just mildly?”
He shrugged. “Just mildly. Because you were right. If it came down to it, of course I would choose you over Valerie. You’re going to be my wife, Sophie. You don’t have to be threatened by anyone else.”
“Well, at least this gives us something to talk about to Dr. Ashley.” It astounded me that Neil could be so gracious about all of my bullshit. Although he claimed to be less emotionally mature than me, the twenty-four-year difference in our ages did give him the upper hand in relationships. He’d already made huge mistakes, while I had a whole lifetime of fucking up in front of me.
Whole life or not, when we hit mid-June and no word from Holli, things looked dire.
Neil and I were lying in our bed, the windows open to let in the sea breeze and sounds. The sheet lay tangled around us, and though I was unbearably sweaty from all the hard work I’d just put in on top of him, I snuggled up at his side.
“Bravo,” he said through a yawn.
“Thanks.” I smiled to myself in the darkness. “You weren’t so bad yourself.”
I’d nearly fallen asleep when I startled awake. “Did you ever find the red checkbook?”
His answer was preceded by a hiss of shame. “No, I knew I was forgetting something.”
I groaned and kicked my feet in the most tired temper tantrum I’d ever had. “The contractor is coming at eleven.”
“Then I will get up at nine and look for it.” He thought I was overreacting, I could tell from his tone.
“No, I don’t want an alarm. I just want to sleep in and snuggle you. I love waking up with you.” I burrowed my face in his armpit.
He lifted his arm and scooted away from me. “I will get out of this bed at nine and not a minute before. It can wait until morning.”
“Ugh, fine.” I rolled away to the side and sat up.
“Where are you going?” he called after me as I padded to the door.
“I think I saw it in your desk in the library.” It would drive me crazy all night thinking it was still missing. The contractor was coming with his team to finish alterations on the home theatre. Neil had wanted a set up closer to what we’d had in the Manhattan apartment, with a comfy bed we could lay on to watch movies. That had been one of the things I’d missed most from the apartment, so I was happy to have it copied here.
It was weird walking around the house naked, because it was so big. It felt like I would bump into someone, even though logically I knew we were alone.
Because he was ridiculously afraid of the loft where I’d made my office, Neil’s desk was in the room he’d designated as the library. I think it was supposed to be some kind of morning parlor, because it always had a lot of sun. Except for now, when the full moon illuminated it. My bare feet slapped on the wood floor in the darkness, and I knew I was close to the desk when my soles landed soundlessly on the Persian carpet. Holding my hands out in front of me, I walked until I bumped into what I was looking for. I pulled the chain to the little desk lamp with the prairie-style glass shade and opened the long drawer that spanned the front of the desk.
Neil’s office in London had been a nightmare of clutter, and his desk was no exception. I shifted through random pens, empty pill bottles, tape, a spilled box of staples—when on Earth did he ever need staples, for Christ’s sake?—and pricked my hand on loose thumbtacks, but I did come up with the checkbook. I thrust it triumphantly in the air, even though I was the only one there.
I was about to run back to the bedroom with it, to gloat about finding it and tease him about the mess in his office, but when I shut the drawer, the computer mouse bumped and the screen lit up with the purple northern lights of Mac OS X.
I’d been checking my email obsessively, hoping to hear a reply from Holli. A war started in my brain, between just check really quick and you can check in the morning. The latter was technically correct; anything in my inbox at the moment would still be there when I woke up. But the former seemed to know that I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep, now that the thought had entered into my head.
Plopping my bare ass on Neil’s leather desk chair, I entered his four digit password—six-nine-six-nine, because he was apparently twelve—and chewed my fingernail nervously as I opened Chrome.
My fingers hovered over the keys when I was prompted to enter my email address and password. Then I took a breath and typed in the information.
I couldn’t stop holding it when I saw “RE: I miss you” in bold black at the top of my emails. My hands shook as I guided the cursor to the subject line and clicked.
Holli and I had always been pretty spare in our communication to each other. We didn’t need a lot of words to get our points across to each other. So when I read, “K. Meet somewhere?” my heart swelled with hope. I leaned over the desk, my head in my hands, and cried as hard as I would have if someone had died. They were happy tears, though, and fearful ones; what if we couldn’t make up? What if it ended up being a disaster?
I wrote back:
I’ll be in the city on Thursday. Meet at Dinicio’s, 9pm?”
When I went back to bed, Neil had dozed off, but he rolled over to spoon me. I pulled his arm tighter around me and held onto it, my fingers playing idly in the coarse hair on his skin.
“Did you find the checkbook?” he mumbled sleepily.
“Yeah, I found it.” I paused, unsure if I should tell him now, or in the morning. What the hell? “Holli answered my email.”
