“Emily’s.”
“Is there any chance you could tell her to call me back? I’d really like to talk with her.” Not that it mattered.
Ursula shook her head.
I spoke through my teeth. “I already told Michael. I want to be with Delaney. I want her.”
“Oliver, honestly. Do you think that’s enough?” I nodded miserably and she raged on. “But so what?” Ursula said, sitting back in her chair and smiling at guests filing into the restaurant.
“What do you mean, so what? I want her!”
Ursula stood and walked past me, hugging Michael’s parents. I followed her in a huff, and said, “Ursula, this is important.”
She turned on her heel and fixed me with a stare. “Listen, you. You don’t get to play with my best friend’s heart like it’s a cat toy and you’re the big paw of destiny, swatting it around. She already had that, and she deserves better than you. So that’s what,” she said, practically spitting the words out at me. I stepped backwards, and Michael’s parents looked ashen.
“Ursula, dear, would you like some water?” Mrs. Wild said, patting Ursula on the shoulder. “Maybe you’ve had a little too much wine?” Mr. Wild smiled patronizingly at me over Ursula’s head, and I said, “Sorry. You’re right,” and retreated to a corner table to drink myself into a stupor.
Three hours and seven drinks later, my arms were around Emily and someone named Sam’s shoulders as they lugged me to their apartment, where I collapsed onto their couch next to a fur ball I realized was Jenny, growling at me until I rearranged myself on the sofa.
“Saaaaaam?” I said as I collapsed onto the sofa. Sam had stood in the corner by the bar, saying almost nothing, holding on to Emily’s waist throughout the entire dinner, looking skillfully bored in his suit and skinny tie. Sam was the consummate cool guy. “Sam,” I muttered. “Where have you been all my life?”
“On an airplane,” he said.
“Hm. Delaney told me you always said the exact right thing,” I said.
Emily said, “That’s Sam for you.”
I buried my face in a cushion and groaned, inhaling the smell of something that was distinctly Delaney. I put my nose in the cushion to smell it again. Pathetic. I was pathetic.
“He’s pathetic,” Sam said to Emily. I said, “That was not the exact right thing to say.”
“I have no idea what’s wrong with him,” Emily said, “but don’t let Laney know he’s here, okay?”
At the sound of her name, my head popped up. “Laney? Is she here?”
“She’s in California, buddy. And she doesn’t want to talk to you.” Emily patted my head and I settled my face back down in the cushions, miserable and alone.
I was awoken by someone shoving an elbow into my head. “Sit up,” a soft voice said, and I complied miserably, because it sounded just like Laney. I was hallucinating her everywhere.
I rubbed my eyes and stretched, and when I blinked, I saw Laney sitting next to me, looking drawn and pale and holding a cup of coffee out to me, Jenny curled up in her lap. My hands fell and started to shake. My stomach caved in. Was this love? Being near her felt awful. Love was terrible. “Hi,” I managed.
“Hi,” she said.
“You’re in California.”
“I was. Now I’m here.”
“Now you’re here. Why are you here?”
“For Ursula’s wedding. Also, you’re sleeping on my apartment.”
I looked down at the sofa, confused. “On it? This is your apartment? Your apartment is across from my apartment.”
She tilted her head. “I moved.”
“You moved,” I said tightly. “You moved and you didn’t tell me, and you didn’t answer my phone calls, and you’re going back to LA.”
“Oliver—”
“You know I’m not with Mia, if that’s what you think. If that’s why you were running away, you shouldn’t. I’m not with her.”
“Good to know,” she said, just as her phone buzzed with a new text. “That would be Ursula, freaking out. I have to go.” She gingerly put the dog on the floor, and when I reached out my arm to stop her from going further, she said, “It’s her wedding day, Oliver. I don’t want to be sad on her wedding day.”
“I don’t want you to be sad ever.”
“It’s inevitable.”
“Is it?” She nodded and held out the hot cup of coffee to me with an NPR logo. “I made this for you. Emily and Sam are still asleep.”
