Squalls of laughter traveled from the courtyard beneath his window. Families happily reunited. Friends hyped up about the big party to come. Derek listened, slowly dying. He couldn’t face those people. To put on a fake grin and pretend his insides weren’t shattered? Why bother? No one in the wedding cared about him. It was all phony bullshit.
He could slip out of the hotel, grab a water taxi to the ferry pier and sleep on the dock all night if he had to, waiting for the next ferry to get him off this horror show.
Cal would be pissed, but not really. Cal never gave a shit about him. Their friendship had been about passing the time until something better came along.
His cell phone groaned in his pocket. Languidly, he retrieved it and squinted to read the screen in the room’s fading daylight. A text from Cal.
You coming down? You’re at the table with Genie. Dinner’s starting.
Derek laid the phone facedown on the bed.
A vision of Cal sitting with Brendan at the rehearsal dinner, nuzzling and showing off how much they were in love—it was like shards of glass to Derek’s heart. It wasn’t fair. They’d only known each other for three months. Derek had been devoted to Cal for five years.
Brendan was a spoiled, pretentious, useless human being, and he had hooked Cal on a line like a fish with his penthouse apartment, chauffeured cars, and his prep school idol good looks. Even though Cal had done him wrong, protective emotions overcame Derek. Brendan didn’t deserve Cal. Cal was too good, too sweet, too innocent for him. He was probably the only good guy left on earth. Just being around him made Derek feel like he was someone important. They were meant to be together. And Brendan had the fucking gall to take that away from him?
A cold reckoning washed over Derek. He could bolt from the wedding, or he could fight for what was his. Running away would be exactly what Brendan wanted. Fighting would be desperate and messy, but what did he have to lose? He might walk away with nothing, but he was assured to walk away with nothing if he skipped out of the wedding like a coward.
He sat up and collected his thoughts. Then he went to the bathroom, washed his face, and pulled from his rucksack a button-down shirt, which had held up pretty well through his flights, and a pair of his best jeans. Avoiding his reflection in the mirror like it might turn him to stone, he dressed and brushed his teeth. Then he ventured out of his room and found his way to the noisy hotel restaurant where everyone was gathered.
In retrospect, he would describe the dinner as a dissociative experience. He was aware of everything and grounded in his body, but some persona emerged that night as a screen to his disordered state. He was a talented Mr. Ripley, chatting easily with Cal’s sister Genie, who’d always shared his cynical observations about the world. He even regaled the table of Panagopoulos siblings and spouses with witticisms. All the while, he kept a furtive eye on Cal and Brendan, and clinking his wine glass with a spoon, he stood and offered them a toast. Brendan’s vaunting sincerity did not chafe Derek’s sociable veneer. He’d left “broken Derek” in his hotel room, a vague, distant relation. Strangers glanced at him favorably. He was the good-natured, eloquent, best bud of the groom.
When lapses of attention from his companions allowed, he took a precise account of the party’s goings-on. He was surrounded by spirited conversations in Greek from the Panagopoulos side of the hall. Unattended children scarpered from table to table, vacating their chairs for the freedom of the margins of the room where games of tag and roughhouse play broke out. Brendan’s guests on the other side of the room were a comical contrast, stiff and bland and impeccably dressed, preoccupied by their inner worlds.
Derek glimpsed a waiter, standing by the swinging door to the kitchen, who looked similarly bemused by the proceedings. He was tall and thickly built, a young Mediterranean as handsome as a star footballer. On closer examination, Derek noticed the waiter’s gaze had pinned to Cal, who was chatting and grinning back and forth with Brendan’s best man—a smirking frat-house type who had asshole written all over him. The waiter’s gaze was desirous, betraying his professional comportment. Spying that Cal’s wine glass was only half-filled, the waiter hastened to his table, taking up a wine bottle to smoothly fill it. Cal gave him a word of thanks, and a shy smile bloomed on the waiter’s face. For a moment, he lost track of his duty to attend to the other guests at the head table. Brendan looked at the guy with a hint of ill humor.
