This Is 35

by Stacey Wiedower

  Pictures! She raced into the bedroom to grab her phone off the dresser and then ran to the kitchen to take shots of the cake and cookie setup. As she darted around snapping pictures of the décor, she made a mental note to put somebody on camera duty. She'd be so busy hosting she'd probably forget to snap shots during the party.

  "Slow down," Ben said, laughing at her as he came back into the room dressed to leave. He headed for the back door with his keys dangling from a finger. Erin stuck out her tongue at him just before he shut the door. Must be nice to be so laid-back.

  She couldn't relate. At some point in the past she'd considered herself laid-back, but right now she didn't have time to be.

  As she listened to his car back out of the driveway, she decided to take his advice. She plopped onto a barstool to catch her breath, grateful in spite of everything that he was home today.

  For the first time all day, she gave in to the thoughts she'd been pushing off. She fought the urge to puke as mental images of nude, lithe Melody draping herself across Ben's body, pushing her tongue in his mouth, accosted her like pop-up ads on a porn site.

  She tried to picture it from Ben's perspective.

  Had he liked it? Of course not. She had to hope that much. But had any portion of him been turned on by it? Melody, despite the buggy fish eyes, was an attractive woman—some might even say beautiful. Leggy and blonde, she had the general look most men found very appealing. Erin had seen how the men had stared at her at the Lanakin party in that low-cut, skintight dress. Even Liang, the serious scientist and consummate family man.

  Did Ben kiss her back? Even a little bit? Was there a split second of indecision when he lost his head and considered cheating on her? Did he hold Melody up when she jumped on him, press his fingers into her bare skin? Did he get hard?

  How could he help it with a naked, attractive woman wrapped around him?

  These thoughts were driving her crazy. She knew Ben hadn't done anything to encourage Melody—he hadn't done anything wrong just like she hadn't done anything wrong to encourage Leo. It had just happened. But still, all day long she'd had to stop herself from snapping at him.

  She wished he'd agreed to put a stop to all of it by turning Melody in. But at the same time, she understood his reluctance. It was a serious accusation that would have repercussions at work not only for Melody, but also for him. It could undermine the team, the serious work they were doing. She knew that all too well.

  I just have to get over it. She had to swallow her anger and frustration and deal with the fact that Ben would see this woman every day, that he might be propositioned again one day if Melody ever got another chance.

  She trusted Ben. She did. Just like he trusted her.

  "Aaarrgghhh," she cried out, lifting her head from her hands.

  "What's wrong?"

  Her mother's voice caused Erin to nearly shoot off the barstool.

  "Good God, Mom, you scared the crap out of me!"

  "Well, hello to you, too, my darling daughter." Joanne set her purse on the counter and walked over to Erin, bending her head to plant a quick kiss on her cheek.

  "I didn't hear you come in," Erin said, trying to keep the accusation out of her voice. Normally her parents and Ben's weren't at all intrusive, even though they both lived within thirty minutes of their kids. Erin's mom wasn't the type to barge in unannounced.

  "I rang the doorbell, but you must not have heard me over the music," her mom said. She gestured to the boom box. Erin had hit the play button just before she sat down, thinking it'd help her get in more of a party mood.

  "No, the doorbell isn't working." She shrugged. "Old houses. I need to get somebody out here to look at it, but there's never time."

  "Maybe your dad can look at it for you."

  "Is he here?" Erin looked over her mom's shoulder and listened for movement in the next room, but she didn't hear anything apart from Cyndi Lauper belting out "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" in her shrill, throaty soprano. She reached over and turned the music down.

  "No, he's still golfing. I figured I'd come early and see if you needed help getting ready. I've got the food out in the car." Joanne glanced around the kitchen. "Is Ben here? I figured he could unload stuff for me."

  Erin shook her head. "No, he isn't." At the sound of Ben's name, her head filled with another image of Melody's body wrapped around him, Melody's mouth on his. Maybe it was unfair, but she couldn't shake off these images, not yet. "I'll go out and get it." Her voice was sharper than she'd intended.