“You made me an NPR mug?”
“Yes, also the coffee, and I volunteered you for the pledge drive. I hope you’re good with phones.”
“We need to talk. Before you go to LA,” I said.
She wasn’t smiling. “No.”
“Please? Just…are you with Cliff? Wait, don’t answer that,” I said.
She shook her head. “I’m not with Cliff.”
I tried to feel something besides complete and total elation, but I couldn’t. It was overwhelming. Any minute I was going to explode into a rainbow. “Oh.” I attempted a facial expression that wasn’t a smile, but it was like my mouth was having a smile seizure, and my heart was having a happiness fit. “So we can talk? I just want to explain things. Again. Not in a voicemail.”
“Fine,” she said tightly, but there was a dimness in her eyes that didn’t match my elation. How could she not feel what I was feeling? “We can talk. After the wedding.”
I nodded like a maniac, watching her walk out the door. “After the wedding.”
Delaney
Ursula’s scratchy lace gown rubbed against my bare shoulders as she gave me another hug. “You promise you’re not going to California again, even if you get that job?” I wiped away a stray tear from her cheek before it ruined her foundation again.
“Ursula, it’s your wedding day. We need to talk about weddingy stuff, like veils and happily ever afters and Michael and wedding night lingerie. I hope you’re not wearing a thong. Thongs are ridiculous. How is that sexy? This underwear is just like toilet paper stuck in my bum! Hot!”
She shook her head. “No. I refuse to talk with you about silly things. I haven’t seen you in days and you scared the bejesus out of me when you went on that interview. We’re talking about this before I walk down that aisle.”
Emily, sitting on the upholstered chair in the corner, filed her nails and said, “She’s the bride. She gets anything she wants.”
“But aren’t you nervous about being married? To one guy, forever?”
“Why would I be worried about Michael?” Ursula said, flabbergasted. “He loves me unconditionally, and now I’m getting a religious and legally binding document that says that we have to stick together no matter what. But you? You I don’t have any such promise from.”
“Is your garter on?” I said, desperate to escape talking about leaving.
“Who gives a flip about a garter?” Ursula said. “This is going to be your wedding present to me.”
“Too late. I already got you cloth napkins.”
“No. No, Laney. You are not going to leave us again. Promise it, and mean it.”
“I’m not leaving you! You’re my best friends. We’ll always be friends.”
“You. Are. Not. Leaving.” She put her hands on her hips and stood firm.
I blew my bangs out of my eyes and said, “Why not? Are you suddenly the person who makes all my life decisions for me?”
She sat down hard then, and shook her head helplessly, and then started to cry. “No, Laney. I’m not. But you’re—you’re my family. You and Emily, and I need my family.”
“Your mom and your brother are out there. Michael, too. They’re your family,” I said, my eyes watering despite my words of aloofness.
“No, I’m saying it wrong then,” Ursula said, tapping a heel against the hardwood. “They’re my family. But you? You and Emily are my soul mates.
“People talk about soul mates as one perfect lover who completes you forever, but what they forget is that love isn’t ju
st romantic love. There’s friendship, and parenthood, and everything else. Love isn’t one dimensional. Just because we’re not getting married doesn’t mean you’re not my soul mate. It doesn’t work that way. A soul mate is someone who has a part of your soul, outside of your own body. That’s you.
“When you left the first time, I didn’t know what the feeling was, but when you left for this interview, and I didn’t know if you were coming back? You broke my heart, Laney.” She was crying now, her face smeared with mascara, and my vision was blurring, too. “You broke my heart because you take a part of it with you, and you don’t even know you have it.
“A part of me is lost without you. So, now I know, and I know that no matter how far away you go, we’re here, we’ve got a part of you.” Ursula’s face was streaked, snot running down it, and Emily had gotten up from the chair, and was standing in a huddle with me and Ursula, all of us a wet, drippy mess.