This was a juicy intrigue.
Meanwhile, the frat house bro threw his arm over Brendan’s shoulder and gave his friend a strangely intimate caress of the underside of his chin.
Genie, who must have noticed Derek watching the exchange, interrupted him from his thoughts to explain. “It’s a tradition for the best man to shave the groom on the morning of his wedding day.” Misreading Derek’s interest, she added in a low voice, “I know. It’s kind of hot to imagine in this case, huh?”
Derek gave her a dirty smirk, though other thoughts were churning in his head. After dessert and coffee, he gently disentangled himself from the party, claiming his eyes were crossing from jet lag.
Before retiring to his room, he discreetly found his way to the hotel’s back offices, slipping past the single attendant at the front desk. He skulked down the main artery, past locked doors, until he came to what appeared to be a cloakroom. Everything was dark. Likely, there was only one night manager for the place, and he or she conveniently was nowhere to be seen or heard. Derek clicked on a light switch, illuminating a little alcove with staff lockers and a rack of uniforms. He quickly rifled through the rack, grubbed out a waiter’s bow tie, and stowed it in his pocket. He flipped off the light switch and snuck out of the private corridor as quietly as he had come.
Back in his room, Derek stripped down to his underwear and lay in bed, contemplating the deed that lay ahead of him in the morning. He felt strangely powerful, a criminal mastermind. He gazed all night at his darkened window, listening to the gay festivities echoing through the open-air hotel, thirsting for the light of dawn. His hand groped between his legs, attending an absentminded need. When he was close, he retrieved a condom from his rucksack, wrapped it on himself, and lay on his bed, palming himself to climax.
Derek didn’t sleep at all that night, possessed by a monomania, which was fueled in part by the distortion of his body’s circadian rhythms. He waited until the resort came alive again with sunlight, observing the rustle of staff moving about the grounds, the clinking of trays of glassware being carried into the breakfast room, the light, ambient music cueing up from the property’s stereo system. Derek pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and stepped into his sneakers. The digital clock on his bedside table read 8:00 a.m., which may have been too early, but he would have a tight window of time.
He emerged from his room and charted out a stealthy route through empty colonnades and stairwells to the topmost tier of suites. The prior night, he’d noticed that the grandest rooms with private balconies were up there, and one of those master suites had to be occupied by the two grooms. At the foot of the final stairwell, he climbed over a shallow stone wall and smuggled behind a bank of shrubbery.
A short while later, a footfall traveled up from below. Peeking out from behind the dry, groomed vegetation, Derek spied Brendan’s polo shirt–clad best man spryly taking the stairs up from the lower tier. The smarmy hunk climbed onward to the crown suite and disappeared from view for a moment until Derek carefully rooted out a hidden vantage from which to watch his movements. The guy knocked loudly on a door and waited, hands shoved into the pockets of his linen pants, rolling back and forth on the heels of his leather sandals, his big shoulders tensing and easing. The door opened, revealing a bed-tossed Brendan, sporting a sheepish grin. His dumb-ox friend commandeered him out of the room and shouldered him down the stairs for his wedding-day shaving.
Everything was proceeding like clockwork.
Derek emerged from the foliage and crept up to the crown suite. The door, like his own, probably locked when closed
, but if Derek knew Cal, there’d be a sliding door on the wraparound deck that he’d probably left unlatched in his carefree manner. Derek sidled along one side of the deck, worried slightly about the open-air design of the resort but attracting no notice from anyone below so far as he could tell. It was still an early hour for most guests, and breakfast was taking place in a lower pavilion looking out to the beach.
Curtains were drawn over a plate glass wall, but Derek found a spot to eke out a view to the inside. It was the bedroom. Derek drew back from the sight of a bare back beached in a tangle of sheets on a king-size bed. He knew that clear, light-olive-skinned back. It was Cal, still sleeping.
