by Lexi Ryan
***
Present Day
Liz: Nate disappeared, so no sexy rocker for me tonight. Damn. I’ve known nuns who got more action than I’ve seen lately.
I grimace at Lizzy’s text from last night. On the one hand, she makes me laugh, but on the other, I don’t know what she’s going to think when I tell her Nate is Mr. Hulk Tattoo.
I’m supposed to spend the day looking at wedding venues with my mom, and all I can think about is whether I cheated on my fiancé. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure I need to know if I’m fucking some rock star behind Max’s back before I can choose the length of my veil.
I’ve been working in the bakery since four thirty this morning, and the clock reads twenty to six when Lizzy comes through the front door, her eyes half closed.
“Why couldn’t your dream career have required me to sleep past ten every day, huh?” She pushes past me and to the coffee. “I swear, if I weren’t an unemployed loser, I’d tell you to find someone else to wake up at the ass crack of dawn.” She pours herself a cup of coffee and then dumps cream in it before taking a long drink. “Fuck me, that’s good.” When she finally opens her eyes and looks at me—really looks at me—she frowns. “What’s wrong?”
“I know who Mr. Hulk Tattoo is,” I whisper.
She straightens. “Really? Did he come back? Did you see him somewhere?”
“He was at Asher’s last night.”
She grins. “Oh, the plot thickens!”
“It’s Nate Crane, Liz.”
“What’s Nate Crane?”
“Nate Crane is the guy who got into my bed like he belonged there. He’s the guy I was cheating on Max with.”
She squeezes her eyes shut and mutters, “God, you’re such a bitch.”
“What?”
“You’re engaged. Sue me for hating you a little. You get the perfect life and the hottie on the side.”
“The hottie on the side might ruin the perfect life!” As much as I want to tell myself that my secret was safe, as much as I want to let go of what might or might not have happened with Nate, I can’t stop obsessing over what I’ve done. What if my memories don’t return? I need answers.
Liz frowns. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. But come on. Who could blame you? Nate. Fucking. Crane. You were fucking Nate Crane.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” I protest.
She cocks her head. “How familiar was he with your body when he was touching you in the dark?”
I wince. “This sucks.”
She shakes her head as if still trying to clear away sleepiness. “Okay, so you saw him at the party and realized he was the guy. Then what? Did he approach you?”
“No. The opposite. He saw me and went in the other direction. But this is my life, you know? My future with this really great guy. And the more time I spend with Max, the more sure I am that he’s the right guy for me, and I don’t want to screw this up, but maybe I already have. So I followed Nate outside and told him I have amnesia and he asked when the engagement happened—before or after the amnesia, as if that made a difference—and I told him before and he was upset all over again and wouldn’t talk to me about it. He walked away without answering any of my questions, but I got a hold of his cell phone and read through some of our texts to each other, and it looks really bad, and now I don’t know who to talk to or where to get answers, but I’m scared I’ll lose Max if I tell him and…” I take a long, gasping breath. “Help.”
“Okay.” She sets her coffee on the counter and comes over to put her hands on my shoulders. “This is going to be all right. We’re going to figure this out. Together. But first you have to breathe.”
“Right.” I draw in another shaky breath. And another. I’m on my third before Lizzy’s nodding and smiling.
“Okay. Now do you think you and Nate were just…”
“Just what?”
“Do you think he just came by for booty calls, or do you think you had a relationship?”
“He said, ‘I’m the idiot who’s in love with you.’ Those were his words, ‘the idiot who’s in love with you.’ And then the text messages…?”
“Dirty?”
I nod. “Really dirty.”
“Oh, damn, girl.”
“I know. Right?”
She rubs her hands together. “Okay. I could talk to Nate, right? Feel him out?”
“He’s hella pissed at me, Liz. I don’t think he’s any more likely to talk to you.”
“What about Asher?” she asks, but my horror must be evident on my face because she says, “Okay, okay, bad idea. No one else needs to know until they need to know, right?”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
“Your phone!” she exclaims. “We didn’t know who we were looking for yesterday! Look in your contacts first. Maybe you have his name programmed as something else.”
