by Liz Fenton
I just smile wryly and shove a piece of bread into my mouth so I don’t have to tell him I’m glad it happened, that I’m so happy he got things right this time.
• • •
The rest of the weekend passes by quickly, Max and I swallowed up in each other like we were when we first started dating, strolling hand in hand in town, sharing an ice cream sundae as we sit on the wooden bench outside of the parlor. We even get out on the lake in a kayak, me not complaining when it tips over and ruins my blowout. For the first time in as long as I can remember, our conversation flows freely, although I am careful to engage Max in topics that he is interested in and avoid the subject of wedding planning. That can wait.
I had texted Jules and Liam the second Max fell asleep the first night to let them know that we were officially “back together.” Liam’s response was hard to read—the same way he’d been since he started dating Nikki. He’d simply written great news. I’d stared at his response, wanting more, mentally urging him to add to it, to tell me that he was happy for me—that this was how it should be—anything. Even though he had only been with Nikki a short time, I still felt a difference in him, something I couldn’t shake or reason away no matter how hard I tried.
Jules’ reaction was much more enthusiastic. She’d sent a series of emojis of champagne glasses and hands clapping, then immediately asked if I could now use my remaining wishes on her. I had laughed out loud, causing Max to change positions in bed. As I watched his eyelids flutter, curious as to what he was dreaming about, I wondered how I would use them now. My whole goal had been to get Max back, and now that I had, did I still have the power to wish for more changes in my life? Did I even want to?
• • •
Waking up Monday morning back home in our bed, I lean into Max’s solid body nestled against mine, his arm slung protectively around my waist, and feel a wave of emotions. A swarm of butterflies dance inside my abdomen as I think about marrying him at the end of the month, as I realize my breath will no longer catch in my throat with the fear that I won’t. But I’m also nervous and, honestly, sad about the conversation I must have with Courtney. I knew that there was a part of me that would miss her. I just hoped that Max didn’t feel the same way.
I pull up to Max’s building at 6 p.m. sharp, when he said I would probably catch Courtney walking out. We’d texted more today than we had in a long time, ironically bonding over his time spent avoiding her. He’d confessed to spending half the day holed up in his office, terrified to run into her in the kitchen. It had felt great to banter with Max again—me joking that it must really be awkward if he was suffering caffeine withdrawal in order to avoid her. But behind our playful teasing, I still felt anxious.
I see Courtney push through the front door, her lips turned down in a frown as she glances at her phone. I fight to keep my composure, my heart racing so fast I have to take long breaths just to get my mouth to form the sound of her name. I finally call to her, and she does a double take when she sees me. She hesitates and looks in the direction of the parking garage, no doubt pondering her escape before realizing she’s trapped—forcing a smile and walking hesitantly toward my open window.
“Hey,” she says carefully. “Here to see Max?” she asks casually, but there’s a sliver of sadness in her eyes. She pulls her sunglasses down from the top of her head to hide it.
“No,” I say evenly. “I’m here to talk to you.”
Courtney glances at the phone still gripped in her hand. “Oh?” she asks, clearly caught off guard. “I wish I could, but I really have to get to—”
I cut her off. “I know everything.”
Her eyes blink rapidly behind the tinted lenses of her aviators. “I can explain.”
“Good,” I say as I reach over and push open my passenger door. “I can’t wait—get in.”
She pushes her sunglasses back up as she sits down, her eyes pooled with tears. They begin to trickle slowly like the water from a leaky faucet, then, as she starts speaking, they speed up like rainwater cascading down a gutter. “Please, Kate, you have to understand. I would never have done it unless I thought—” She stops abruptly as if finishing her sentence will break her.
“Thought what, Court?” I scoff. “Thought he was going to press his mouth over yours and give you the longest, most passionate French kiss of your life?”
“No,” she says between sobs. “I mean, honestly, I felt something from him—there was a connection. At least I thought there was. God, I was so stupid. Obviously, I couldn’t have been more wrong. And now I’ve ruined our friendship.”
“Well, that was going to happen either way,” I say definitively.
Her eyes register confusion, then acceptance, as she processes what I’ve said. “I know you probably won’t believe me, but I didn’t plan this. I never thought about Max that way until recently. I mean, I had just thought he was a nice guy and great for you.”
“He is still a great guy for me. Just because you want him for yourself doesn’t make him any less right for me. It just makes you a terrible friend.”
She blinks several times as if I’ve just slapped her. “I know,” she says quietly then blurts, “But . . .”
“But what?” I ask.
“But I need you to know that it was something that snuck up on me—I never intended for this to happen. I never thought I’d feel that way about him.”
Me either.
“And when I got the job with his company, I took it as a sign.”
Her words hit me hard and I feel like a clamp is tightening around my chest—my own insecurities about the universe bringing them together swelling as I realized Courtney was beginning to realize it too.
Courtney quickly fills the silence. “And so I had to make this awful choice—the friend who had always been there for me, or the man I thought I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with.”