“She’s right,” Emily said with a loud sniffle. “You have us, forever. Please don’t leave again, beautiful girl.” She smoothed my bangs back from my forehead and then said, “Now, let’s get married.”
“Wait. You haven’t promised yet, Laney.” Ursula was wiping away the mascara with her fingertips.
I wavered and Emily squeezed my arm. “Laney, you can ignore Oliver. You can be a coward with him—”
“Hey—”
“You are. You’re being a coward. You’re hiding and running away,” she said, and I reluctantly nodded. “But Ursula’s right. You need to give her an answer. Will you stay?”
“I will,” I said finally.
“You will?” Ursula choked out.
“I promise,” I said, crying. “I do.”
“Good. I do, too,” Ursula said, and then, “Now let’s get married.”
“What about your makeup? Don’t you want to fix it?” I asked.
Ursula waved a hand and said, “You’ll love me no matter how I look, right? And so will Michael?”
“Yep,” Emily and I said, and then she said, “Then fuck it. I want to move on to the partying as fast as possible.”
Oliver
I stood across from Delaney during the whole ceremony, willing her to look my way, but she didn’t do it even once. I walked over to the reception table where she was manically giggling with Emily and Ursula, wondering if I’d gotten it wrong and the three of them hadn’t just gotten married. They kept hugging each other and laughing. “Hey,” I said, and lifted a champagne flute in the general direction of Delaney. “We were going to talk.”
Emily smiled and patted me on the back, and then so did Ursula. “You talk,” Emily said, and they wandered to the dance floor to join drunk Michael, lip syncing to Tina Turner with his beer bottle as the microphone.
“Oliver, before you say anything,” Delaney started, “I need to tell you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you.”
“Oh?” I put my glass down on the table. “Go ahead.”
“I ran away from you when I saw Mia standing in front of your door. I knew she was exactly what you needed, and so I ran away.”
“That’s not true,” I said, but Delaney shook her head and said, “Let me finish.”
“I know you’ve got a hero complex. You need to fix everyone, and I thought, for a while, that you fixed me. You really saw me. You called me beautiful. You made me feel whole. You wanted me to show off the parts of me that made me feel vulnerable. I fell completely and totally in love with you.
“But don’t worry,” she said, putting her hand over my shaking one on the tabletop. “I understand now. I didn’t even understand what it meant to really love someone. I kept running away from the hard parts, so I never got the chance to figure it out, but Ursula explained it to me. When you really love someone, it’s not just about feeling fixed or whole. It’s about staying even when you don’t feel fixed or whole, when things are ugly and sad and miserable and broken and lost. I thought love was this beautiful thing I couldn’t have, and didn’t have, but love isn’t like that. It’s ugly and it’s common and it’s every day. It’s not a rare bird of paradise. It’s like a pigeon, so common we don’t even pay attention to the fact that it’s really a dove with iridescent rainbow feathers.
“What I’m trying to tell you is that I thought I was in love with you, and so I ran away. But I realized something.”
“Oh?” I said, smiling at her. Delaney loved me.
“I’m not in love with you,” she said. “I’m not running away.”
“What?” I blinked rapidly, and then she removed her hand from mine and gave me a patronizing smile.
“You’re not in love with me, so you’re not running away.”
“Those are two separate and independent clauses. I’m not in love with you. I’m not running away,” she said.
I nodded, feeling cold and tired all over. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
“And I’m going to move back into my apartment,” she said. “And I want us to start over. As friends. Real friends, like me and Ursula and Emily are. I took your friendship for granted because I wanted more from you, but now I realize my mistake.”
I swallowed and looked into her chocolate brown eyes. “You want to be my friend.”
“I want to be your friend. Your very good friend, Oliver.”
“Then we’re friends,” I said as the tiredness wrapped itself around me, pulling me under.
Twenty Nine
Delaney
I was carrying my bike up from the basement when it was suddenly lifted off my shoulder. I turned around to see Oliver smiling at me, hauling it to street level. “Thanks,” I said.