  After a short surprised pause, her mom said, "Is everything OK? Are you nervous about the show?"

  Erin glanced at her mom, her brow furrowed. And then she shook off her dark thoughts, getting her head. "Yeah, everything's fine. I guess I am nervous about tonight."

  "Well, I'm excited. I can't believe my little girl's on a national TV series." Joanne squealed like a teenager, and Erin laughed. This was why she loved her mother, among the zillion other reasons.

  A second later, the smile left her face. She should be as excited as her mom. Why was it that at the precise moment when everything in her and Ben's lives should be sunny and perfect and thrilling—new marriage, new home, new careers that had climbed quickly and were still climbing—why was it always these moments when black clouds swooped in to block the sun? She should be bursting with nervous anticipation, not fighting off dread.

  As her mom bustled around the kitchen, Erin wondered how her life must look from the outside. She got up and started pulling bowls and platters from the upper cabinets, handing them to her mom to arrange on the island. And then she went outside to get the chicken from her mom's car. The whole time, her brain was spinning over the choices that had led her to this moment.

  Five years ago she'd decided to live her life deliberately—to not float through life letting things happen to her but rather to experience each moment and make conscious choices. To be present. To live.

  That's what YOLO was about. It's what her 35 by 35 list was about. It's why she went on TV as a lifestyle expert to encourage others to avoid complacency and live out their dreams. It's how she'd ended up with Ben. How she'd gotten her job. How she'd found her calling as a writer.

  But the real test of your mettle isn't what you do right but what you do wrong. Nobody was perfect—not her, not Ben. And when it came down to it, she didn't have any more answers than the next girl.

  If Ben thought it was best to shove Melody's outrageous behavior under the rug and not deal with it, then why should she force him? After all, he hadn't forced her when she was in the same position. She might not have the answers, but she did know one thing, and that was that Ben loved her. Letting Melody or even Leo drag her down today when she should be happy and excited and looking forward to celebrating a once-in-a-lifetime achievement with her family and friends was not the conscious choice she wanted to make at this moment.

  By the time she came through the back door with her mom's hot chicken steaming in the dish in her hands, she'd embraced a new mindset. She set the pan on the counter and turned up the volume on the hot pink boom box, crooning along with Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer."

  And then, noticing for the first time that her mother was dressed in high-waisted, acid-washed mom jeans and a purple off-the-shoulder shirt with a turquoise tank top underneath, she started giggling uncontrollably and then ran back to her room to change into her own party garb. Her mood had gone from grayish-black to multicolored '80s neon.

  She wouldn't let Melody ruin this night. Or any night from now on if she could help it.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Playing Pretend

  January 9, five months, one week to thirty-five

  Three hours and forty-five minutes later, Erin's heart was in her throat. It was almost go-time. In roughly six minutes, she'd make her on-screen reality TV debut.

  Ben and Erin's living room was overly warm and packed. Since closing on the house nearly eighteen months ago, they hadn't had time to throw any big p
arties. They hadn't even had a housewarming, only a small celebration with her parents and Ben's mom. And so this was the first test of how well their little bungalow handled a crowd.

  For the last two hours, people had trickled in until they filled the kitchen—why did people always wind up standing around the kitchen at a party?—and eventually scoped out the best seats in the living room. Ben had moved every chair they owned into the room, even the desk chair in Erin's office.

  Almost every person they'd invited had come. Sherri and Alex had driven up from Austin, Ben's brother had come from his Fort Worth bachelor pad, and Dave and his wife Missy had brought their whole brood. A soft jute rug covered much of the old, weathered hardwood in the living room, and on the floor in front of the TV, Dave's daughters played with Hilary's little girl, Harlow, while Hilary's son, Rowan, pushed a yellow dump truck around the room and under people's feet. Hilary's husband, Mark, wasn't there, and Hilary was keeping mostly to herself, watching both kids with an eagle eye and occasionally fussing at Harlow to stop pulling up her dress or yanking Rowan back into the room when he tried to push his truck down the hall toward the bedrooms.

