“He’ll probably think I did it on purpose, that I’m trying to trap him. Which you know I would never do.”
Dani kept quiet, her nose in the magazine.
“Talk about changing the plan!” Pregnant at twenty-three had definitely not been on the agenda. “We wanted to see the world and party and make records and comics and maybe get a cat, to test-drive domesticity,” I moaned. “Kids were for when we slowed down.”
A flash of Allen with a baby cradled in his tattooed arms gave me a fluttery feeling in the pit of my stomach. How silly. I knew it was too early to feel anything, but just thinking about something so fresh and new that Allen and I had made together . . . maybe . . .
“Do you think he would—” I stopped midsentence.
My best friend was slowly and discreetly ripping a page from the new magazine.
“Dani . . .” My voice wavered in a warning tone. “What—?”
M&M’s rained down and the bedsprings of my old canopy bed creaked under our combined weight as I wrestled for the torn glossy photo page she held in a death grip between her shirt and her bra.
A Match Made in Heaven? Victoria’s Secret Angels model Geska Nielsen spotted in Bondi Beach frolic with rock drummer Allen Burnside of the scorching alternative band Three on a Match: exclusive pics!
• • •
I splashed cool water on my whiskey-warmed cheeks and blinked the moisture away. The hotel’s towels were plush and decadent against my face as I stalled for time and an excuse. Noah had to think I was a nutball by now, drinks or no drinks. I took a sobering breath and went back to face the perfect stranger I’d left behind in the not-so-hot tub.
“Sorry. Had to break the seal.”
Seal? Sure, Laney. More like whack the eight-hundred-pound elephant hanging out with us in the room. I cringed weakly. Lame. “Guess the game’s over?”
“It was fun while it lasted.” Noah had drained his drink dry. “Anyway, forget about it. You’re obviously in a better place now.”
He propelled himself up and out of the Jacuzzi, leaving a litter of Naughty Sleepover party cards in his wake.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Someplace named Hawaii? A little thing called your wedding?” He cracked the minibar like it was a bank safe and stood back to admire the bounty within.
I toed the cards into a messy pile with my stocking feet. “Still assuming too much.”
“Meaning?” He turned to glance at me.
La verità . . . whateverthehell.
Tired of pretending, I winced and went for broke.
“Meaning it’s not mine. Not the dress, not the wedding. None of it.”
Noah
LAST CALL AT THE MINIBAR
“You’ve heard of a ring bearer, right? Well, I’m just the dress bearer. For my mother.”
My brows shot up. I didn’t know what I was expecting when Laney emerged from the bathroom. Weepy, prenuptial nostalgia over some old flame, perhaps. But certainly not . . . she wasn’t even . . .
“You’re not even in the wedding?”
“Nope.” She gave a wry smile. “I escaped the Creature from the Seafoam Blue Lagoon dress. My best friend wasn’t so lucky. Fortunately, Dani’s so cute, she would make pond scum look good.”
“Dani’s a girl?”
“Do those look like a guy’s toes?”
Laney held up the latest beach picture on her phone. Realization washed over me like a tidal wave; or maybe all those Jack and Cokes were finally hitting. I reached a hand behind me to make sure the bed was really there before I sat.
“I’m sorry I called you a Bridezilla.”
“Told you I was more like Mothra,” she replied quietly.
The pieces began to click into place for me. “You’re helping your mother.”
“Even though she is the enemy, yes.”
I shook my head. “So, that ring—”
She bared her fist, tough-guy style. “Class ring. Sentimental.”
I gave an understanding chin bob. The ring’s stone winked under the hotel lighting. She held her hand out for me to inspect it. Music notes were etched into one side of the ring, and the other side displayed the tiny tools of an artist’s trade: brushes, pens, and paper.
“But what was with all the drawings?” I asked. “Of rings and cakes and stuff?”
“Oh, you mean like these?” She opened her sketchbook to the page I had seen her working on in O’Hare. “Ever hear of Hudson Views?”
“‘Hudson Views has got a card for you’?”