I scroll through my contacts until I see find his name staring back at me. “He’s here. Programmed into my phone.”
She makes a hurry-up gesture with her hand. “Well, click on the history.”
I frown. I called him last Friday. That was the day of my accident. We had a three-minute conversation. About what? Judging from his reaction when he saw my ring, I obviously wasn’t telling him about my engagement.
“Oh, hell, Liz. This doesn’t make any sense.”
She snatches the phone from my hand and starts scrolling through the history under Nate’s contact info. “But you said there were texts from you on his phone?”
“Yeah. A lot of them. I didn’t get very far back before he found me and took it back.”
“But there’s nothing on your phone, which seems to indicate you deleted the evidence.”
I cross my arms. “It looks like it.”
“Where’s your laptop?”
“In the kitchen. I need to—”
I don’t get a chance to finish before she darts to the back of the kitchen and opens my laptop. “What’s your password?”
I shrug. “That’s what I was trying to say. I haven’t been able to get on because I don’t know. Thank God my calendar is synched with my phone, but I brought it down today because I need to take it to the shop. I can’t access my files.”
“What have you tried?”
“All the usual passwords I’ve always used. Birthday, initials, HanHan, initials and birthday together.”
“What about your anniversary with Max?”
I lift my palms. “No go.”
“What about Nate? Or Nate Crane?”
“That’s not it.”
“You sure?”
I drop my gaze to the floor. “I tried this morning.”
“Or…” She taps on the keyboard for a minute then presses ENTER. The computer beeps at her and gives her the “Wrong Password” warning message. “Hmm.” She taps again.
“Let it go, Liz. I’ve tried.”
She hits ENTER and the computer brightens as my desktop appears.
“What was it?”
“‘Lost In Me.’” She forces a smile. “But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s a seriously popular song.”
Maybe it’s not incriminating evidence, but it doesn’t look good either. “Go to my email first.”
She opens the email client and loads the “Sent” folder. A quick scroll through shows messages from me to several potential clients, vendors, future brides. When she pulls up my contact list, Nate’s name and email are listed, but a search for his email address gives us nothing from the history.
“Why would I have him in my contacts if I’ve never actually contacted him?”
“Let’s check the trash,” she says, moving the mouse to pull up the deleted messages. She looks at me. “Empty.”
My stomach churns, bile crawling up my throat. “I’ve never been good about clearing that stuff. Why would I do it here?”
“Because you were trying to hide something?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I mutter.
; A search of my Facebook profile yields similar results. Nate is in my friends list, but we can’t find any evidence of correspondence between us. Of course, if we’d been having an affair, I can’t believe I’d be stupid enough to flaunt it on Facebook. Hanna is in a secret mostly-just-about-sex relationship with Nate Crane. I’m pretty sure they don’t have that option yet.
I want to scream. “I wish I were the kind of girl who kept a diary.”
“What are you ladies doing?”
I jump at the question and turn to see Drew entering the kitchen from the back door. She’s gorgeous, a younger, more petite version of Cally’s dark hair and sultry curves. But she’s certainly not dressed to impress anyone in her torn-up old jeans and raggedy T-shirt.
“Drew! Good morning!”
“Eh. If you say so. Coffee?”
“Up front,” I say just as the bell at the front rings to let us know a customer came in. “And can you get that customer while you’re at it?”
“Sure. I’m great with the public,” she enthuses, with an eye roll thrown in for good measure.
I ignore her sarcasm. “Thanks, Drew,” I say, and watch her push through the swinging door to the front of the shop.
“Let’s think about this,” Lizzy says. “Maggie says you met Nate three months ago at a show in St. Louis. That’s also around the time you stopped trying to lose weight and started taking drastic measures to be sure you lost weight.”
“Drastic measures?” Maybe the anorexia I was secretly seeing Dr. Perkins for wasn’t much of a secret at all.
“You stopped eating, took your one-a-day workouts to two or three times a day. Drastic. That’s also when you started pulling away from me.”
The truth is that my anorexia is more believable to me than the idea of pulling away from Liz. “You think I did that because of Nate?”
