“But not as my girlfriend.”
For a moment I allow myself to imagine it, the way Tarek might romance me: dinner dates at Seattle’s best restaurants, moonlit walks, flowers to mark the monthly anniversary of our first kiss. Maybe it’s the oxytocin fucking with me, but in my head, it’s not the worst thing in the world. I might have even wanted to hold his hand when we were in line with Julia and Noelle.
Except romance is like the harp, or how I viewed the harp before I met Maxine: a performance. He’d want something wild and grand, and I’ve spent my life with grand. Grand is exhausting.
I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek. “I can’t.”
At this, he gets to his feet and puts a few steps between us. “You can see how this might be confusing, right?” His eyebrows are creased, and I have to fight the urge to go over and smooth them out. Iron them with my lips. “You do all these things that make me think you feel the way I do. Then you tell me you don’t want a relationship. And everything we’ve done today—it feels like a date. So I’m just… really fucking mixed up about this.”
He’s not wrong. Sitting here, comforting him the way he comforted me, it feels like he is my boyfriend. The fuzzy boundaries between us have taken a toll on him. I’ve been so focused on making sure I emerge from this unscathed that I haven’t wondered whether any of this might hurt him, too.
I splay out a hand on the bench and stare down at it, then turn it over to see the new calluses forming on my fingers. “I’m sorry I invited you to the show. Maybe I shouldn’t have.” And it kills me to say it, but I add, “We don’t have to do things like this. We can… I don’t know. Keep the boundaries clearer?”
It’s not what I want. I want to be close to him, especially if he’s feeling this way right now, but that’s selfish. I’m the one making him feel this way—I can’t be the one to fix it.
He rakes a hand through his hair, this burst of frustration I haven’t seen from him. It’s not fun, knowing I caused it. “No, no. Forget I said anything. We can keep doing this. All of this.”
“Okay,” I say quietly, wondering why if I’m getting my way, if I’m getting him in all the ways I want, it still feels like we’re both losing.
It’s all I know how to do. He said earlier that he didn’t understand, but he has to get it by now.
“Hey. I loved the show,” he says, sitting back down and beckoning for me to come closer. Reluctantly, I do, closing the space between us again. He pulls me into his lap, hands on my hips. “And I loved this.” He motions to the wrecking room around us. “Could you—could you at least tell me why? We’ve been friends for so long, and I can’t remember you not feeling this way.”
His voice is so soft as it invites me to tell him my secrets.
“Maybe I just really hate romantic comedies.”
He scoffs at that, and I probably deserve it. “I’m sorry if I sound daft, but it seems so straightforward to me. We like spending time together. We’re obviously attracted to each other. I know I fucked up at the auction, and at the movie, and I’m sorry. But what am I missing, Quinn? What am I not seeing?”
In my mind, I reach farther back into the past. I am so close to letting him into this painful place. Letting him hold some of that pain with me, maybe even help me make sense of it.
“I just—” I break off, take a deep breath with my fingertips pressed hard against my temples. If it’ll make him understand, I have to let him in, even if it only makes it harder to eventually shut him out. So I push myself over the edge. “My parents separated.”
Separated. It doesn’t sound like what it really is—either a prelude to divorce or a last-ditch effort to save a marriage. It sounds… final.
He blinks a few times as this registers. “They… what? Isaac and Shayna?” he asks, as though maybe I’m talking about my other parents.
I nod. “When I was eight. They said work had been stressful, and my mom was going to stay with our aunt for a while. It was only for six months, and then she moved back in and they pretended everything was fine.”
“Only six months,” he says, giving it a strange emphasis.
“What?”
“You said it was only six months. That’s not an only to me. That’s six fucking months. Six fucking months when you were eight years old. That probably felt like a lifetime.”
“I—yeah. I guess it didn’t feel like an only to me back then either.” I move off his lap, my breaths still shaky. “We never talked about it. I tried to, but they clearly just wanted to move on and forget. Asher was in high school, and she was always so busy, and I didn’t want to bother her, either. And—and when I stayed with my mom, sometimes I overheard her crying, and it all felt like… like all these adults were making decisions about me, but no one cared to let me know what was happening or why.”
“I am so sorry, Quinn.” A couple emotions flit across his face and his fingers twitch, as though he wants to comfort me but knows it’s the opposite of what I’m asking for. So he keeps his hands in his lap.
“What you said last year at the marina, about couples not trying hard enough to stay together? I couldn’t imagine them having tried any harder than literally being in the business of love.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeats. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have said that.” But he might have still believed it.
“They went back to work like nothing was different. They’d just almost gotten divorced, but they were all smiles with their clients, and none of it ever seemed real. It felt like they were faking their whole marriage because it was good for business.” God, it feels weird to be telling this story with an ax at my feet.
“And you think they’re still faking it? Even now?” There’s no judgment in his questions. He’s not asking them to prove me wrong. He genuinely wants to know what I think.
I hold up my arms. “Yes? I don’t know. It took me by surprise when it happened, and there weren’t any signs at all. So I’m constantly waiting for something to go wrong, for any minor disagreement to be the last straw. And if I left B+B, well, I can’t help feeling like that last straw would come a lot sooner.”
