Queen of Babble Gets Hitched (21 page)

Is it emotional to feel as if I’m a stranger in my own family, as if these people I’ve known my whole life don’t actually know me—or care about me—at all? Gran was the only one—the only one of them—who ever said anything to me that was actually worth a damn.

Not that I ever told her that.

And now she’s gone. And I’ll never have the chance. Never have the chance to talk to her again.

No wonder I’m so emotional.

God. Maybe I should take one of those pills Dr. Dennis prescribed after all. I can feel them, rattling around in their bottle in the pocket of my jeans. Will they make me feel less emotional? Will they stop me from feeling anything at all? Because right now that’s what I’d really, really like.

Headlights flash, and I raise my head. Mrs. Brand and her Brunswick stew. I swipe at my cheeks with my wrists. I don’t want Mrs. Brand—whoever she is—to see me looking like such an unholy mess.

But the car doesn’t turn into the driveway. It pulls over and parks down the street. It’s so warm and humid outside, a sort of mist has settled over the street, making it look as if a fog has rolled in. I stare at the red taillights through the fog, breathing in the summer air, so familiar and yet so strange after so many months in the city. The smell of fresh-cut grass, the whine of cicadas, the chirp of crickets… these are summer scents and sounds that are almost foreign to me now, I haven’t experienced them in so long.

Someone gets out of the parked car. Even though it’s pretty dark out, and the mist is pretty thick, I can see it’s not a woman. It’s a man, tall and broad-shouldered. I look away, through the fog, into the dark sea of our yard—the yard where Rose and Sarah forced me to hose off Mom and Dad’s bedspread that time Gran was babysitting us and ended up vomiting cooking sherry all over it.

Yeah, that hadn’t been much fun.

But before that—before the vomiting—Gran had told me the story about working in the munitions factory during World War II, while Gramps had been off fighting the Nazis in France (every single man in his platoon had died when they’d found a bottle of wine in an abandoned farmhouse in Marseille and drank from it, not knowing it had been poisoned by Nazi sympathizers. Gramps, being a teetotaler, was the only one to survive), and how she and the other girls had painted black lines on the backs of their legs to make it look like they were wearing stockings with seams when they went out on Saturday nights, because all the silk had been used up for parachutes.

That’s the kind of thing we should be talking about at her funeral. The happy times. The incredible sacrifices her generation made—without complaint. Not some stupid biblical passages that have nothing to do with Gran and never did.

I notice through the fog that the man is walking toward our house. I also notice he’s the same shape and size as… my fiancé.

My heart seems to freeze inside my chest.

But what would Luke be doing here? I mean, it’s true my grandmother—the family member I cared about most in the world although I might not have realized it until it was too late—is dead. And it’s true I’m really disappointed in him because he’s made no effort during the course of our relationship so far to meet anyone in my family.

But he’s in France. He wouldn’t have flown all the way to Ann Arbor just for the funeral. We’re on a break.

And then, as the mist swirls and tumbles around the man’s legs as he turns into our driveway, I see something that causes my heart, which a moment ago was frozen, to explode into what feels like a million tiny pieces of flame—like fireworks, only inside my chest, instead of up in the night sky: he’s wearing a baseball cap.

A second later, I’m on my feet and I’m running. I’m running toward him through the fog, and a second later, I skid to a halt in front of him. He stops too.

So, it seems, does time. All I can hear, in those few heartbeats, is the sound of the cicadas. And our breathing.

“What are you doing here?” I demand. My voice sounds gravelly for some reason.

“What do you think I’m doing here?” Chaz shoots back. His voice sounds gravelly too. “I came to see how you’re doing.”

I scan the street behind him. I see no one else in the mist.

“Where’s Valencia?” I ask him.

“Fuck Valencia,” he says.

“I’d assumed you already took care of that,” I say.

“You know what?” Chaz says, starting to turn back toward the car. “I can leave, if that’s what you want.”

My heart gives a twist, and I take a quick step forward, laying my hand on his arm.

