The Status of All Things: A Novel
Page 19
“It doesn’t matter how you did it. Life is complicated. If you and Max are happy here and now, then take it and run, Kate,” Jules tells me later when I arrive at the restaurant where she works before we leave for my bachelorette party. “This is what you wanted. And now you’ll even get the wedding you always hoped for as well. Why are you questioning it?” she says as she feverishly mixes fudge in a large stainless steel bowl. She barely even slows as a tall man sweeps in and dips a small spoon into the mix, the chocolate dangling precariously as he lifts it to his mouth, nodding his head in approval, Jules’ only acknowledgment a quick sideways glance before he disappears into the dining room.
“Who’s that?” I say with a smile. “Supercute coworker alert!”
Jules frowns at me. “He’s one of the owners.”
“How can that be? He looks about twenty-five.”
“He’s thirty.”
I think back to the way his deep blue eyes crinkled at Jules. “He’s adorable.”
“I guess,” she murmurs nonchalantly as she pours the fudge expertly into the waiting pan before placing it in one of the large refrigerators against the wall. “He’s my boss.”
“Really?” I ask. “Because boss or not, he looks as delicious as that fudge you’re making.”
“If you say so,” she answers. “But stop trying to change the subject. I don’t get it. You finally have Max back—you effing traveled back in time to make it happen, for goodness’ sake. So please, tell me why you can’t just go with the flow? Just accept that Max wants to make you happy and that’s why he told Stella to change things back.”
“Maybe,” I ponder. “I guess I’ve come so far with him that I don’t want to go backward again. The first wedding I planned wasn’t at all what he wanted. And I want to make sure he’s happy too.”
“Sometimes you have to give up a little bit of your own happiness to make someone else’s happen. That’s what love is.”
I watch Jules’ face register a series of emotions as she says this. “What did you have to give up to make Ben happy?”
Jules’ eyes narrow slightly. “Don’t make this about me. Anyone who’s been married and has kids would tell you the same thing.”
“Would they? Because I’m only concerned about you.”
“You’ve got precious little time to fix this thing with Max and I’m topping your list of worries?” She walks around and cups her hands over my shoulders. “You need to stop questioning my relationship and start talking to Max about yours.”
I didn’t know why I hadn’t mentioned Stella’s call to Max the night before—it had certainly been on my mind as we ate dinner, as I poured him a glass of the Chianti Classico I had picked up on the way home. The words had sat on the edge of my lips as we opened the gifts that had arrived at our door earlier that day, both of us cringing as we realized the beautiful cherry-red KitchenAid mixer we tore open was from Courtney, who must have ordered it before everything happened.
“How did work go today?” I had asked Max as we sat on the floor together surrounded by light blue wrapping paper. “Did you see her?”
Max’s eyes clouded over as if he was contemplating whether to tell me what he was thinking. “Okay—” he finally says. “I did see her once, in the elevator. She slid in right before the door closed.”
“Oh? What did she say?”
Max’s eyes met mine. “Just that she was sorry.”
“And?”
“That was it. I told her I was sorry too.”
The skin on the back of my neck pricked. “What are you sorry for?”
Max sighed and I could sense him formulating his answer. “I’m sorry things turned out the way they did. That two friendships ended. I feel bad about my part in all of it.”
Trying not to read into Max’s words, I’d turned the white and silver tissue paper over and over in my hands, until it dissolved into a small ball that I tossed in the direction of the trash can. “How did she seem?”
Max paused. “Miserable.”
“Good,” I had said under my breath and tried to mean it.
• • •
“I’ll talk to Max about the wedding stuff,” I promise Jules as she peels off her yellow and black apron. “If you pinky swear that you won’t really make me wear that god-awful penis necklace tonight!”
“Not a chance.” She laughs as she puts her arm around me and leads me out into the dining room and grabs her overnight bag from behind the bar. “You ready?”
• • •
“Vegas? Are you serious?” I ask as I lean my head against the leather passenger seat of Jules’ SUV an hour later, after Jules finally revealed our destination.
“Yep.” Jules nods, giving me a quick sideways glance as she merges onto the 15 freeway, the plastic penis that she stuck on the dashboard waving its approval as we speed past the tumbleweeds and shacks that sprinkle the side of the highway. “ETA two hours, thirty minutes!” she squeals, and high-fives Liam, who is sitting in the backseat sipping from his flask.
“Suite booked at the Aria? Check! Slutty outfit packed in your bag? Check! Bottle service at TAO? Check!” Jules says.
Liam chimes in, “But most importantly? Flask full of the smooth stuff to get this party started? Check!” He laughs and passes the liquor forward, me pursing my lips as I take a sip and feel the whiskey burn my throat, thinking I’m definitely getting used to the taste, and, dare I say, liking it a little.
“Do you go anywhere without that thing?” I tease.
“Not if I can help it,” he retorts.