“Yes.” Laney gave a dramatic eye roll. “When you barely care enough to send the next best greeting card. That’s my family’s company. I do the graphics.”
“Ah, that makes sense. Laney Hudson, Hudson Views.”
I guess that also explained the witty one-liners and sharp barbs she’d been lobbing my way since landing in my first-class row.
“Well, the office is on the West Side Highway, so it also overlooks the river.”
“Clever.” I thought back to that killer caricature she had sketched of me back at LaGuardia. “Wait—my picture isn’t going on a greeting card, is it?”
Watching her toss that glossy hair back in ribbons of red and gold and making her laugh a full-on belly laugh felt like winning the lottery.
“No, No-ah.” She teased my name from her lips. “That’s for the private collection.” She sobered a bit. “More superhero than sappy sentiment. I draw for fun, too. See?”
She flipped the page to show me a busty crime-fighting babe: catsuit, cape, mask, and all. She was poised in midair between various city skyscrapers, and instead of fighting a villain, she was punching out a disembodied wedding dress. And instead of the usual “sound effects” like “POW!” and “KA-BLAM!” inside spiky speech bubbles, Laney had added funny wedding-related ones, like “VOW!” and “RRRRRING!”
That was right; she said she had worked for one of the Big Two. As a kid, I would’ve given my left nut to see the inner workings of the Marvel Bullpen or the headquarters of its rival, DC Comics, whose offices I imagined were like the inner sanctuary of the Daily Planet, the fictional newspaper where Clark Kent worked.
How and why had Laney gone from comics to greeting cards?
“I love it. What’s the WF stand for?” I asked, gesturing to the logo gracing the superwoman’s sexy bod.
“Oh, that’s my alter ego.” Her tone was a sarcastic and nonchalant mix. “Laney the Wonder Fuckup.”
A knock drew both of our gazes to the hotel door, then back to each other.
Paranoid, silly, and completely illogical thoughts swarmed in my head. Had Daisy the desk girl noticed our strange behavior at check-in? Suspicions aroused, had she alerted the police to come evict us? What if it was Lance the bar back, coming back to claim his five dollars or, worse yet, to claim Laney?
What if it was Sloane or her father, ready to drag me home by the ear?
That’s your guilt talking, Noah.
Just when Laney had dropped her bombshell, just when I felt my own defenses begin to fall. What if, as they said in every comic book, cartoon, and superhero movie, the jig was up?
“We’ll go together,” Laney whispered.
The peephole yielded a fish-eye view of a young hotel employee with something in his hand.
“Sorry to interrupt your night,” the kid, probably a bellhop, said upon greeting.
His reddened yet sly expression told me what his dirty adolescent mind was assuming he had “interrupted.”
He held up a bottle of champagne like a peace offering. “For the happy couple, compliments of the hotel manager.”
Laney’s relief was palpable. “Isn’t that sweet, honey?” Her melodic giggle was music to my ears.
“Absolutely,” I said, dropping my arm casually across her should
ers and giving her a gentle squeeze. She didn’t pull away. I smiled.
“We know you didn’t plan on staying at the Regency before your wedding,” he continued on his bad script, “but we do hope you’ll come back and visit us after the big day.”
Laney grabbed the bottle by the neck like a sailor and rapidly rolled her other fingers in a cute, “take the hint and get lost” little wave.
“Thanks, man.” I palmed the guy a ten and closed the door on his wink.
“Good job, Tech-Boy,” she said teasingly. In her best Johnny Depp doing his best Keith Richards as Jack Sparrow, she strutted back into the room with bottle in hand. “You didn’t turn red this time. Or green.”
“Deception gets easier with time, I guess.”
I thought of Laney, blushing over her sushi when she mentioned getting bumped into first class. She had had plenty of opportunities to set the record straight, to say she wasn’t a bride and that wasn’t her dress she was lugging around. I wondered why she hadn’t.