“Don’t go,” I say. “I’m sorry. I just… ” A sob catches my throat. “Oh, Chaz. Everything is so screwed up.”

“I know,” he says. I can’t see his eyes because they are hidden in the shadow of the brim of his baseball cap.

“No,” I say, my own eyes swimming in tears. “I mean, it’s not just—it’s not just Gran. It’s a lot more than that.”

And then, just like that, it happens. My mouth takes over from my brain, and the words just come spilling out before I can stop them.

“It just sucks,” I hear myself saying in that same strange, gravelly voice, “because… because I think I’m in love with my fiancé’s best friend.”

“So?” Chaz says without skipping a beat and sounding completely unsurprised. “I’ve got it worse. I’m in love with my best friend’s fiancée.”

For a moment there’s no sound at all. Neither of us seem to be breathing, and even the cicadas have fallen silent.

I’m not sure I heard him right. His best friend’s fiancée? But that… that’s me! Chaz means he’s in love with me!

That’s what he’s doing here at my parents’ house on this foggy summer night. That’s why he’s standing here in front of me with his arms at his sides, palms open, nothing to hide, no more sarcasm, no more biting remarks, no more Luke, no more Valencia, no more nothing. Just us.

All it took was a few thousand miles of separation, the stripping away of all but the rawest of emotions, and the death of one of the people I love most in the world.

Then, as if by some unseen cue, we both take a step forward until our chests collide, and he says, “Oof,” and then, “Lizzie—” and I throw my arms around his neck and drag his head down so that I can press my lips to his.

And then neither of us says anything for quite some time.

The first bridal registry was established by the department store Marshall Field’s in Chicago in 1924. It was created in an effort to help couples keep a list of wedding gifts they desired for their households and soon caught on in shops worldwide.

The first electronic or online registry was introduced by Target in 1993.

When the first jealous ex logged on to mock the bride’s choice of flatware in front of all her coworkers was not recorded.

Tip to Avoid a Wedding Day Disaster

No one ever wants to think that a wedding could be canceled. But these things happen. That’s why proper wedding etiquette calls for wedding and shower gifts never, ever to be used before the wedding actually occurs. That way, if the wedding does not actually take place, these things can be easily returned to the giver, as is the appropriate action in such a case.

LIZZIE NICHOLS DESIGNS
^™

“This is so wrong,” I say as I sprawl naked across Chaz’s equally naked chest.

“Is that why it feels so right?” he wants to know.

“If there’s a hell,” I say, “we’re going straight to it.”

“At least we’ll be together,” he says. “And I’m pretty sure Elvis will be there. And Einstein. He was an adulterer too, right?”

I groan and turn my head only to find that I’m looking at a mural on the wall of a castle on a hill. It’s not even a very good mural.

But I don’t turn my head again because on the other wall is an even worse mural of a knight riding a white horse. Chaz is staying at the Knight’s Inn, which has windows with imitation diamond panes and a turret to make it look like a castle. When I asked him why in God’s name he would choose to stay at a Knight’s Inn out of all the hotels in Ann Arbor, he’d said, “Lizzie. I’ve got a turret in my room. How can you even ask me that question?”

“And Shakespeare,” Chaz says now. “He was an adulterer. So at least hell won’t be boring.”

“I’m not an adulterer,” I say. “I’m not married. I’m just engaged. And we’re on a break.”

“Did you specify the parameters of the break?” Chaz asks. “Did it include rampant monkey sex with your fiancé’s best friend?”

“Stop it,” I say. “You took advantage of me when I was in a weakened emotional state.”

“Me?” Chaz starts to laugh, his stomach muscles causing my head to bob up and down. “You assaulted me in your parents’ driveway. I was just coming by to pay my respects, and the next thing I knew, your tongue was in my mouth, and your hand was down my pants. I was so scared, I almost called nine-one-one to report a sexual predator on the loose.”

“Seriously,” I say. “What are we going to do now?”

“I can think of a few things,” Chaz says, lifting the sheet that’s covering us and looking under it.

“We can’t let animal lust get in the way of our friendship,” I say.