As I watch Jules gripping the steering wheel with a permagrin on her face, I wonder why she is taking me to a place she’d always described as skanky. Anytime I had suggested a girls’ trip to Las Vegas, she’d always rolled her eyes and exclaimed, no way.
Liam’s phone buzzes and he smiles, texting back quickly with his thumbs. “Nikki says congrats and to have fun.”
“That was nice of her,” I say, and look over at Jules, wondering if she’s having the same thought I am, that I’m surprised he was in the car at all. I’d half expected him to cancel at the last minute so he could attend some swanky Hollywood party with Nikki. “How are things going with you guys?” I ask, but am only met with silence.
“Liam?”
“Huh?” he mumbles, and I look over my shoulder to find him texting with the speed and intensity of a fourteen-year-old girl.
“I asked how things were going with Nikki.”
“Amazing,” he says, his eyes never leaving the screen of his phone as if he can’t bear to let even a second go by without responding. He chuckles. “She wants to make sure we aren’t being followed.”
I glance back at the empty highway. “By whom?”
“The paparazzi.”
“Really? Wow, how things have changed for you,” I say, sounding more put off by this than I intend to. Liam had been getting a lot of media attention as Nikki’s new boyfriend—having gone from my hipsterish best friend who was writing code for websites to the guy who was dating a huge TV star literally overnight. Extra had gobbled it up, wanting to know who this guy was Nikki had picked from obscurity. They’d even done a whole segment about him the other night: “28 Days with Nikki?” a tongue-in-cheek piece about how no guy had outlasted her stint in rehab.
“What’s with the tone?” he asks, finally looking up at me. I wasn’t sure I had a good answer for him, only that there was a small flutter in my chest whenever I thought about this life I’d wished for Liam. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was responsible for sending him careening down a path he wasn’t meant to travel.
“Is your life really better now?” I question.
“Are you being serious?” he asks, his face contorted into a smirk that I wish I could wipe right off it.
“Yes, I really want to know.”
“Of course it is!” he says, as emphatically as if I’ve just asked him if he’d be interested in winning the lottery.
“Okay,” I say lightly.
“What do you mean, okay?” he challenges. “I can tell there’s more swimming around in that head of yours. Just say it. You know you want to.”
I look over at Jules again, but she only shakes her head as if she’s warning me not to answer him. But there’s something about the arrogance I swear I hear in his voice that makes me comment anyway.
“It’s just that you’ve been kind of MIA since you started seeing her,” I say, doing a mental calculation. I was sure we’d never gone more than a day without at least texting. Since he started dating Nikki, my texts would go unreturned for hours, if they were answered at all. And I hadn’t talked to him on the phone in days. “And there’s the car and the clothes. You just seem . . . different.”
“Because I am!” He shakes his head. “I don’t get it. I thought this is what you wanted. For me to finally find someone.”
“Of course . . .” I trail off, not sure I want to continue, not even sure what I’d say if I did. They had just started dating and I knew he deserved his honeymoon period. He had a right to that giddy, fluttering-in-your-stomach feeling; that adrenaline rush when the other person’s name pops up on your phone; that urgency to want to be in touch with them all the time, about everything. And as his best friend, I also knew I was supposed to want that for him.
When Max and I started dating, we spent all of our nights and weekends together. The only breaks we had from each other were when we were at work. Jules had once joked, “The sex must be amazing. I’ve barely heard from you in weeks! You haven’t even posted on Facebook.” But she hadn’t been annoyed with me, and neither had Liam. Neither of them had called me to task over my absence or my behavior the way I was doing with Liam.
“I think what Kate is trying to say is you’re moving really fast. We’ve never seen you like this. And we just want to make sure you’re okay,” Jules interjects.
“I’m better than I’ve ever been,” Liam says, and leans back against the seat, staring out the sunroof, as if he’s basking in happiness. “And what about you, Jules?” He meets her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Should we be concerned about you? The old you wouldn’t be caught dead in Vegas, but now that you have a new look, we’re on our way there. . . .”
“This trip is for Kate!” she says a little too quickly.
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jules challenges, her cheeks turning red.
“Hey—” I interrupt. “I know I started this and I’m sorry. Can we just drop it? Pretend I never brought it up.”
“Fine,” they say in unison, and I lean my head against the window, letting the ensuing silence and the endless highway lure me into sleep, waking to the shiny casinos as we descend into the City of Sin.
“Are you sure there’s no tiger in here or a baby in the safe?” I joke as we trail the bellman into the two-thousand-square-foot suite that Nikki’s “people” had secured for us, passing three different TVs and two wet bars as I make my way to the window, gasping as I take in the incredible view of the strip, squinting my eyes to shield them from the late-afternoon sun. I turn to face Liam and Jules, who both seem lost in thought. “Hey, you two. I just want to say thanks. This is amazing.” Pulling them in for a group hug, I squeeze them close to me. “I’m lucky to have you guys,” I say, and am surprised when I feel tears burn my eyes, hoping the tension we’d felt earlier in the car will now melt away. “And I’m sorry if my wishes have hurt you in any way—I promise I was only trying to help . . .” I grip them both tighter, hoping Jules will take this opportunity to tell us both what’s on her mind.
