singularly incongruous in a place like this. I need a cocktail dress, I need high heels, I need Prada.
I need some goddamn steel plating.
‘Yeah,’ Brandon replies, but he seems about as convinced as I am. There’s this expression on his face that I don’t recognise – a sort of uncomfortable, half-pained look – and it gets tighter and more intense as this goes on.
By the time we’ve gotten around to talking about tonight, he’s almost beside himself – though I’ve no idea why. Is he really this bothered by how I look, five years later? I feel like telling him: people age, you know. And also, sometimes they just want to wear their comfortable trainers and an old jersey. Not everyone can be as awesome and Calvin Klein as you, jockstrap.
All of which is a little unkind, I know, but sue me. I’m caught in a mahogany cage, and I’m vulnerable.
‘So, are you staying in town?’ Tyler asks, and of course he does so at exactly the wrong time. It’s just after I’ve noticed that Brandon seems overpoweringly eager to get away, and right before he makes this sound: hurk.
So I don’t think I can be blamed for my response, exactly. ‘Oh … no. No, I just thought I’d … you know, stop in and say congratulations. I mean, I have this hair appointment, and I’ve got to call at the dry cleaner’s before it closes, so …’
There’s no hair appointment. And I’ll be perfectly honest, I don’t even own any clothes that need dry cleaning.
‘I should probably just get going.’
Of course I think of the note I left for them both the moment I’ve said it. The similarities are uncanny, they really are – the same awkward excuses about having to do something that doesn’t exist, the same vague end to it. I mean, could I have crammed more non-specific hedging in there? All I need are some littles and maybes to go with those reallys and justs, and we’re right back to where we left off.
It’s like it hasn’t been five years, at all. It’s been five seconds.
‘Seriously? You’re going to skip the party?’
Such an elegant choice of words from him, truly. Skip instead of anything less loaded, like not able to make or maybe even miss. Skip suggests I’m running out on them; that I’m a flake who can’t hold my shit together – and I’m pretty sure he knows that.
The years have only made him stronger, smoother, better. I bet he could talk Mother Teresa into a gangbang with very little effort at all. Despite the fact that she’s been dead for God knows how long.
‘Well, I’m really not dressed for a –’ I start, but he anticipates that, too. He anticipates it before I’ve even finished talking, and he does it in a way that makes me simultaneously angry and ready to faint on a chaise longue.
‘Here, take my credit card. Get yourself something,’ he says, just like that. As though he’s James Bond or Aristotle Onassis or some other smooth sort of character that I can’t even think of, because seriously no one is like this. And it’s not just me that thinks so because once the offer is made Brandon gives him such a look.
I think he actually starts to tell him don’t, too, but after another shared and silent exchange that I’m not a part of, Brandon glances away, defeated. And all of Tyler’s three-hundred-watt attention is back on me again.
‘Of course, I think you look fine as you are,’ he says, and I wonder if it’s in response to that expression of Brandon’s. Like maybe he was teasing me and Brandon knew it, and now that the look has been exchanged he’s changing tack.
Or at least, I imagine something like that until his gaze slides over me, inch by inch, and that chocolate-box voice drops an octave lower.
‘That jersey is very …’ he starts, but I’m just left to imagine the rest.
Tight, I think, he wants to say tight. If that’s true it only leaves me with one option: he really is staring at my tits. Oh Lord, I think he’s actually staring at my tits, and it’s making my face red and my body go all hot and cold, to the point where I’m actually relieved when Brandon blurts out: ‘OK, well, if she can’t stay for the party she can’t stay for the party. Nothing to do about that! Oh, by the way, Ty, I really need to talk to you in the back about some … thing.’
Even if those ramblings kind of sound like he hates me.
‘Yeah, really, guys, you go ahead and talk about your … thing. I’m just going to head back,’ I say, and I swear, I come this close to escape. This close, before Tyler runs a hand around my shoulders and leans in far too close, to murmur in my ear.
‘Oh no, we wouldn’t hear of it,’ he tells me, while my spine turns to jelly and slides right out of my body. I know what’s going to happen here, before it actually does. ‘You just take my credit card and see Marie at Ebe, she’ll take care of you. And then when you come back we can all have a real talk, about old times. What do you say?’
I say a million different things, in my head – mostly about how smoothly arrogant he now seems, and how awkward this all is, and how bizarrely aroused I feel. But, of course, I don’t voice any of them. It’s impossible to voice any of them when Tyler’s practically kissing the side of my face and Brandon’s looking at me with these big, kind of shocked eyes.
So instead I just go with the safest option: ‘OK.’
* * *
I think, in all honesty, that I intend to get in my car and drive back to Hollingdale without a second thought. And yet somehow I find myself going to this annoyingly pretentious boutique Tyler mentioned, and, sure enough a woman called Marie does help me out – as though he’s done this a thousand times before for a million different women, and all of them fit into these tiny, drafty clothes far better than I do.
I have to come away with a dress that’s more akin to a jumper, in truth, because everything makes me look like some obscene whore of Babylon. And as I drive back to the bar I can’t help wondering if he knew that. He knew everything would cling to my enormous breasts and skim somewhere just shy of my vagina. He knew, and sent me there anyway like some more terrible version of Pretty Woman.
I can hardly bring myself to walk back into the bar, and not just because of the sluttish glimpse I catch of myself in the slick black exterior. The place is packed, and pushing through the crowd in a dress that’s continually threatening to show my gauche panties is not a fun time for me.
Someone fondles my ass, I think – though it could just as easily be a wayward bar stool, brushing against me in the dark. I’m so oversensitised and on the edge of God knows what that I can’t tell the difference, and by the time I get over to the table of honour I think it’s showing.
My face is flushed, my hair is in disarray and, worst of all, my nipples are stiff and poking through the material. I know they are, without looking, because every single move I make flags it up and, even if it didn’t, Tyler’s eyes immediately shift downwards to the offending articles.
I want to die. Oh God, please just let me die. I’m sorry for what I said earlier, about wanting to get through this alive. I don’t at all.
‘Maisie!’ Tyler says, and I can tell he’s had a couple. Not enough to make him drunk, of course, but he’s