“I don’t want to be friends with you,” Chaz says matter-of-factly. “I stopped wanting to be friends way back last New Year’s Eve. Remember? You’re the one who had to go and ruin everything by getting yourself engaged to someone else. While I was sleeping, I might add.”

I roll off him and lie on my back, staring at the ceiling, which is made out of that hideous stuff that has sparkles in it. There’s an overhead light that has been crafted to look like an old-fashioned lantern. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it has a lipstick camera in it that has been videotaping our every move for the past two hours. The Knight’s Inn seems like it might be that kind of hotel.

Which makes it the perfect place for my tawdry affair with my best friend’s ex-boyfriend and my fiancé’s best friend.

“You don’t even believe in marriage,” I wail miserably to the lipstick camera. If there is one.

“Well, if I did, I certainly wouldn’t marry you, that’s for sure,” Chaz says. “You’d just go around sexually assaulting my best friend behind my back while I’m in France and you’re at your grandmother’s funeral. You’d make the worst wife ever.”

I lean over to hit him, but he rolls over on top of me, pinning my arms down beneath the sheet. A second later, he’s staring deeply into my eyes.

“Lizzie,” he says, looking serious for a change. “You need to stop beating yourself up about this. You and Luke have been over for a long time. You should never have said yes when he asked you to marry him. I told you that that morning in your apartment. If you had listened to me then, you could have saved everyone a lot of heartache. Especially me. And yourself.”

I glare at him. “Do you think I don’t know that?” I demand. “But you didn’t exactly go out of your way to act like Prince Charming that morning, you know. You could have just told me you loved me then, you know.”

“I seem to recall that, number one, you never gave me the chance… you were already engaged to someone else by the time I woke up, and that, number two, I did tell you I love you, and you took it as a joke and walked out.”

I blink. Then say indignantly, “You mean at the sports bar? But you were so nasty! I didn’t think you were serious.”

He looks hurt. “I bared my soul to you, and you thought it was nasty. Nice.”

“Seriously,” I say. “You were horrible. You couldn’t possibly have expected me to think you meant a word that you said—”

“I was mortally wounded!” Chaz insists. “The woman I loved, and whom I thought loved me in return—don’t lie, you even said at Jill Higgins’s wedding the night before that we were going to try taking things to another level—had just pledged herself to another!”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous,” I say. “Agreeing to take things to another level and saying that I’m in love with you are two completely different things.”

“If I was nasty, like you say, I had a right to be,” Chaz says. “You were acting like a crazy woman. Getting yourself engaged to a guy who is so completely wrong for you—”

“You didn’t seem to have any objections when Luke and I got together last summer,” I point out.

“Sure, I had no objections to your sleeping with him,” Chaz says. “I never thought you’d want to marry the guy. Especially when I knew perfectly well you weren’t in love with him.”

Still pinned beneath his body weight and the sheet, I can only glare at him some more. “I beg your pardon,” I say. “But I most certainly was.”

“Before the Great Christmas Sewing Machine Incident, maybe,” Chaz says. “But not after. It just took you awhile to admit it to yourself.”

I blink at him, trying to figure out if what he’s saying is really true. There’s a part of me that’s sure it isn’t.

But there’s another part of me that’s equally scared it is.

“But you finally came around to admitting you’re in love with me now,” Chaz says as he reaches for the room service menu. “So what does it matter? Now I need sustenance. All of this cuckolding makes a knight hungry. What should we have? Beef nachos supreme? Or… ooh, bacon and cheddar potato skins with sour cream. Such fine fare this establishment offers… oh, wait. Cream cheese and turkey pinwheels. Who could resist?”

“I can’t tell him,” I burst out.

Chaz stares down at me. “About the cream cheese and turkey pinwheels?”

“No,” I say, poking him through the sheet. “Get off me, you weigh a ton.” Obligingly, Chaz slides off me. “Luke. He can never know.”

Chaz leans up on one elbow, his head in his hand. “I can see why,” he says, regarding me, his blue eyes expressionless. “Who eats turkey with cream cheese? That’s a disgusting combination.”