Neil was fully awake now, shifting up on his elbow behind me. “What did she say? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” I knew my relieved tears had made my nose stuffy, I could hear it in my voice. He was probably taking that as a bad sign. “She wants to talk to me.”
“And how are you taking that?”
I shrugged. “Cautiously optimistic? What else can I be? I want my friend back, but I’m not blind to the difficulties we’re going to have to overcome.”
He said nothing for a long moment, and then, “I very much hope that those difficulties are easier to overcome than you anticipate.”
“Thanks.” I rolled over and peered at what I could see of his face in the blue light of the alarm clock, and reached up to kiss him.
He rubbed my back and lifted his head. “And if it doesn’t work, I am always here for you. I am always on your side.”
I blinked away my grateful tears and lay back on the pillow. I’d never doubted it…but it was nice to hear.
* * * *
By the time we left Dr. Ashley’s office, I was a wreck of nerves. My whole body was shaking.
“Will you be alright?” Neil asked gently. “You’re trembling all over.”
“Just nervous,” I squeaked out, and he didn’t press further.
When we pulled up outside of Dinicio’s, Neil took my hand and kissed it. “I’ll just be around the corner. I can be here at a moment’s notice.”
“Thank you.�
� I smoothed my skirt down. “How do I look?”
“Holli has seen you in your froggy pajamas. I’m fairly certain she’ll love you no matter what you’re wearing,” he said with a hint of sympathetic amusement. “But you look gorgeous as always.”
“Thanks.” I took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m going in.”
Through either design or serendipity, Holli sat in the same booth where we’d had our fight all those months ago. She didn’t look up when I came in, and she was cradling a regulation brown diner mug in her hands as she stared out the window.
I came up to the table, and she glanced up, then did a double take at the sight of me.
“Is this seat occupied?” My joke fell flat when she just nodded.
Holli had looked better. Her blonde hair had grown out, but it hung limp around her face, haunted by curls that had gone flat. Her eyelids were puffy in contrast with the dark circles beneath them. Maybe she’d been just as miserable over this meeting than I had.
“You look good.” She smoothed the front of her black t-shirt. “Sorry, I look terrible, I had an overnight shoot and you know how I can’t sleep during the day.”
“Yeah.” I did know that.
We just looked at each other. Neither of us wanted to address what had gotten us to this point.
But there was no avoiding it. That was the only reason we were here, and the only way we would move forward. So I said, “Look. I should have handled this whole thing better. It wasn’t fair of me to go directly to Neil without talking to you.”
“Then why did you do it?” It was an antagonistic demand, but her heart wasn’t in it. Maybe it was because she was physically tired, or maybe it was that she was as tired as I was of our falling out.
“Because I was learning to be honest. I haven’t been great with that, lately.”
“Neither have I.” She took a shaky breath. “I know that Deja told you I was having a problem with the money—”
“I’m not with him because of his money,” I interjected. I’d been wanting to say that to her since the day we’d fought.
She gave me a tight, closed-lipped smile. “I know. I know you’re not, because I saw everything you went through to be with him. But I wanted to hurt you, so I acted like I thought you were just in it for the cash. And I said hurtful things. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry for getting Deja fired.” I was eager to change the subject from her uncomfortable apology.
“Deja got herself fired.” Holli shook her head and made a noise communicating her disgust. “I told her she couldn’t keep hanging out with Gabriella and working for Neil at the same time. I tried to get her to quit—”
“Wait, you knew about this?” I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. If she had known that Deja was the mole even before I’d gotten fired… “How long have you known?”
“She told me after I got back from London.” The answer came so easily, I had no reason to doubt it. “After she saw how sick Neil was…she just felt really guilty.”
“So why didn’t you tell me?” So much of this entire betrayal thing could have been fixed if she’d just been honest.
“Because it seemed unfair. Neil was dying. And I couldn’t lay all of this on you.” Holli twisted her cheap paper napkin, then dropped it on the table. “What were you going to do? How were you going to deal with that, when you were losing your boyfriend to cancer?”
I couldn’t come up with an answer. All I could think about was what Neil had told me about Valerie, and how he wished he hadn’t told her that he’d cheated on her, because it was unfair to drop bad news on her right before Emma was born.
“You’re right,” I sighed. “That would have destroyed me. But you should have told me after he was in the clear. He got out of the hospital in freaking September. Why not tell me then?”
“There was no way she could have kept her job. I know that sounds shitty, but…” She shrugged. “You chose Neil over me. I chose Deja over you. That’s just how it is, I guess.”
A server stepped over and apologized for our wait. I ordered a slice of pie and a chocolate egg cream.
“Not doing the vegan thing anymore?”
She’d tried to make it sound like casual, natural conversation, so I did the same. “Nah. We were doing it for health reasons, but now it’s like, I just want dairy products in my life again.”
Weighty silence fell between us.