It had been three weeks since Ursula and Michael’s wedding, three weeks since my friend decree, and I’d spent part of almost every day with Oliver. We’d gone out for burgers and Dairy Queen, we’d watched two NOVAs, he’d sat at my kitchen counter eating pie, and I’d subjected him to three in-depth analyses of the unrealistic Law & Order plots, and not once had he seemed nervous, uncomfortable, or the least bit romantically interested in me.
It sucked.
“You off on another ride?” Oliver said as he adjusted the chain on my bike.
“Just off to the grocery store.” I pointed to my backpack. “I’m out of butter, and I need to make an emergency pie.”
“Emergency pie?”
“It’s a hormonal thing.”
“Ah,” he said, thankfully not asking any other questions. “I’m off to work.” He smiled briefly and I was punched in the stomach by his beauty. It was so unfair that beautiful people could be nice, too.
“You’re working a lot.”
“Yeah, well, that hero complex of mine needs feeding.”
I winced. “Sorry. But in my defense, you’re the perfect hero. Maybe even a superhero archetype.”
“I am?”
“Sure. You’re gorgeous and everyone likes you, you come from a rich family and you’re smart and talented. You’re like Bruce Wayne, or Tony Stark, but with a medical degree. So you’re better than them, really.”
“I couldn’t be Clark Kent or Peter Parker. They were socially awkward nerds.”
“I could be Clark Kent, then,” I said with a smile.
“No. You’re not any kind of alter ego.”
My face fell but I tried to hide it with a laugh. “I’m not?”
“No. Alter egos have to blend in with their environments. Even Bruce Wayne blended with his rich corporate cohorts. You don’t blend. You stand out,” he said, staring at me, his jaw twitching, his hands fisted at his sides like he wanted to hit something.
“I don’t blend?” I said. “I sure don’t.’
“I have to go.” A muscle in his jaw twitched and jumped before he turned away.
“Have fun.” I awkwardly waved as his long body walked away from me, knowing that whatever he was doing pretending he was my friend was about to end, and soon.
Oliver
I rubbed my eyes, then ran my hand through my hair. I was exhausted, over
worked, and hungry. I hadn’t slept well in longer than I could remember, because every time I lay down, I pictured Delaney saying she wanted to be my friend, and smiling at me sweetly.
I wanted to be her friend. I did. I understood everything she said, and why she wouldn’t want anything more from me, and so I was respecting her boundaries. I was sitting at her kitchen counter, eating apple pie, steadily building an unattractive gut while I pined for a woman who didn’t want me any longer.
But if all I could be was her friend, that would have to be enough. It would be enough. I’d make it so. But it was awful. Every second was awful, smiling at her and pretending. I felt like my skin was on inside out every time she blithely smiled back, happy without me. This was Hell, not the version with a smiling devil with a forked tail. This was a Hieronymus Bosch painting version of Hell.
I groaned and looked back at the monitor.
I was filling out a chart when I heard the sirens, and Anton walked by, tapping the back of the monitor to say, “Trauma. Car hit a bicyclist. Wanna help?”
“Hmm?” Then I looked up and saw her rolling by me, and passed out.
***
I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lighting in the exam room. Michael was leaning over me with a frown. “You okay?”
“What happened?”
“Well, the nurse, Liam? He said that first you must have vomited all over yourself, and then you passed out, and they dragged you in here. They checked your vitals, but everything seems fine. You were only out for a few minutes.”
“You read my chart?” I said.
“I was bored.”
“And they called you?”
“I’m your emergency contact. Of course they called me,” Michael said, clearly offended.
“That’s right. You are. Good.” I laid back down on the pillows. “The weirdest thing happened. I haven’t been sleeping well, but I swear I saw Delaney in the ER wheeled in here on a gurney. She looked like she was dead, covered in blood and unmoving. It was awful. I need to get a nap.” I smiled at him and shook my head as I laughed, but Michael’s face went pale.
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