“Decisions, decisions,” I say sarcastically, looking down so I don’t have to see the sincerity reflected in her eyes.
When I look up again, I see her lips part as if she’s going to say something, but she doesn’t.
“Sometimes I feel like I handed Max to you,” I say. “I let you go to concerts with him while I stupidly buried my nose in some romance novel. While you guys were bonding over being adopted, I paid more attention to pictures of babies posing with dogs in my Instagram feed. I was so confident, so trusting. I was an idiot.”
“No, don’t say that.”
“What should I say, then? I introduced Max to you before my own mother. I wanted you to meet him because I cared about your approval. I wanted you to like him. Not fall in love with him!” I slam my fist against the steering wheel, causing the horn to blare, and Courtney jumps in her seat. “And you know the worst part?”
“It gets worse?” she says under her breath.
“He’s only fucking five feet eight and a half inches. Maybe five nine. You always said you wouldn’t be caught dead with a guy that short. With heels you are probably taller than him, no?”
“I don’t wear . . .”
“That was a rhetorical question, Courtney! I don’t give a fuck what shoes you had on when you were out trying to sink your claws into my fiancé,” I say, seething now.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her tears falling hard again.
“Me too,” I whisper, taking in her porcelain skin and bloodshot eyes, hating that she still looks beautiful despite the fact she’s been crying practically nonstop since she got into my car, remembering the night Max told me I had nothing to worry about. That his friendship with Courtney was just like mine with Liam.
“And now I’ve lost both of you,” I hear Courtney saying, her voice shaking so much my instinct is to reach over and console her, so I slide toward my door just to put more distance between us. “I want you to know something, Kate. My friendship with you, every bit of it was real. Even
if it doesn’t feel like it right now.” She wipes at her nose with the back of her hand and I reach for a package of tissues in my center console.
“Here.” I jam the Kleenex into her hand.
“Thank you.” She pulls a tissue out and blows her nose.
I stare at my steering wheel, letting my fingers trace the symbol in the center.
“Even if what you said is true, it doesn’t matter now. What’s done is done. You can’t change the past,” I lie, and wonder if Courtney had the chance to go back, what she would do differently.
“He won’t talk to me, you know. At least you—you are giving me a chance to explain.”
“That’s not why I’m here. And I don’t need your justification,” I say simply, but my voice sounds sharp and I notice Courtney flinch slightly. But she stays silent; even her tears have quieted.
“I just needed to tell you that you obviously can’t come to the wedding or any other wedding-related event—” I stop when I see the expression in Courtney’s eyes—she’s feeling sorry for herself. And suddenly I remember I’ve seen that look before. It was when I’d found her and Max talking at my rehearsal dinner and naively asked her to take our photo. I hadn’t been able to place it then—the emotion I was seeing reflected in them—but now I realize it was pity. She hadn’t felt sad about what she and Max were about to do to me, she’d felt sorry for me. She had known that Max was going to leave me in just minutes for her, and she’d stiffly taken our picture then disappeared into the night so she didn’t have to face her part in it. “But more than that, we—you and me, you and Max—none of us can continue being friends. This is not repairable.”
Courtney’s face turns ashen, but she simply nods. She knows what we all had is now broken. And without uttering a single word, she opens the door and steps out. I watch her walk away, wondering why I don’t feel more victorious.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity. #truth
“I draw the line at sucking on peppermint pecker mints or penis pops!” I laugh into the phone as Jules rambles on about the favors she’s buying for my bachelorette party. I can hear her rummaging through the shelves of Sugar & Spice & Everything Not Nice on Wilshire Boulevard, her high-pitched giggle breaking into the conversation every few minutes as she discovers some hilarious trinket shaped like a man’s junk.
“Oh, honey, you better get on board—it’s a bachelorette party! You should see what I’m holding right now! Glow-in-the-dark pecker ring toss! Oh my God, I didn’t even know this existed—they’ve come a long way since the penis straws we had at mine!” We burst into laughter, us both remembering Jules dancing on the bar as she sipped her cocktail—as she kept calling it—nearly falling off the bar as she tried to mimic the scene from Coyote Ugly, the night ending with us getting escorted out and hanging our heads in mock shame on the curb until Ben came to get us.
For some reason, Jules had it in her head that she needed to change my entire bachelorette party plan from what she’d done last time, even though the mellow night she’d organized before, when I’d simply worn a bride-to-be sash and subtle veil, had been perfect—me having no idea of the heartbreak that was waiting for me around the corner. “The only thing we need to change this time around”—I’d breathed heavily into the phone when I’d called Jules yesterday just minutes after my unsettling conversation with Courtney—“is the guest list.”
Jules listened quietly as I told her about the talk Courtney and I had had in my car. As soon as I finished, she blurted, “You’re a better woman than I would’ve been!”
“Why do you say that?”
“It would have been hard not to pop her in that gorgeous mouth of hers!”
