Borrow-A-Bridesmaid (4 page)

His cheeks flush again, and then he winks back.
He winks back!

Before we can embarrass ourselves further, Susan and Brandon begin reviewing tomorrow's schedule. Susan walks around the table, handing small bags to several guests. She has a secret smile for me when she hands me my bag. The tag reads, “I'm glad I called you. Thanks for saving my wedding.”

I open the rectangular black velvet box inside the pink sheer bag. She's given me a pair of pearl earrings and a matching necklace. I look up, about to protest, feeling like an impostor for yet another time this evening. Then again, I bet I could pawn these and eat for a month. Or longer, if I stick to ramen and peanut butter.

I slide the bag into my purse and take a last bite of key lime pie as people begin to push back from the table, breaking off into groups of two or three and ambling toward the door. I rest my napkin on the table and smooth it out, focusing diligently on inanimate objects. Before I can stand up, Charlie catches my wrist. “I need your help,” he says, leaning close.

His tie is slightly askew from numerous hugs; the red heart symbol between “I” and “Yeats” rests on the left side of his chest above his actual heart. Inadvertently, I picture him flexing those lean-muscley pectorals one at a time. Pec winking.

“Okay,” I say, forcing my gaze back to his eyes and giving him a smile that threatens to spill off the sides of my face.

“Here's what's going to happen at my parents' house. I'm going to get grilled on job prospects as my parents sip brandy and my grandparents ask me if I'm married while their crazy three-legged Chihuahua named Gus humps my leg. Have you ever been humped by a three-legged Chihuahua?”

I shake my head.

“Would you like to save me from such a dire fate?”

“What do you have in mind?” I try to be coy but fail. I'm one breath away from humping his leg myself. His hand is still on my wrist, and I can feel his pulse beating against mine.

“How would you feel about getting out of here?”

“Good.” Really good.

He pulls his hand away to push back his brown suit sleeve, which is tasseled by loose threads dangling off the cuff. This motion exposes a naked, freckled wrist. He studies it, then looks back at me with a conspiratorial grin. “It's happy hour in California. Can I buy you a drink?”

Four

S
everal blocks northeast, Charlie leads me below street level into Rocket Bar, a divey establishment that boasts Skee-Ball, darts, shuffleboard, and pool, along with typical bar fare and a smattering of posters announcing upcoming live music shows for bands with names like Angry Achilles, Bert and Hernia, Smog Breathers.

Above the eighties music playing over the speakers, Charlie asks me what I want to drink. I'm afraid more wine will make me sleepy after this week's C shifts, and I want to be alert for every moment of tonight. “Beer me!” I say.

He bows in acquiescence and wedges himself between hipsters at the bar to procure two pints of something amber that smells hoppy and delightful. We find a table by the Skee-Ball machines and settle into rickety chairs.

“Cheers,” he says, and we clink glasses.

“Thanks for the beer.”

“You're welcome,” he says, “but I'm bartering for information. Talk to me. Tell me about yourself.”

“Well.” I suddenly feel like I've never done a single interesting thing. Charlie seems less nervous now, as if the Rocket Bar environs, despite their visual and sonic clatter, have soothed him. Or maybe it's just the beer.

I take a drink, stalling. I'm rusty on straight-male interaction. To prevent turning the subtle pause into an awkward one, I forge ahead. “I have this side project of learning a new word every day since graduation, to make sure my brain doesn't wither away. I've already forgotten everything from all those required college classes. I got nothing on Euclid's theorems and the theory of relativity.”

Charlie looks intrigued. “And today's word?”

“Scintilla: a small amount or trace. It's from the Latin term for a spark or particle of fire.”

He beams, and I can see his dimples even in the sparse light. “I'll add it to my arsenal. Let me guess—English major?”

I nod. “What gave me away, the gratuitous verbiage or the dead-end job?”

“Both. Takes one to know one.” He raises his glass and we cheer again. “For a while there I couldn't get enough of the transcendentalists, but more recently, I've been getting into contemporary American poets. My poor screenplay characters tend to break out into verse, and my instructors keep telling me to make them talk like actual people.”

Oh dear Lord. He's hot
and
he's a word geek? I consider splashing my beer onto my face to wake up from whatever dreamland I'm inhabiting. I reach down to subtly pinch my thigh while hoping the unsteady chair doesn't collapse under me. But when I look again, he's still there, and the conversational ball is in my court. “Instructors? So you're taking writing classes?”

