Page 17 of Life, Love, and Other Messes

Now, I stared. I was drunk, sure, but I had no idea how he could know such things from my feet.

“Color affects you profoundly. It has to be exactly right or you’re distracted.”

I’d painted my office five times. “How do you know this?”

He shook his head again, this time smiling gently, still rubbing my feet. “You’re going to spend the rest of the night avoiding people, and you’re going to fake it the first time we have sex, although I’ll remedy that the next time.”

I sat up and removed my feet from his grasp in one motion. “Yeah, no. Apparently my feet didn’t tell you that I’m gay.”

Ben jerked his chair backward. “Fuck. You’re not Zoe?”

I rolled my eyes. “Sam. So nice to meet you.” I grabbed what was left of my drink instead of offering my hand.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Cami said that Zoe was the one in the green dress and—”

“She’s the cute perky one, and she’s likely to fall for that one hook, line, and sinker. Best of luck.” I took off down the steps toward the pond, half looking for somewhere to throw up.

That didn’t happen. Instead, I discovered one of the bridesmaids hiding out around the corner, leaning hard against the wall. I remembered her as one of Cami’s much older cousins, and I knew her only as Smash-and-Grab, due to an unfortunate incident in high school which, thanks to a good lawyer and a sympathetic judge, resulted in community service and a smudge on her record rather than a lengthy stay in juvie. The wedding program said that her given name was Julia, but that didn’t really fit. She was sitting on the ground, mounds of baby blue ruffles surrounding her haphazardly, shoes cast off to the side. She had a Budweiser in one hand and a Marlboro in the other. “Ben’s a fuckhead,” she said. “Where are your tattoos?”

I sat on the sidewalk next to her and stretched my left arm in her general direction so she could see one. “I’m not drunk enough to show you the others.” It stung more than a little that someone had heard that exchange.

“What, are they internal or something? You’re pretty damn drunk.”

“They’re not anywhere weird, it’s just that if I undo any of this, I’m never going to be able to get it back on.”

Smash-and-Grab shrugged evenly. “I’ll zip you back up if you’ll do the same for me.”

I stared out at the duck pond. A tiny blast of adrenaline coursed through my veins, then slowed when it reached my stomach, as if the alcohol was thicker than it was, and somehow capable of reducing a crazy borderline eager feeling into mere nerves.

Smash-and-Grab flipped a fold of her dress and continued in a very different direction. “I can’t believe they’ve been parading me around in this shit all day. I thought it was sweet when she asked me, then I found out that one of her friends is eight months pregnant.”

“So?”

“You think for a second that Cami’s the type who would be okay with having a pregnant bridesmaid?”

“You don’t have to have eight bridesmaids.”

“You do if you have eight groomsmen.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. I don’t even know that many people.”

“I sure as hell don’t like that many people.”

“So is that the pregnant chick’s dress?”

“Fuck you.” Smash-and-Grab swatted me with the ruffle. She was smiling. “What’re you doing out here?”

“Besides getting hit on by Dr. Creepy?”

“Besides that.”

“Avoiding my mother.”

“Ah, your mother.” Smash-and-Grab’s tone told me that she, too, remembered my mother. “What did she do?”

“Told her friends I’m a doctor. It used to really bother me when nothing I did was good enough, but now it’s just irritating.”

“So what, it’s not good enough that you’re a writer?”