  Both of Ben's parents were there, despite the divorce. Apart from the wedding, it was the first time Erin had seen them together since right after she and Ben had started dating. Soon after, they'd announced their separation.

  Erin's dad, Bob, had arrived not long after her mom and was currently talking animatedly to Dave, leaving Erin to wonder what on earth the two of them had to talk about…Dave being a thirty-seven-year-old high school drama teacher with an encyclopedic knowledge of cinematic trivia and a flair for interesting wardrobe pairings, while Bob, tall and balding with a paunch that had doubled in size in recent years, was a fifty-nine-year-old avid golfer and semiretired insurance analyst.

  Nate was in one corner talking to Ben, Brian, and Joseph, one of the longtime scientists on Ben and Nate's team at the lab. Nate's girlfriend, Genevieve, looked bored beside him. Joseph's wife had hit it off with Missy, and the two of them were sharing Ben and Erin's oversized armchair. About half the guests had dressed the part, but Dave was the clear winner of the "best costume" prize in his gold lamé MC Hammer pants, double-breasted yellow blazer, and thick gold chains that dangled down his scrawny white chest.

  As for Erin, she couldn't stay still. She shifted from foot to foot and hovered near the wide arched doorway between the living room and kitchen. Knowing she'd be nervous, Ben had pressed a pint of Local Buzz from Four Corners into her hands, but she was too anxious to drink it. She took tiny sips from the glass more to give her hands something to do than to quell her nerves.

  The TV was already tuned to the channel, and Erin's eyes were glued to the screen as the credits rolled on a crime drama that was just ending. Before moving to commercials, the network ran a "coming up next" segment, and Sherri yelled out, "Everybody, shh! Here comes the show!"

  Erin watched the fifteen-second segment, the same promo that had played for weeks advertising the new season, without really watching it, her stomach twisting into gnarled knots like the roots of a hundred-year-old oak. She was surprised by how nervous she was—she'd been on national TV a half dozen times now and local TV even more than that, but this felt very different. This wasn't a talk show interview—it was an actual series with millions of viewers. And unlike previous YOLO seasons, she didn't know what every segment of the show would look like before it aired.

  Conversation in the room swelled up again when the promo rolled into commercials, but eyes darted every few seconds toward the screen, and voices were more hushed than they'd been a few minutes earlier. When the opening notes of the show's intro began to play, everybody's voices stopped as if on cue, apart from the kids who continued chattering and bouncing around, oblivious to the reason they were here.

  Erin stared at the screen, transfixed, as host Greg Tucker ran through his opening spiel, which Erin had helped write three seasons earlier. He described the show's concept and ran through highlights of the previous seasons while images flashed on-screen, including a close-up of Erin and a screenshot of her blog.

  As Greg moved into a description of the coming season, Erin didn't move a muscle. She hadn't noticed Ben stand and leave his chair, but she vaguely registered his arm snaking around her waist as he came to stand beside her in the doorway. Across the room her mom was beaming at her with excitement, but Erin couldn't smile back. Her stomach felt all fluttery, like she was hungry, and maybe she was. She was numb all the way to her fingertips.

  The host described each of the season's ten contestants in turn—Carsyn Caro, the karate instructor from Tucson. Micah Lazzetti, the high school history teacher from South Florida. The small-town waitress from northwest Michigan, the internet entrepreneur from Providence, the party planner from Duluth, Georgia… Erin listened, wetting her lips compulsively, counting in her head, and trying with no luck to swallow the dry lump in her throat as Greg plunged through his thirty-second rundown of each contestant, apparently saving Erin for last. As he talked images of the contestants flashed on-screen, followed by a montage of breathtaking moments from their film footage.

  When Greg reached contestant number ten, Rashida Zaman, a Syrian-born speech pathologist from White Plains, New York, Erin could no longer feel her toes. She didn't see the people in the room around her, didn't hear the shrieks and giggles coming from the kids, who'd spread out around the room and were being shushed halfheartedly by parents who were no longer paying attention to where they went. The music changed, and she did feel it when Ben lightly squeezed her hip. "Here it comes," he said in a low murmur.