Then again, I was one to talk. I still hadn’t said a word about my own situation.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t so much as given a thought to the wedding, or the bachelor party, or even Sloane, until that knock on the door. I had been having such a good time joking with Laney about Godzilla’s cheesy special effects and flirting with her during that silly Q&A game. Trying to figure out what made her tick was a bit of a turn-on, and now that I knew she wasn’t the Bridezilla I thought she was, I felt even more—
“Ha, there it is! Delayed blush reaction!”
Guilty as charged.
As usual, my id tried to reason with my superego. Was a little bit of old-fashioned fantasizing and flirting with Laney any different from what I’d be doing in Vegas? Looking with my eyes but not with my hands, not ordering from the menu, and all that jazz?
Of course it’s different, you idiot. Laney isn’t a plastic mirage, like Vegas. She’s a living, breathing, very cool girl. A girl who some asshole named Allen must’ve hurt pretty bad in her past life.
“I’m gonna go get some gratis ice for our gratis alcohol,” Laney said, but not before flipping to an early page in her sketchbook and tossing it to me. “You might as well start here,” she said with a resigned sigh, as if she had read the earlier thoughts in my mind. I stared after her as she sashayed toward the door; Laney seemed to possess superpowers of her own. I dragged my eyes back down to the page and studied the first panel.
A young girl was sprawled, belly down, in front of a roaring fireplace, propped up by her elbows. Paper and crayons littered the floor in front of her, and she was dreamingly clutching a pencil. Her knees were bent, her stocking feet pointing up to the sky. The speech balloon was a puffy, cloudlike thought balloon, with the classic bubble tail pointing toward her head. “When I grow up, I want to be a cartoonist . . .” Off in the top right corner, another balloon was roughly inked, reminding me of the monster comics I’d devoured in my youth. Someone off panel was reminding her “You’ll never be GOOD enough, so stop DREAMING!”
The next panel showed a teenaged girl, her hair spiked into a Mohawk. Eyes squinted, teeth gleaming in happiness. “I’ve got my pick of art schools! California, here I come!” is inked above her head. Each hand was clutching school admission letters triumphantly. Another rough balloon burst the hopeful art student’s bubble: “I’m not about to sit back and watch you squander your future, running off with some high school flunky! You’ll stay at school here in New York, where I can keep an eye on you.”
My eyes zoomed to the last panel of the page. It was heart shaped, with a big jagged break splitting it down the middle into two. With a sunset on the beach as the backdrop, two hands reached for each other in the foreground or, perhaps, were pulling away. The hand on the left side of the broken heart was smaller and more feminine. With a speech balloon dashed to indicate a whisper, it read: “We need to talk . . .” The right side of the broken heart showed a larger, more masculine hand and a balloon containing the universal curse word symbols: “@#$%&!”
My eyes lingered a moment on the bottom panel before flipping to the next page. A new set of panels greeted me. The girl was newly graduated in her cap and gown, her hair now tame, shiny, and hanging straight. “Marvel Comics wants me!”
I could practically hear the shouting inside the jagged speech bubble: “After I spent $80,000 in tuition? Not on my watch!”
“That’s called a burst balloon.” Laney was at my shoulder, her finger grazing the words of rage on the page. “Fitting, huh?”
I tried not to inhale too deeply, but her sweet scent was too good not to. I directed my sigh toward the open page.
“Have you ever had someone shutting you down at every turn?” she asked quietly.
I shook my head. “No. With a high-ranking general for a dad, I grew up in a ‘be all that you can be’ type of household. It was a different kind of pressure.”
“I can still hear the scorn in my mother’s voice.” Laney scraped her own voice up an octave and imitated: “‘You’ll never earn enough drawing to support yourself, Laney!’ and ‘No one will ever take your job choice seriously.’” She ground the bottle down into the ice bucket angrily. “As if the artists in the Marvel Bullpen were a bunch of kids playing Dungeons and Dragons and goofing off in their parents’ basement rec room!”
I thought about my own parents’ basement, where I had built my first computer at age twelve. There had been no put-downs in the Ridgewood household. But there had been plenty of pick-up-and-go, which was enough tumult to keep me reaching desperately for the brass ring as my father kept moving us in his quest for top brass.