“Don’t get me wrong—it’s not like I haven’t thought about it. But it’s weird. As angry as I am with what she did, part of me feels sorry for her too. I don’t think she could feel any worse—not even if I gave her a black eye.”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so,” I confirm. “I just want to try to move on from it all. To get on with my life with Max. To focus on our future.”
“I agree. And first up on that agenda? A kick-ass bachelorette party! With penis necklaces!”
“Okay,” I concede, too exhausted to argue. Besides, it seemed to make her happy—she’d been subdued lately, and planning this her way would hopefully snap her out of the funk she’d been in.
“Jules?” I try to get her attention over the beeping sounds suddenly ringing through the phone.
“Kate, you’ll never believe what I just found!”
“I’m not sure I want to know,” I say slowly.
“Electronic strip poker!” she squeals, and the beeps begin again.
“Jules,” I say as I glance at the clock on my desk slowly ticking toward the time when I have to meet with Magda. “I’ve got to go. Have fun dildo shopping!”
After hanging up, I’m faced with an endless stream of emails that have appeared in my in-box during our short call. I start to click through them when a Facebook notification pops up on my screen—one of my college classmates has changed her status to married. I hit like and then scroll down my own feed, grimacing at the endless stream of celebratory announcements, staged photos, and carefully written statuses. In the past few days, I’d started to look at Facebook differently, wondering what the real story was behind the date-night photo or the pouty-lipped selfie. When I was in Big Bear, reconnecting with Max, doing things that provided endless photo ops, something had kept me from posting about it—I didn’t even check in at the restaurant where we had dinner. Even though we were legitimately having a wonderful time, I held off. For reasons I didn’t completely understand, I hadn’t been compelled to share our private moments with other people the way I used to.
I click through my list of friends now to see if Courtney is still listed or if she’s unfriended me. But as I’d expected, her name is still there, listed among those who claim they are ready and willing to receive my news every day. I wonder which of us will be the first to admit publicly that it’s over.
• • •
I’ve always been convinced Magda has a sixth sense about what’s on my mind. Whenever I’m about to do or say something, it’s as if she already knows. Once, in a meeting, I parted my lips just the slightest bit and she whipped her head around and pointed at me, her long magenta fingernail hanging in the air. “Don’t even think about suggesting we change the campaign slogan!” she’d warned, and I’d clamped my mouth shut, wondering how she knew exactly what I was about to say. So I’ve done my best to steer clear of her since I traveled back in time, keeping most of our conversations limited to the phone, worried that if I spend too much time in her presence she’ll look at me and ask why I didn’t use my power to wish her younger. So when I picked up the phone earlier to give her an update on how my search for a replacement for Courtney was going, I wasn’t surprised that at the very same moment, my other line had blinked red and it was her telling me not to bother calling—she wanted to see me in her office this time.
I hover in her doorway at exactly 10:30 a.m. until she finally looks up from her work and curls her finger toward herself, indicating that I should enter.
I slide down into the seat across from her and wait, doing my best to keep my mind blank.
“You can stop avoiding me now,” she says abruptly.
“Excuse me?” I say, using my most innocent-sounding voice.
“I know you haven’t found someone to fill Courtney’s shoes and—”
“I can explain.”
Magda tilts her head to the side and purses her lips and I immediately stop talking.
“There’s no need—in fact, you can stop looking.”
“You’ve found someone?”
“No,” Magda says simply, removing her blazer and smoothing the front of her black silk
sleeveless blouse, her bony shoulders protruding from underneath it. “I’ve decided we don’t need to hire someone. You’re doing a great job picking up the slack.”
I blink rapidly. There was no way I could keep up with the workload I’d been juggling. I’d been creating PowerPoint presentations rather than going to lunch and laboring after hours at home each night. I’d even had to write several emails and craft a pitch on the final day Max and I had spent in Big Bear. I knew I’d burn out if I kept this up for much longer. Maybe I can just wish that Courtney never left in the first place?
“But—” My pulse quickens, sending shivers of panic through my body as I start to argue why there is no way I can continue this pace—especially with the wedding coming up—but Magda cuts me off.
“My God, Kate, you look like you’re about to pass out—I thought you were going to be relieved!” Magda says incredulously. “Weren’t you and Courtney always in competition? Each of you trying to show me how great you were individually. Didn’t you both desperately want my”—she waits for a moment, even though I can practically see the word she’s about to say dangling from the end of her tongue like bait on a fish hook—“approval?” she finally says, dragging the word out one syllable at a time.
I sit silently, my palms wet with worry.
“And now she’s gone. Don’t you see, Kate? You’ve won.”
I force myself to nod and quickly walk out, the look on Magda’s face clear—there’s nothing I can say that will change her mind.
I hurry back to my office feeling like I’ve just been punched in the gut, the to-do list in my mind so long it dizzies me. From the call I need to return to Stella to discuss a million wedding details to the three campaigns I am juggling—all with something due to the client at the end of the week—I’m overwhelmed. I duck into the bathroom to splash some water on my face, hoping the shock of cold against my cheeks will at least stop my knees from wobbling.