“I didn’t say that. I just think something happened three months ago and you changed.” Her eyes light up and she’s back at the computer, pulling up the web browser and typing madly.
“What?”
“Gossip sites.” Lizzy’s eyes scan the screen as she scrolls down with her mouse. “They’re in love with Nate Crane for the obvious reasons, and I bet there’s at least one pic of him while he was in St. Louis.” She stops scrolling and her shoulders sag.
“What?” I step behind her to see what she found. She minimizes the window, but not before I see the headline.
The thing about being overweight, for me at least, is that I’ve spent most of my life strategically planning how I’m going to lose weight and change my body. Most fat girls don’t like their pictures taken because they truly believe that soon enough they will be smaller, fitter, more toned—more aesthetically pleasing. No matter that I’ve been overweight my whole life. I wasted so much time and energy thinking about how to get rid of the weight that I never accepted my size.
Fitness people would probably say that’s good. They would probably talk about the dangers of complacency and “giving up,” blah blah blah. But they don’t understand that always hating your size, always planning to change, translates way too easily to self-loathing and depression. And every time someone takes a picture of a fat girl, revealing her true fat-girl form, it feels like an insult, an intentional jab.
But one hundred times worse than the pictures is the commentary, as if we must be reminded of this completely unacceptable shortcoming. As if we don’t spend the majority of our waking moments thinking about it.
My eyes sting as I blink at the screen where the picture was. Where the headline was.
“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” Lizzy says. “They’re fucking shallow idiots.”
“Pull it back up, Liz.”
She shakes her head. “No. It’s stupid. Looking at it is only going to hurt you.”
“Pull it back up.” My determination must be clear in my voice, because she sighs and clicks on the icon. The browser pops back up on the screen.
The image shows Nate kissing a woman, his hand halfway up the black skirt that’s creeping up and exposing her thick thigh. My face is obscured, but there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m the woman in the picture under the soul-scarring headline: Nate Crane’s Secret Fatty Fetish.
I reach over Lizzy and scroll down to the text of the article—a bunch of nothing trying to make legitimate journalism out of spotting Nate making out with an overweight woman outside a St. Louis nightclub. There’s no mention of who the woman in the picture is—as if identity is irrelevant—and no mention of what Nate and the girl did before or after making out outside the nightclub. But Nate’s words echo in my head.
“You begged. Right there outside the club, you begged me until I ripped your panties off and you were too busy biting my neck to talk anymore. Is that what you’re hoping to remember? How you wanted me so badly you let me finger you out in the open, against that building where anyone could have seen?”
He wasn’t lying about that. The evidence is right in front of me.
“Do you think I saw this?” I ask Liz.
She chews on her lower lip and shrugs. “It would explain your drastic diet changes.”
“It doesn’t answer any of my questions, though. Like why would I cheat on Max and how far did it go and…what the hell am I going to do?”
“We’ll figure this out. Let me think. Three months ago seems to be when everything changed. That was our graduation, the night you met Nate, and—”
“She started taking those out-of-town baking gigs three months ago.”
Lizzy and I turn toward Drew in unison as she pushes back into the kitchen, coffee in one hand, chocolate croissant in the other.
“That was even before this place was opened, but you were doing side gigs for people.”
Lizzy’s eyes are wide, her fingertips to her mouth. “I didn’t even think of that. I found it weird at the time, but I was kind of pissed at you for dropping me. I didn’t really give it much thought beyond that it was yet another reason you were better than me.”
“I’m not better than you. I’m sorry if I made you feel that way.”
She waves away my apology.
“Where was I going?” I ask Drew.
“Different cities,” she says around a mouthful of croissant. “I bet you can find your flight information in your email.”
Lizzy’s already tapping at the keyboard, pulling up my travel folder in my email client. “Bingo.”
I scan the destinations from the subject line. “LA, Seattle, New Orleans.”
Lizzy opens a new tab and searches Nate Crane tour schedule. She clicks through a link and pulls up the calendar on his website. “The dates and cities of your gigs all line up with Nate Crane performances.”
I step back and press my head against the wall before sinking to the floor. “Liz. What have I done?”