What I don’t tell him: the closest Tarek and I ever got to a relationship, it hurt in a similar way, the kind of hurt that makes the ground unsteady beneath your feet, that makes colors duller. The kind of hurt that made me feel I had one less person in the world on my side. A deep, acute loneliness.
It confirmed everything I thought was true about relationships: that they don’t give a fuck about who they hurt when they go up in flames. We hadn’t even started one, and already I’d been burned.
“You have to know we wouldn’t be like that,” he says. “For about a hundred reasons. You really think all relationships are doomed? Your sister’s? Julia’s?”
I shrug. “Some of them, sure. It’s just statistics.”
“Right.” The word ricochets off the walls of the small gray room.
“You’re going back to school in September anyway,” I continue, because if I can’t convince him with emotion, then I’ll use logic. “Why does this have to be something serious? Why can’t it just be fun? You are having fun, right?”
He hesitates, but then his mouth quirks up. It’s such a relief to see, even if it isn’t a whole smile. “I have been having a ridiculous amount of fun, yes.”
“Me too. So why can’t we keep having fun? We can still be friends. We’ll just be friends who kiss. And… other things,” I say.
He’s quiet for a moment, processing this. I know this kind of casual relationship I’m asking for goes against every die-hard-romantic cell in his body.
“Okay,” he finally says. “Then I guess we’ll keep having fun.”
It must be the saddest way anyone’s ever talked about having fun, and it scrapes at my heart. But he’ll see, when he goes back to California and I go exactly nowhere, that this was the right decision. This way, neither of us gets hurt.
I wrap my arms around him, bury a hand in his hair, ask if he
wants to go back to his car.
At least that’s one thing we can agree on.
22
We didn’t think they would be so… naked.” Lincoln taps his chin as he stands in front of a nude oil painting that leaves nothing to the imagination. “Or so, uh, well endowed.”
“My parents are going to lose their minds,” Victoria says. “We can’t have our first dance in front of this. Not on TV.”
A producer and camera operator stroll through the exhibit, pausing by each work of art to examine it up close. Victoria and Lincoln booked the museum six months ago, and suffice it to say, the exhibits have changed.
“It’s all very artistically and tastefully done,” Mom says, trying to be helpful. “Right, Quinn?”
“Oh—right.” I try to tear my gaze away, but it’s, like, a lot of penises. It’s taking all my willpower not to send a photo to Julia. Maybe I can snap one when no one is looking.
“Are you sure we can’t move some of them around? Even just for one day?” the producer asks the curator.
“Unfortunately, that’s not going to be an option. This collection is in very high demand.”
Mom lets Victoria and Lincoln walk a few paces ahead of her, then whips her head toward me, lowering her voice so only I can hear. “What happened to that quick pop-by you were going to do last week? To take photos of what the art looked like in the space before the walk-through?”
Last week. Shit. Was I? When Mom mentioned the walk-through at work brunch, I assumed this was what she meant.
“It may have, um, slipped my mind,” I say.
The disappointment on her face is impossible to miss. I’m not just her daughter. I’m the employee who fucked up.
“We’ll play around with the setup.” Mom strides into the center of the room with a binder tucked under her arm, all business. “We could do the buffet here, and the band here, and then we could get some curtains or a divider screen to cover up the more erotic pieces?”
“I like that idea,” Lincoln says. “Vic?”
“Everyone’s going to think we’re pervs for deciding to have our wedding here,” Victoria says. “My mother thinks HBO is pornography. This many dicks might actually kill her.”
The producer and camera operator are discussing something in hushed tones. “I know timing is tight,” the producer says, “but we’re wondering if it might be better to explore other venue options at this point.”
“Other venues?” Victoria squeaks. “We’ve had this booked for ages. I grew up going to this museum with my grandparents. There’s a reason we picked it. We can’t pull a new venue out of our asses with two weeks to go.”
“It might actually be kind of funny if we do the cake cutting right here.” Lincoln points to a painting of a man with some strategically placed desserts. “It’s unconventional, sure, but we could roll with it. What do you think, hon?”
Victoria bursts into tears.
“Sorry—I just—” she says, and then she races out of the exhibit.
“I’ve got this,” Mom says.
Lincoln holds out his arms, looking defeated but concerned. “Be my guest. I wish I could say this is the first time this has happened, but I think she’s under a lot of pressure. I can say from experience that I’m probably not who she wants to talk to right now.”
I place a hand on my mother’s binder. “This whole thing was my fault. I can go talk to her.”
A beat passes between us before she relents. “Thanks. I’ll try to puzzle this out with the camera guy.”
Comforting a weepy bride is the last thing I expected to do today. I’ve seen my parents do it numerous times, and I’m always bowled over by their patience, their empathy. Crying in public is the worst; I owe it to Victoria to try to make things right.
I can hear her sobs before I reach the bathroom. I knock on the door. “Victoria? It’s Quinn. Can I come in?”
She just cries louder, which I take as neither a yes nor a no. Her pointy-toed flats peek out from beneath the door of one of the stalls.
