After Hours: (InterMix)
Page 30
She squished the carpet between her bare toes, wiping her smudged screen with her sleeve. To confront or not to confront.
Lauren had told her once, “You can be fat, or you can be a bitch. But you can’t be a fat bitch. Bitchiness is a luxury only hot girls can afford.”
Merry hated that motto, but she still remembered it word-for-word, five or more years after Lauren had decreed it. As though a girl couldn’t be big and a bitch, and for that matter, hot. Though sadly, it seemed perhaps a girl could not be Lauren’s best friend if she didn’t stay fat.
Which was a rather bitchy policy, Merry felt. Nearly as bitchy as that email.
Was she more annoying, now? She hadn’t thought so.
Like anyone on earth isn’t annoying, from time to time. And if she was chirpy and smiley when people complimented her, it was because her mom and had raised her to accept praise graciously, never to deflect or apologize. Save your deflecting for the insults—there’ll be plenty. Swallow the kind words whole.
Merry sighed, physically feeling the angst, forcing it from her body as she’d trained herself to do in lieu of muffling it with food.
Let Lauren sulk. Let her vent. Let her think Merry had turned traitor by veering off a comfortable, delicious collision course with diabetes or joint problems or whatever else she’d managed to ignore until last year.
Maybe Lauren would come around, in time. And if she didn’t, Merry might have to admit that maybe Lauren was an additional two hundred pounds she’d be well rid of.
Sucked, though—ten years of friendship, and she’d never managed to notice how codependent they’d been. Kind of like how she’d never quite realized she was fat, despite the numbers on her jeans tag and the scale giving it to her straight on a daily basis. People were nothing if not selective in their perceptions of reality.
She hit Reply.
From: Merry
To: Lauren, Kat
Subject: re: Farewell drinks?
Awesome! 7:30 at Americano. First round’s on me.
Mer
Yeah, awesome. Merry could be the bigger man . . . even if she was now the smaller girl. She’d broken some unspoken, fat-girl solidarity pact she’d subconsciously entered into with Lauren. She could forgive the woman for feeling betrayed or abandoned.
Though yeah. It was pretty cunty.
She turned to the catastrophe that was her living room, strewn with three weeks’ hiking supplies she had to magically clown-car into one pack. She lined items up by necessity—tent, sleeping bag, water filter on the front line. Essential clothes, followed by if-there’s-room clothes . . .
Friends love each other, she thought, checking the caps on her travel bottles. Friends hurt each other. Friends came and went, but Merry had already lost a lot in the past year and a half. Her mother, then a third of her body weight, then her . . . Well, not her boyfriend. Her fuck-buddy. Jason had quit texting a few months ago, right around the time Merry had spun giddy circles in a department-store dressing room when the zipper slid home, practically dancing out into the street carrying her first size-twelve dress, with a side of intoxicating confidence.
Magically, a few weeks later, she’d had to take that dress to a consignment shop—it was too big now. After this vacation, she might need to do the same with all her tens. Holy shit. Size eight. The single digits. She might actually one day fit into the sample sizes she patterned at work. Shangri-fucking-La.
The weird thing was, she still felt like the old Merry, inside—caring, competent, fun, loyal. But now people were reacting differently to the package those qualities came in. Guys from work who’d never said more to her than, “How do you change the toner in this thing?” were suddenly asking about her weekend, her vacation, her opinions on the latest reality TV scandal.
While part of her was thrilled—these were side effects of the weight loss she’d been hoping for, after all—another part had to think, caring, fun and loyal don’t really count for much, do they? Not unless they came wrapped in a pleasing female shape. Not if you wanted to get past the proverbial receptionist with a guy. Which kind of sucked.
And yet . . . she did want that. Thirty-one, and she’d never been in love. She’d been infatuated, sure. She’d been in love in a guy’s general direction, but she’d never felt that light and heat shining back on her. She’d been clad too heavily in her own self-consciousness to welcome it.
Now the armor was gone. She felt exposed, but the sensation was as thrilling as it was scary. And if she ever wanted to get tangled in the writhing tentacles of passionate, mind-blowing, stupid-making, reciprocal true love, she’d have to make peace with this naked feeling.
Perhaps Lauren, like Jason, had preferred the old Merry, the Merry who’d bend over backward to please the people she liked, who put herself last.
You’re welcome to her, she thought, stuffing her sleeping bag into its sleeve.
This new Merry’s off to walk across Scotland.
And she’s not coming back until she’s fucking found herself.
Before becoming a purveyor of smart erotic romance, Cara McKenna worked as a record store bitch, a lousy barista, a decent designer, and an over-enthusiastic penguin handler. She loves writing sexy, character-driven stories about strong-willed men and women who keep each other on their toes . . . and bring one another to their knees.
Cara now writes full-time and lives north of Boston with her bearded husband. When she’s not trapped in her own head, she can usually be found in the kitchen, the coffee shop, or jogging around the nearest duck-filled pond.
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