But she only breaks away and smiles at me. “No waterworks! At least until we get good and drunk!” She laughs, any signs she’s struggling emotionally hidden behind her grin. She walks over to the bottle of champagne peeking out from an ice bucket that had been sent compliments of the hotel and uncorks it without fanfare. “To new beginnings,” she says as she pours champagne for all of us and gives me a knowing look. “Just because you didn’t get it right the first time doesn’t mean it’s not meant to be.”
I take a deep sip, letting the bubbles tickle my throat as I ponder her words. She’s right. It shouldn’t matter that I needed to go back in time in order to make things right. This really wasn’t any different than going to couples therapy to work through issues or going through a separation and then getting back together. The bottom line was we’d repaired our relationship.
“How about you, Jules?” I ask. “Is your life better the second time around?”
She pauses to refill her glass. “Hard to say,” she says. “You’re the only one who remembers living it the first time. You tell me.”
My mind wanders back to the month leading up to the wedding. Jules had seemed a little distracted, but I had chalked it up to stress. Between Ben, her kids, and her job, and being my matron of honor, her life was so busy that there was little room for error. But now I’m sure I must have missed something more serious. “You did seem”—I search for the right word—“distracted.”
A shadow passes over her face. “Interesting.” She glances at her watch. “Hey, we’ve got reservations at Sushi Samba soon—I’m going to jump in the shower.”
After the water is turned on, I glance over at Liam. “Do you think Jules has been acting weird lately? Is that why you asked her about why she really chose Vegas, because I agree with you, that’s not like her at all. . . .”
“Define weird. Because you’ve time traveled, wished her a kickass makeover, and me a famous girlfriend. So it seems like a sliding scale.”
“Touché.” I laugh. “But in all seriousness, she’s been different, right?”
“I don’t know—like you said, I’ve been MIA,” he says, and I can tell my comment bothers him.
“About that . . .”
“Forget it, let’s just have a good time and not worry about how any of us is acting. I think we can agree that we’re all doing the best we can under the circumstances.”
“You’re right, but what if this thing with Jules is more serious, like she might be having real problems, maybe even with Ben?” I start to tell him about what I overheard in Jules’ foyer when the buzzing of his phone interrupts us. I grab it before he can. “Can Nikki handle not receiving a text from you for five seconds? I’m trying to talk to you about something important here.”
I survey Liam as he searches for his answer. “Okay. She does seem slightly off. But if she has a problem, she’ll talk to us about it—I’m not going to force her.”
A dozen scenarios flare through my mind as I wonder what could be wrong between Jules and Ben—if anything. It was true that I could be reading too much into the fight I overheard. The reality was that couples argued, especially ones that had been together as long as they had. And it was possible I was being hypersensitive because of my own situation with Max. But the instinct in my gut told me something had happened to shift their dynamic dramatically. And I had wondered more than once, based on some of the cryptic comments Jules had made about her marriage, if Ben had cheated on her. It was possible—he traveled a lot and was a good-looking guy. But while there was a chance it had happened, I just couldn’t believe he had it in him. He used to brag that he didn’t need to look at other women after he met Jules—that she was the most beautiful person on the planet.
“I’m not saying we need to force her to tell us her secrets, I just want to make sure she knows she can confide in us. That we won’t judge her or Ben.” Max flashes through my mind, how I had ignored our problems until he’d been forced to look other places for the answers he needed. I didn’t want Jules to make the same mistake. “After what happened to me, I just worry that if she’s wearing blinders, it could make whatever she’s going through worse.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“And you said we would never be able to finish it!” Liam raises his voice over the thumping sound of the music, pointing to the empty bottle of Ketel One vodka and mixers on the tray in front of us. He signals to the server who’s been assigned to our plush couch in the VIP area of TAO. “Another one, please.”
I try to shake my head, to tell Liam that I’ve already had too much, that I’m so buzzed I’m no longer embarrassed by the fluorescent penis beads I’m wearing around my neck. I had even let Jules talk me into participating in a ridiculous bachelorette scavenger hunt—I’d pinched some guy’s ass on the dance floor and done a blow-job shot at the bar. But despite Jules’ pleading, I had drawn the line at removing my bra and talking a man into wearing it.
But I was having a great time, the alcohol blunting any tension I’d felt among Liam, Jules, and me earlier.
“Having fun?” he yells into my ear, his breath hot.
“Of course!” I exclaim as that new will.i.am song starts playing, the one that Jules made us listen to on repeat so many times on the car ride here that Liam finally banned it.