“I’m just going to sit out here,” I say, sliding onto a padded bench across from the sinks. It’s a very luxe bathroom, with a sparkling chandelier that looks like a work of art itself. “If you want to talk about anything, I’m here to listen. Or if you want to not talk, we can do that, too.”
A sniff from the stall, and then the sound of toilet paper unrolling. When she opens the door, mascara has spiderwebbed down her cheeks, and a few strands of hair have escaped her curly bun. I’m reminded of her meltdown the week before proposals.
“Sorry,” she says, blotting at her face with a wad of toilet paper. “You must think I’m a complete bridezilla.”
“We at B+B firmly reject that word. You’re absolutely allowed to be emotional, and we deal with plenty of disaster grooms, too, and there’s no word for that.”
“Fine. A mess, then.”
“No,” I insist, and when she raises a single eyebrow in a way that makes me deeply jealous—my eyebrow-raising ability is both or nothing—I relent. “Well. A little. But you don’t have to apologize.”
“It’s honestly not even about the art. I mean, hell, I work with art. Those paintings are beautiful. The dudes are hot, am I right?”
I let myself laugh at that. I’m starting to get the feeling there’s something bigger going on than painted penises. Metaphorically speaking.
Victoria joins me on the bench. “All of this is just a reminder that people are expecting perfection from us. They have this idea of who we are and what this is supposed to look like, and if the wedding doesn’t mesh with that, then we’re going to get a lot of backlash.”
“Most couples we work with want perfection,” I say. “You might be in the minority who already knows it’s not going to be that way.”
“My parents were skeptical enough when I went on a reality show, and sure, I was too. I thought I’d get more Instagram followers, that it would be good for business. But there was a part of me that believed in the whole thing too. Part of me that wanted to fall in love.”
“And you did.” I saw it play out, the way her conversations with Lincoln had more depth than anyone else’s, how her eyes lit up when they met for a date. She had been open to it. Open to love. And it had happened.
“Yes. But it wasn’t just what the cameras picked up. It was the little things, like how Lincoln would arrange for a producer to deliver takeout if it was an especially grueling day of filming, or how he’d write notes for me to read on the days we weren’t together.” Maybe my heart isn’t as hardened as I thought it was, because that’s pretty sweet. “So the fact that we’re going to be back on TV, opening ourselves up to criticism again… It’s a lot. I tried to avoid the Twitter commentary last time, but there were entire blog posts talking about how I was shrill and annoying, anti-Semitic shit all over the internet, racists who didn’t want us together…”
“Shit.” I saw the blog posts, but not the rest of it. “I’m so sorry.”
“It was what I signed up for,” she says with a shrug. “That doesn’t excuse it, of course, but I knew it was going to happen. I just didn’t think it was going to be that bad. And it’s going to happen again, so I’m trying to prepare myself.”
“It’s not too late to kick out Streamr.”
Victoria gives me a knowing look. “Ah, but the money,” she says. “I’m always worried, though, about what people are saying about us behind our backs. If they think we won’t last because we met on TV or we haven’t been together that long. And I love Lincoln. I want to marry him. I didn’t even really believe in the concept of The One until I met him. But I’ve been on the verge of a panic attack every night this week, and now, seeing the venue, all of it feeling real… It sent me over the edge.”
“I hear you.” It’s the closest to telling her “I understand,” when the truth is that I can’t, not fully. “Obviously I’ve never been in your position, but people are going to talk. People are going to write horrible fucking things. I ov
erhear so much gossip at weddings, and some of it’s terrible.”
She shudders. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
A couple months ago, I would have cast aside her worries, rolled my eyes and marked them unimportant. Now, even if I can’t put myself in her position, I feel for her. I want to make it better. Right now, I think I see her.
“You’re going to be the one up there looking fucking amazing on the best day of your life, penis paintings or not, internet vitriol or not.” It’s a miracle I say it with a straight face. “I’ve seen a lot of relationship drama, and the fact that you and Lincoln aren’t at each other’s throats, that it isn’t manifesting into something pushing you two apart? That’s a big deal. It’s not about the artwork. It’s not about the venue or the cake or the band or the dress or the fact that thousands of people are going to be able to stream it.”
“It’s a great dress, though,” Victoria whispers, and I can’t help grinning at that.
“My mom does this thing before every bride or groom walks down the aisle. She tells them to look at their partner, and to make sure to take some time with them away from everyone else at some point that day. And she reminds them, no matter what else happens, this event is about the two of you. We’ll take care of the rest.”
“Jesus. How old are you again?”
“Thirty-seven. I have great skin.”
“I like you,” she says. “You’re going to be there, right?”
I tell her yes, and I realize—I want to be there. I want to see Victoria looking elegant beyond belief, and I want to see how B+B pulls off this wedding.
Most of all, I want to witness that moment Lincoln sees her dressed up for the first time. I want to see their first dance. Because despite what I may or may not believe about love, I’m rooting for them.
There’s a knock on the door. “Everything okay in there?” Lincoln’s voice.
Victoria gets to her feet and swipes at her eyes a couple times. “Yeah, hon, I’m just on my way out.” Then she turns back to me. “Thank you,” she whispers, leaning down to squeeze my shoulder.
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