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“So,” she said, “you could have said, ‘I love Tim,’ or ‘Get off his case, JoJo. I’m marrying him and I’m fucking happy’ or ‘Shut the fuck up, JoJo. You don’t know shit.’”
I drew my tongue along my teeth. Tapped my nails against the counter.
“And?”
“And you said, ‘His name is Tim’.”
I bit back an aggravated exhale and said through teeth I hoped weren’t clenched too tightly, “I love Tim. Happy?”
JoJo rested her hand against mine, her smile soft.
“I’m happy,” she said quietly. “Are you?”
I tugged my hand away on the pretext of resecuring one of the bobby pins holding my bun. I cleared my throat and again searched the office behind the empty window.
“Goddamn, what is taking so long?” JoJo complained beside me. “I thought people come here all drunk and fucked up all the time to get hitched. We’re cold-ass sober—your fault by the way, my friend, I said we should sneak in a bottle of champagne or two—and I can hardly wait any longer.”
I didn’t say it, but I was thankful as I stretched up onto my tiptoes and pressed my nose against the glass. Behaviour Tim would call “unrefined”. JoJo was the nosiest, loudest, most brutally honest friend a girl could have, but she also knew when to step back. To give me space. To not be the nosy, loud, brutally honest friend, but just the friend. There for me. No matter what. Stupid, life-ruining decisions or not. JoJo knew there were things I kept from her. Things about my past. Things I didn’t want coming out. Couldn’t have coming out. Not for the life I was living at least. Or about to live. And she was okay with it. Okay with me having secrets. Okay with not opening that closet. The one with the skeletons.
“If you’re going to be late for your audition,” I started.
JoJo waved her hand to dismiss me. “Please,” she said, laughing, “Pierre still hasn’t paid me back from that last show I did for him. I’ll show up whenever I’d good and ready please and thank you.”
I draped my arm over JoJo’s shoulders (something she hated and something I loved, because I knew how much she hated it) and squeezed her in tight. She squirmed away and straightened beside me, lifting her chin just a little too high.
“You know, you can still audition, too,” she said. “There’s this part that you’d be—”
I interrupted by saying, “Yeah, Pierre already has enough people he owes.”
JoJo eyed me, clearly wanting to say something more but dropped it. Maybe she knew it was just an excuse. Maybe she knew Tim expected a certain image for his wife, and a small (probably unpaid) role in a (far, far off) off-Broadway play about disco aliens was not exactly what he was looking for.
“Seriously,” JoJo complained again. “How do people pay Elvis to stick around while they wait all this time? Do they get him drugs or something? If I were Elvis I wouldn’t be chilling on some sad bench at city hall waiting for all this nonsense for a shotgun wedding. They must give him something, don’t you think?”
I laughed.
“I wouldn’t have the faintest clue,” I said.
JoJo eyed some of the couples waiting to get their marriage certificates. Girls in tea-length dresses big with tulle. Guys in t-shirts laser printed with a bowtie and black vest. An old woman in a fur coat with a slicked-haired twenty-something. Wet, sloppy kisses. Bodega bouquets going limp by the second. Sprays of cheap perfume against sweaty necks.
Tim and I were going to get married in a cathedral. With white lilies of the valley. And a train of lace so long…it was going to be…nice.
Every girl’s dream.
My dream, I mean.
“But you lived in Vegas,” JoJo said after a few minutes, the civil servant still lost in the aisles of file folders. “You did the whole…”
She waved her hand vaguely, because all the information I’d given her about my time there was vague. She was pretty sure I’d danced. Pretty sure I’d been in entertainment. Pretty sure I’d left in a hurry. It was all mostly right.
I laughed as I turned around to knock on the glass.
“Just ’cause I was in Vegas doesn’t mean I got drunk, found some guy, and dragged him off to the Little White Chapel to get hitched by Elvis,” I said. “Where did she go? Tim said it took him like thirty seconds to get his.”
I knocked on the window. “Hello?”
JoJo went back to twirling around the pen on its chain. It was then that I heard, amongst the din of people talking, a deep voice. It was the accent that set it apart. The accent that sent my heart racing. The accent that made me turn around.
A pair of lips crashed into mine. Before I knew it I was being swept low, a strong hand at the small of my back.