“Yeah! It's all the rage in L.A. That's the nice thing about being out there. Lots of masters, hence lots of master classes. Not that I can really afford them on a barista's budget. But enough about me! What hamlet of English majordom did you reside in?”

“I went through a transcendentalist phase, too. I even spent a week in the wilderness one fateful spring break.”

“Yeah? How'd that go?”

I cup my hands around my glass. “I fell into a swamp.”

He smiles, then presses his lips together.

“Ha, ha. You wouldn't be grinning if you had to pry leeches off your ankles,” I say, pretending to glare at him.

He shakes his head. “You're an idealist. It's adorable. So what next? You didn't retire to Walden Pond, then.”

“I went backward in time—did my senior thesis on Milton. Themes of temptation and damnation were my specialty.”

His eyebrows rise. “Nice. So are you more of a literature-analysis type or a writer type? Or, dare I ask, both?”

I take a breath. “Well, I do like to write. I just haven't devoted much time to it recently.”

“I'm sorry. Work?”

I nod. “That's part of it. Ever since graduation, I feel like there's this wall between me and creativity. My dates with creativity used to happen around two
a.m.,
and two
a.m.
and I haven't really been friends lately.”

“I hear you. It's a struggle. I get back to my apartment after work and enter a macchiato-scented daze. I actually find the best time to write is on the job. At peak caffeination. Writing on the job helps, I swear. If you're anything like me, you have this static in your head that only goes away if you get things down on paper.”

“I think I know what you mean. For me, it's less like static and more like . . . sinus pressure.” Nice one. Reeeal attractive.

To my surprise, he nods. “You're right, it is more like pressure. It's the soul-crushing guilt and anxiety that come when you're not doing the one thing you know you're meant to be doing.”

“Exactly.” Feeling vulnerable, I decide on a change of subject. “So, this place is great. I've never been here before.”

“Really? You've been missing out.”

“I spent most of my Mason years at karaoke bars,” I admit, bringing the pint glass to my lips and taking a long drink just as Depeche Mode fades into a familiar voice singing, “I lose myself in you.” I swallow hard as I set the glass down, my hand shaking. I'm in shock: I've never heard Scott's music on the radio before, but it causes a physical reaction. My heart pauses for several stanzas, then hammers out a series of frenzied eighth notes. Like coming up from a long dive underwater and gasping for air.

Had Scott ever lost himself in me? I doubt it. Scott never cared much about my interests, except where they aligned with his. Occasionally I was called on to critique his song lyrics, but he never read my stories.

The last time I went to a dive bar was the night he broke up with me. He brought me to Calamity Brew, a frequent venue for his band, the Gaussian Pyramids. We arrived late, after separate family graduation dinners. I'd asked him if he wanted our families to eat together. “No, that's okay,” he said, not meeting my eyes.

Calamity Brew was still in disarray from graduation celebrations, and a few groups of friends lingered over drinks, postponing the inevitable goodbyes. I sat down first; Scott sat directly across from me, like we were in separate departure zones. My shoulders crept upward as my defenses slowly roused themselves.

And then he made The Speech. “We're young, Piper. We have our whole lives in front of us. And I owe it to myself to give this band a shot. I'll never have less responsibility and more freedom than I do at this exact moment in my life.” He even waxed poetic: “I'm at, like, the apex of my life, with all this burgeoning post-bac freedom but without any adult responsibilities to tie me down.” He held his arms at cross-angles, making a human mathematical diagram.

Who says “burgeoning” during a breakup? I should have pushed his arm diagram against his forehead and watched him tip backward onto the beer-stained floor.

Instead, I started to cry. “So you consider me—what? A responsibility? I don't get to be part of your journey? I'm not welcome with you at the apex?”

“You're taking my words and twisting them around.” He made a face as if he'd sipped one of the wounded soldiers lining the stage. “We're at a natural crossroads, and I'm saying it's best if we go our separate ways.”

A natural crossroads. I thought the three years we spent together were building toward something. He apparently saw them as one phase, neatly severed at graduation.

“You mean it's best for you. I never said I wanted that.”

He sighed, his attention pulled away by a group of cheerleaders behind me doing one last Mason cheer. It was such a surreal, horrible moment.

“Last call,” the bartender shouted, raising the house lights to display a stained, sticky floor. The Piper-Scott show was officially over. Or maybe it was just the Scott show all along.

As recorded Scott sings to me now, I have to close my eyelids to hold back tears. To stem them, I conjure Lin, who takes every opportunity to parody The Speech. Exempli gratia: When baking, he'll hold up the bowl and say, “Do you think this is the ideal apex of flour, without too much baking powder to weigh it down?” Then he'll cross his arms and make The Diagram.