Now, Derek’s timing was crucial, and he had to pray for a little luck. He waited in a corner of the balcony, shadowed by an eave. His heartbeat drummed in his ears. People were venturing out on the grounds below. A group of children stormed into the central courtyard around the pool to take a swim before breakfast. Anyone could spot him if they looked up and scanned the crown suite deck closely enough. Derek stood as still as a statue for about thirty minutes—or maybe only five—while sweat dripped down his back.
He noticed some kind of ship far out on the water, like a tugboat sitting on the sea. To heaven, he prayed it wasn’t headed to the hotel dock, readying to blast a horn to herald its arrival so that everyone would come out of their rooms to check it out. He glanced back cautiously to the stairwell. If he’d misjudged this plan and Brendan came strolling back, he was doomed.
A faint displacement traveled from the bedroom, and then came the triumphant sound of a shower squeaking on. Derek waited a few breaths and proceeded to the sliding door, which was graciously unlatched. With the touch of a diamond thief, he eased the door open just enough to slip through sideways. Then, he stole up to the bed and brought out the pilfered bow tie and his used condom.
For a tenuous moment, the villainy of what he was about to perform held him paralyzed. Cal would be devastated, and he would have to somehow explain to his family why the wedding had been called off when they’d traveled across the Atlantic Ocean and spent a lot of money. Derek steeled his heart. It was the perfect scenario for Cal to surrender himself to the comforting arms of his best friend, the one person who truly understood him, the one person who would believe him. The guy who loved him ten thousand times more than Brendan ever would.
Derek placed the condom and the bow tie on the bed, and he slipped out of the room.
Chapter Nine
FRESHLY SHAVEN AND a touch slaphappy from the shot of Ouzo Louis had pressed on him, Brendan strode back up to his suite. The whitewashed seaside resort shimmered under the fierce Mediterranean sun, nearly blinding, yet invigorating. And the roar of waves was like a celebratory ovation—as if the whole world was singing for him on his wedding day.
He was marrying Cal. That refrain had been echoing in his head for weeks, halting his breath, making him briefly dizzy, and ultimately enlivening him like a wide receiver who’d just made the game-winning catch in the end zone. Now, the actual day had come. Glancing around to take everything in, he decided it could not have been more perfect: This cliffside palace where they were getting married. The bright, warm early autumn day, tempered by a fresh, seaborne breeze. He and Cal would say their vows in the open-air chapel perched over the sea, surrounded by all of the dearest people in their lives. Brendan had won at life. That was the only way he could think to describe it. He took the final stairwell to the presidential suite, two steps at a time, and let himself in with his key.
The shower fizzed in the bathroom. Brendan carefully closed the door behind him and licked his lips with the thought of quietly stripping down and sneaking in there to surprise his fiancé with a little wedding morning romp. He stepped lightly down the hall while pulling his polo shirt over his head. It was easy to pass through the living space to the bedroom. Then he would have to be even lighter with his step to slip into the adjacent bathroom. Moving into the bedroom, he undid the button fly of his chino shorts while keeping an eye on the open bathroom door. Quietly setting his shirt on the bed, he then wriggled his sandals off and stepped out of his shorts and underwear. He placed the last of his clothes on the bedspread bunched up at the foot of the bed. Then a stray glance landed on something strange.
Sitting on a spot of the bed uncovered by the sleep-tossed sheets was a balled-up, white bow tie Brendan gradually recognized as the kind the hotel wait staff wore. He grinned, thinking it must have been mixed in with the sheets, unbeknownst to him and Cal while they’d climbed all over each other last night. Then his gaze drifted to the bedside table. There, he spotted, in all its foul ignominiousness, a used condom.
It belonged to neither Brendan nor Cal. They’d stopped using condoms after being tested for HIV. Brendan jumped back a step as it occurred to him he might have strolled into—and was now standing buff naked in—the wrong suite. But his key had let him in. His sunglasses case and tablet were on the table. He didn’t want to believe the inevitable conclusion. His throat closed up like he was going into anaphylactic shock. What else could it mean?
