And as much as I want to let it go, I can’t help but use this moment to make my own point about my sister.
“So you must understand more than anyone why I have to at leasttryto talk to Laurel.”
“I guess it makes sense.” He adjusts his position, shifting the mattress. “I’m still sorry I couldn’t come to your wedding.”
And stopped talking to me, I add in my mind. But it’s possible he thinks I was the one who stopped talking to him. We were two stubborn people refusing to bend in a conversational standoff.
“I couldn’t come,” he repeats. His voice is thin, his incomplete apology draping over us like a gauzy curtain. Even the way he recalls it now—that hecouldn’tcome—grates against me more than I’d care to admit.
The truth of it is this: my best man and I argued, and thena woman who no longer follows him on Instagram (I’m not proud that I know that detail) got food poisoning, and he simply didn’t show. Or maybe she was just a convenient excuse, but at the end of the day, he didn’tfeellike going. And Ethan doesn’t do anything he doesn’tfeellike doing. He’s always come and gone as it pleases him. It was my fault for being disappointed in a bird for flying away.
“Was it nice?” he asks, and something sweet blooms in my chest. It reminds me of the good parts of that day, how it wasn’t all bad with Rich. Even the bad years have the occasional good days, and the bad days still have moments of sunshine.
“Wendy and Stuart had a great time.” I smile, recalling Ethan’s parents and how they stayed with me until the venue kicked us out. My parents were technically present but in one of their relationship’s “off” cycles. For them, the wedding festivities seemed less like a joyful occasion and more like a series of interruptions to their heightening feud. But the Powells danced all night long and whispered “I love you” to each other during Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” I adored the way his parents loved each other, out loud in this quiet and unselfconscious way that was truly for the two of them. It was different from my parents, who loved each other with a volatile frenzy, like they had something to prove.
Rich was so even, steady. I’d hoped we’d end up like the Powells, whispering “I love you” over coffee mugs. But when Rich told me he loved me in the morning, it sounded like he was reminding himself.
The day Rich left, the seas of boring husbands and petty fights parted to make way for a reconciliation with my bestfriend. Ethan was my first text.Turns out, you were right, was all it said. I sent it as Rich walked out the front door.
And just like that, I had Ethan in my life again. We didn’t discuss the rift. We pretended no time had passed. I didn’t want to hash out the hurt or run back the tape of my bachelorette party, because I had my best friend again.
“Does the wedding really matter if the marriage was a failure?” I sigh, searching for an adequate way to convey how relationships always seem to slip away from me like water through cupped hands.
I sink my forehead into his shoulder. His arm wraps around me, adjusting our bodies so that I’m perfectly curled into the crook of his neck. My hand falls onto his chest as his fingers gently comb the hair between my shoulder blades. The sensation cracks me open like I’m a soda can, releasing the tension building up my spine and replacing it with the effervescent fizz of anticipation.Where will that hand go next? Where do I want it to go?
We’re quiet again for a minute, probably more, until he asks, “Did you love him?”
The simple question shouldn’t conjure up the humiliation it does.
My pride wants to tell him that I always knew it was wrong. That’s what divorced people say, right? Better to have ignored your intuition than to have never had any.
I knew Rich wasn’t some big love, but I’d never wanted that. He was someone who could perfectly slot into my life and I into his. We never disagreed on anything. We didn’t challenge each other. We couldn’t hurt each other. I remember lying in bed with him thinking:I could be happy like this so long as Idon’t think about happiness too much. If I didn’t dwell on the corners of our relationship where we didn’t fit. The places in us that were dark and hollow. The parts of me that wondered whether he even liked me, notlovedme, butlikedme.Neededme. Asked things of me. And whether I wanted anything from him.
But somehow, despite the worries that circled and swarmed late at night, I was so sure Rich wasn’t a risk. And isn’t that all anyone is looking for in a love story—a person to keep their heart safe?
As much as I’d almost rather that Rich and I were broken from the start and that I didn’t have the incontrovertible proof that someone could fall out of love with me in under a year—that would be a lie.
So I answer Ethan honestly. “I think I did love him.”
I feel his frown in the strands of my hair. This bed is too damn small. “Then he was a lucky man.”
I nod into the dark, a little dumbstruck. I blow a raspberry to defuse the solemn shift in energy. We’re touching in too many places now—our shoulders, our knees, our knuckles—and nothing good can come from the vulnerability that’s cloaking us like a blanket in this already stuffy van.
“I’m not sure he’d agree with you about the ‘lucky’ part.” Ethan’s pulse is racing beneath my cheek. It’s terrifying. It’s exhilarating. It’s the greatest threat to our friendship, and I’ve never been so grateful for the dark.
Threat or not, he doesn’t clear his throat or feign a yawn-stretch that’ll unpeel his body from mine. Instead, he takes my hand in his and squeezes. Only once. Enough to remind me he’s him and he’shere, and all I want is to sink deeper into my best friend and let him hold all of my stiff broken pieces.
So I give in to how good it feels to have him this close. I pull myself onto my side to look at him eye to eye and find he’s already looking at me, breath shaky. In the absence of the warm sun, his features look serious. Sharper. More intense. Like a black and white photograph.
“I don’t care what that guy thinks.” His voice scrapes against my skin like loose gravel.
My eyes have adjusted, and I can see how Ethan’s tapered fingers look woven in mine. The way his purple loosestrife tattoo climbs up his forearm.
I got it because of you, he told me once.
His attention presses into me, until I’m hot and safe and terrified all at the same time. His tongue curls beneath his teeth, and I can’t stop replaying our conversation under the twinkle lights.
Rich doesn’t deserve to be the last person who’s touched you.