  "And we have a special contestant this season who hails from our own staff, YOLO cocreator and co-executive producer, Erin Crawford, whose image you've seen on-screen at the start of every episode. Erin's bucket list, blog, and Glamour magazine column formed the concept behind the show, and this season you'll see her like you've never seen her before. From a daring pre-wedding adventure"—the screen panned to a shot of Erin grasping the granite cliff face at Lake Tahoe—"to a stunning honeymoon journey through the tastes and sights of Italy"—the scene morphed from a wedding shot to a closeup image of Ben popping an olive into Erin's mouth at the Tuscan farm and then to a shot of them walking hand in hand down a cobblestone alleyway in Venice—"to Erin's first, bumpy steps into domesticity"—the next scene was the cooking school classroom, Erin with a smear of flour on her cheek as she attempted to crack an egg into a dish and dropped it on the countertop instead (Giggles erupted around the room at this.)—"to the first hints of trouble in paradise. It's hard to have your cake and eat it, too." Greg paused dramatically. "The first year of marriage is never easy, especially when you're married to your job."

  The scene hovered on Erin's botched soufflé attempt as Greg said the line about "cake" and then, during the pause, morphed to the sparkling ballroom at the Dallas dance studio. In that scene, Erin glided gracefully along the dance floor, one hand clutching Leo's torso and the other grasped firmly in his. A brief wide-angle shot gave way to a close-up of Erin's face. Her expression was positively dreamy, her eyes heavy-lidded and a small smile on her lips, her head tucked intimately under Leo's chin. And then the camera moved up to capture her partner—clearly smitten, eyes smoldering…and very much not Ben. The entire room let out a collective gasp, Ben included.

  Ben didn't drop his hand from her waist, but his body grew wooden beside her. She felt like she was floating above herself, watching in horror as all of this took place rather than actually taking part in it. Time seemed to move in slow motion, the tension in the room palpable as everyone's eyes moved from the screen, to Erin, and then back to the screen, as if the next scene might show even more of Erin's apparent infidelity.

  Only a couple of seconds passed before the music changed and Greg moved on. While everyone else sat dumb struck, Hilary—tactless Hilary, who was drawn to drama like a moth to a closet lightbulb—called out with barely disguised glee, "Well, Erin, you always did k
now how to pick 'em. Whoever that guy is, he is hawt."

  Erin glanced up at Ben whose face was white, his dark eyes not angry, but hurt. His hand had dropped from around her waist so he wasn't touching her at all, and suddenly she felt as if she couldn't support her own weight.

  She wanted to tell everybody, "Hold on just a minute, this isn't what it looks like," but instead all she got out was a meek, "Excuse me," before she made a run for the half bath off the kitchen, sure she was about to lose what little food she'd managed to eat.

  * * *

  When she reentered the room ten minutes later, nobody was watching the show, which was at commercial at that moment, anyway, but they were talking to each other in hushed tones. Missy, Dave's wife, looked up at her with sympathy and at Hilary with fascination. Sherri and Joanne had gone after Erin when she fled to the bathroom and by now had heard her flustered, frantic explanation about the ballroom dance scene. Sherri already knew most of it—all except the reasoning behind the lovestruck look on Erin's face in the scene—but Erin hadn't told her mom a thing about Leo.

  Her face still blotched from crying and her '80s blue mascara smeared around the edges of her eyes, Erin scanned the room. "Where's Ben?"

  Nobody wanted to answer her.

  "Um, he went out there." Nate finally pointed in the direction of the small front entry hall, and Erin turned to Sherri.

  "Explain, please," she begged her friend, gesturing to the group, and then she half ran to the foyer and out the front door.

  Once on the front steps, she glanced around but didn't see Ben. She felt ridiculous in her frosted denim miniskirt, lace-edged hot pink leggings, and off-the-shoulder, midriff-baring T-shirt, all of which she'd scrounged up either online or at the vintage shops in Deep Ellum. The fun, festive '80s vibe from earlier in the night was long gone. She shivered in the post rain January chill.