The shower cut off while Brendan stood staring at the condom, frozen by fear and disgust. Cal appeared at the bathroom door toweling off his wet mop of hair. Despite the fact that Brendan’s heart had dropped out of his chest, Cal brightened at the sight of him. When Brendan didn’t respond, Cal gave him a strange look.
“What’s wrong?”
Brendan turned his head and pointed to the condom. He asked Cal in a trembling voice, “What is this?”
Cal came closer to the bed to take a look. His face grew wide with shock. “I don’t know,” he said. “It wasn’t here before.”
Was Cal really going to lie about this to his face? Brendan’s legs were weak. He stumbled to sit down on the room’s overstuffed chair. Cal wrapped the towel around his waist and came over to him.
He grinned nervously. “Brendan, you can’t possibly think—”
“Tell me what I’m supposed to think.”
Cal drew back from the anger in his voice.
Brendan’s hands shook. This wasn’t happening. On their wedding day. From the man he had trusted more than anyone else in his life.
He looked up at Cal. “How could you do this? Was it all a lie?” He glanced at the bed and snorted bitterly. “You could have at least covered it up a little better.”
“I can’t believe this is what’s going through your head.”
Brendan stood, enraged. He went to the bed and scooped the tie up in his hand. “What’s this, Cal? Do you think I’m a fucking idiot?” Cal shrank back to the other side of the room, which only fed Brendan’s anger. He demanded, “Which one of the hotel staff was it? The waiter from last night?” The bow tie slipped out of his trembling hand. He crossed his arms, cradling himself. He suddenly couldn’t bear even looking at Cal. “Did you guys plan it all along? The moment I was out of the room?” He shivered. “Were there others, Cal?”
“Brendan, you need to get a grip,” Cal told him.
“Don’t tell me to get a grip,” Brendan shouted.
Cal went to the bedroom bureau and started dressing. He muttered, “This is fucking bullshit.”
“You’re going to stand there and lie to me? For Christ’s sake, Cal, it’s our wedding day.”
Cal pulled a pair of cargo shorts over his underwear. “It was our wedding day. Until you ruined it.”
Brendan spat out words, “I ruined it? Are you out of your skull? I’m not the one who got caught fucking someone in our bed on the morning of our wedding.”
Cal finished buttoning a madras shirt, now fully dressed. “You’ve been waiting for this moment all along, haven’t you? To accuse me of cheating. To show me I’m not good enough for you.” He grabbed his wallet and his passport from the bureau and gave Brendan a hateful glare. “Congratulations, Brendan. You got what you wanted.”
Brendan had never before been possessed by an urge for violence. But some heinous, primal instinct took over in that
moment, eclipsing reason, humanity, even his surroundings, like being buried by a cold, crimson blanket. He stormed at Cal, reaching to grab him by the collar. “So that’s it? You’re going to throw this in my face and walk out of here?”
Cal pushed him back, but Brendan wrangled a grip on his arms. Cal stumbled against a standing lamp, knocking it over. Cal’s voice: “You’re hurting me.”
That jolted Brendan back to himself. Cal twisted free, huffing breaths, afraid. Brendan crumbled to his knees. Of all the nightmares in the world, he could never have imagined things with Cal would end like this. He stared up at his fiancé, defeated. “Why? Just tell me why?”
Cal shook his head. He pulled off his platinum, diamond-set engagement ring and placed it on the bureau. Then he walked out of the suite, leaving Brendan clutching himself beneath the weight of a fallen sky.
Chapter Ten
FOR A BLANK stretch of time, Cal walked along the shore of the Aegean Sea like a dazed survivor of a shipwreck on a deserted island. He had nowhere in the world to go. He couldn’t face his family. As he left the hotel suite, he’d sorted out a back route to the beach, thinking he might find solace by the water. The roaring surf enveloped him, and he was alone with his thoughts. He headed toward a towering bend in the coastline where he’d be hidden from everyone in the hotel.
The fight with Brendan echoed in his skull. It was as though a demon had possessed his fiancé, but there weren’t such things as demons. It had been all Brendan, or at least a dark, deluded side he’d never shown before.
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