“You know, it would have helped if Deja had done the ethical thing and quit working for Neil when she changed her mind about helping Gabriella out,” I pointed out gently. “I felt like it was really unfair of you to just cut me off like that. We’ve been friends for the better part of a decade, Holli. You’re going through so much. You’re about to get married. And the idea of you going through all of that stress without me to help you—I mean, not that you can’t do it yourself, that’s not what I meant—”
“I know what you meant.” The ghost of a smile bent her mouth. “It’s been really hard. It’s been a nightmare, actually. Planning a wedding is hard, and Deja has like, completely taken it over. My bridesmaids are hopeless, my maid of honor got freaking pregnant and is too busy with her nonstop baby obsession. Deja completely rejected my farm theme—”
“Farm…theme?” I could only imagine what Holli had proposed.
“Yeah, I thought it would be cool to do this urban farm thing, where the guests sat on hay bales and chickens clucked around, but the chickens would be dyed our colors? And like, since I wasn’t talking to you, I wanted a goat to be my maid of honor.” A spark of the old Holli peeked through, and I couldn’t help but laugh a little.
“You really thought she was going to go for that?” Then I paused. “Wait, you’re saying that a step down from me was a goat? Like, if I couldn’t be there, a goat was a suitable stand in?”
“I was irrationally angry with you,” she reminded me. “Look, I didn’t want this fight to drag out this long. But every time I thought of calling you or emailing you, I would just get mad all over again. Not at you, but at the whole situation. I wanted to believe that you were at fault and Deja did nothing wrong, even when she kept saying, ‘I am responsible for this.’”
“What made you change your mind?” Holli hated admitting that she was wrong, so it must have been something pretty serious.
“It was when Deja called me out on something I hadn’t even realized.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t want to tell you. I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“My feelings have been hurt for like, five months,” I pointed out.
“Okay.” She exhaled loudly then admitted, “I’m jealous, okay? You don’t have any responsibilities anymore. You don’t have to worry about bills, you don’t have to worry about grocery shopping or rent or how you’re going to pay for your wedding. I mean, I’m not doing terrible or anything. I’m actually doing better than I ever have. But during a financially tight spot for us, I sat there and watched you buy a purse that cost more than I make in a year, like it was nothing. So, I’m jealous of that.”
I didn’t know how to address this, when it was laid out so plainly in front of me. “First of all, I still have responsibilities.” That had been what had bothered me the most, so I wanted to get it out of the way. “Maybe my survival doesn’t depend on my paycheck, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to work and make a life of my own.”
“I figured that out when you and Deja started talking about a magazine. You’re not just doing that because you feel bad that she got fired, right?” Holli tilted her head in an expression of mild suspicion.
I scrunched up my face. “No. If you haven’t noticed, I’m persona non grata in the fashion journalism world, too.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got your whole book thing.” She sat up straighter. “How is that going, by the way? I saw that it made the New York Times list.”
“It did. We had cake.” God, that sounded so stupid. Like I didn’t even care about my success. But I didn’t, and Holli was probably the o
nly person on the planet who would understand that. “The writing thing isn’t for me. At least, not memoirs. Not books at all. It’s so lonely working by yourself, and the constant second-guessing.”
“Yikes.” Her eyebrows rose as she took a sip of coffee.
“I just need to get back to doing what I’ve always wanted to do. I know how it sounds to say, “Oh, I’ll just walk away from this amazing opportunity that millions of people are working hard for every day, but it wasn’t really my success. People bought that book because of who it was about, not who wrote it. And I don’t want that. I want to build something from the ground up.”
“You’re preaching to the choir. I wouldn’t be able to live my life without modeling. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I know I say I could quit at any time, but I’m addicted.” A flash of trouble squinted her eyes. “It’s harder now, though. More competitive. Before last year, I could take any job. I could do car shows, or stock photography shoots. Now that I’ve walked in a couple major shows and done a huge print campaign, I can’t go back to that other stuff. But there are hundreds of other models at my level who have more experience, and more practice navigating the industry. I feel like a little fish in a big pond, and the big pond has fewer job opportunities.”
“I’m sorry, Holli. I wish I had known.”
“Well, I didn’t tell you. I need to be better about that. Trust me, Deja has informed all about my uncommunicative tendencies.” Holli rolled her eyes. “Can we just be friends again? I know it’s not fair to put you on the spot like this—?”
“Yes, oh my god, yes.” I almost lunged across the table to hug her. “I need you. You’re one of the most important people in my life—”
“It was like getting my arm cut off in a freak elevator accident,” she finished for me, in the way only Holli could describe something. “And you weren’t going to be at my wedding.”
“When are you getting married?” I hoped it wasn’t very soon; I would need time to warm Neil up to the idea of going. Not that my going would be dependent on his attendance. If he didn’t want to be there, then that was his problem.
The Bride (The Boss) Page 38