It takes a few more slow-motion seconds before I open my eyes and drain about half my beer. I feel the lopsided ratio of Scott to me.
Scott's a recording artist; you work at an airport bookstore.

“I hate this song.” Charlie's voice is soft, as if he can sense that he should proceed with caution.

“My ex-boyfriend is the singer-songwriter.”

Charlie goes quiet. He drains a good quarter of his own beer before he ventures, “Is it fresh?”

“Hmm?”

“The breakup. Is it fresh?”

“Chronologically, no, but the pain and humiliation are still pretty close to the surface.” I am so not the apex of sexy and alluring right now.
Damn you, Scott.

Cheering erupts behind us as a woman schools her boyfriend at darts. “I've never heard him on the radio before,” I say over the din as we watch her do a victory dance.

“I have but wish I hadn't. He sings like a drunk David Bowie impersonator.”

I laugh. “You know, he kind of does. When we were dating, I always thought of it as his
signature style
.”

“Huh. My ex's signature style involved jealous rages and emotional manipulation.”

“My ex should write a song about your ex.”

He smiles. “That'd be classic. Can I get you another drink?”

“Please.”

As he settles back into his seat, we look at each other over the tops of our glasses.

“Is yours fresh?” I ask.

“Yes and no. I think we were breaking up for the past year or two, long before we made it official. So I was sort of getting over her even while we were still together. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, it does.”

He takes a deep breath, and I wonder if he's reliving a Speech. He seems to swallow the memory down with the beer, then he smiles and reaches across the table. “Hey, this is a pretty heavy conversation. Let's say we won't devote a scintilla of thought to our exes for the rest of tonight. And tomorrow, when we'll dance the shit out of that reception. Deal?”

“Scintilla—well played.”

Lin pops into my head again, creating his own word of the day: “dimpliciousness.”
Used in a sentence: “Charlie's dimpliciousness ranks a ten on the Richter scale of my loins.”

“So, deal?” Charlie's hand still rests on the table, hopefully upturned.

I imagine Lin sitting on my shoulder, pulling at a strand of my hair as he wiggles his eyebrows suggestively at Charlie. He always tells me to ask myself, “WWLD,” or “What Would Lin Do?” Still eyeing Charlie, the imaginary Lin whispers in my ear, “WILTNT.” “Work It Like There's No Tomorrow.”

“Deal.” I slide my hand into Charlie's, my heart beating in eighth notes.

He holds my hand longer than would be appropriate for a handshake. The longer he touches me, the more color seeps into my cheeks. “Your ex is a complete and utter ignoramus,” he says when he finally lets go.

It feels as if Angry Achilles is playing in my mind: so many thoughts, desires, and insecurities raging
.
But Scott disappears, vanquished by Charlie's words.

I try to shift closer to Charlie, and in the process, the rickety bar stool falters—and my entire body tips, Leaning Tower of Pisa–style, toward him. Not quite the effect I hoped for, but he puts a hand out to steady me, setting his glass on the table. His hand loiters on my bare shoulder. “Would you want to—”

Two hands clap Charlie's shoulders from behind. We both turn to look at the lithe body connected to those hands. The expression on Charlie's face is one of instant recognition and joy.

“Sam, dude! I wasn't expecting to see you until after the wedding.”

“Got the day off, so I drove down early. I had a feeling I'd find you here,” Sam says. “Thought you'd be wanting a post-rehearsal slog. I tried texting you, but I guess you were already halfway to Boozeville.”

My heart makes a sad-robot bleep. A third wheel?

Charlie and Sam fall into a secret handshake that's somewhere between the hand jive and the macarena. It ends with a regal inclination of the head. While they evaluate each other, I make my own notes on Sam. He's wearing a green military jacket, aviator sunglasses (worn inside despite the dark), and ripped jeans. Upon noticing me, he pulls me into a full-on hug. I put my arms around him and laugh. “Well, hi there,” I say into the epaulettes of his jacket.

He pulls back, his hands on my shoulders. “Charlie's holding out on me.” He clucks his tongue, shaking his head. “Hi, Charlie's new lady friend.”

“Oh!” I say, my cheeks hot. “I'm not—” I look at Charlie, who's giving Sam a coded look.

Charlie clears his throat. “This is Piper. She's Susan's bridesmaid. Piper, meet my best friend and hetero lifemate, Samuel. We've known each other since we were eight.”