Looking back down at the penciled and inked panels, I shook my head. “I take it your mom wasn’t impressed with the best of the best coming to court you?”
“There was what my mom thought was the best—whether it was schools or boyfriends or places to live and work—and then there was all the rest.” Laney snorted. “‘Let me know when it’s the New Yorker, Laney; then we’ll talk!’”
I loved how she threw the obnoxious, stereotypical Long Island inflection into her bit, drawling out Yawka and tawk.
“My mom never trusted me to figure it out on my own. She pulled some strings and got me a cushy cubicle job doing graphic design for an elite women’s magazine.” Laney mimicked sticking a finger down her throat. “Monday through Friday, nine to five—”
“Bang-your-head-on-the-desk boredom?” I finished for her.
“Stick-your-head-in-the-oven torture.”
“I’ve spent a few nine-to-fives there myself.” I gave a knowing smile and flipped the page.
“YOU’LL BE THE DEATH OF ME, LANEY.”
There was no graphic to go along with that caption. Just purple and red lava drips and plumey yellow vapors indicating some form of purgatory for all involved.
Laney knelt on the edge of the bed next to me. “The night at the Lake Shore Hotel was a wake-up call. It took five years, but I finally realized it was my life, my choice. No one was going to save me but myself.”
She sounded so resolute, yet so vulnerable at the same time. I wanted to gather her to my chest and hug those years away, but I had no right. I had no power myself, as I sat questioning my own choices.
“So I quit the magazine, applied at Marvel”—the hint of her smile told me that went well—“and moved into the city. I got my dream job, dream apartment . . .” Her fingernail traced the hellish vapors around the word death. I remembered that her two question cards, best sex and worst night, had shared the same answer. Lake Shore Hotel. Five-year high school reunion. Allen Burnside.
I had to ask.
“What about the dream guy?”
Laney shook her head, as if to clear the past, and her messy bangs, from her line of vision. Then she smiled and reached for the champagne. The walk down memory lane was over, at least for now.
I flicked a glance at the label. “Classy.”
Not that I was an expert, but after courting Sloane for so long, I knew better than to try to pass any brand off on her that spelled its name with a lowercase c. “One must never capitalize unless it’s from the actual region”—I could practically hear her haughty tone.
“Hey, don’t question free booze,” Laney countered. “This says ‘Michigan’s Finest.’”
“The Midwest isn’t exactly known for its sparkling wines.”
“Snob,” she teased, slowly tilting the bottle back and forth. “I say we open it.”
“In the bathroom,” I instructed.
“Bathroom? Classy,” she echoed mockingly, with a wink and another shake.
“Careful,” I warned, following her. “A champagne cork can pop out of a bottle at a speed of over twenty-five miles per hour. You could put an eye out.”
“Please,” Laney scoffed, picking at the foil. “I was on tour with a rock band for six months. I know how to pop the bubbly.”
“And rock bands are known for trashing hotels,” I pointed out, reaching for the bottle. Although I was curious to hear more of that story. “Allow me.”
Uncorking a bottle of champagne followed a ritual, almost like a ceremony, yet Laney was treating it like a cage match. “I’ve got it. It’s just”—she struggled—“this wire thingy won’t—”
“It’s a muselet,” I informed her. “Turn it six times.”
“Like I was saying,” Laney said defiantly, “the wire thingy won’t budge—and I turned it ‘six times.’ How do you know so much about champagne, anyway?”
“Champagne school,” I admitted. “At Flûte Gramercy.”
“Champagne school? Is that like obedience school for rich guys?”
“Yes,” I deadpanned. Sloane had enrolled me as an engagement present. I had learned the fine art of tastings, food pairings . . . and how to roll over and play dead. “I can pair prestige cuvée champagnes from the top of the producer’s range with caviars from Petrossian Paris. And I can certainly open this bottle if you’d let me help.”
Dictatorship of the Dress (9780698168305) Page 11
