I TRY TO gather myself, to catch my breath and clear my throat, so I won’t have to answer in a dehydrated croak.
Of course, I don’t have to answer.
But this is the first time I’ve heard from Peter in weeks, and the thought of not hearing what he has to say—of simply wondering, forever—makes me feel sick.
Just kidding, Gill’s shots are doing that just fine.
The name Gill just occurred to me out of thin air, the image of his braided gray beard flashing across my mind.
I clamp my phone against my ear and beeline toward the window for fresh air. It’s cool out, more spring than summer today.
“Hello!” I say, too loud, too forceful, and too cheery. A rare trifecta.
“Daphne?” Peter’s soft voice fills my head like helium.
“Yes?” I say.
There’s a pause. “You sound different.”
“I feel different,” I reply. No idea why that’s what comes out.
“Oh.” There’s a silence on the other end.
“So,” I say.
Another pause. “So, I got your RSVP?”
I dig the heel of my hand into my forehead and press, hard, against the throbbing there. “Yeah.”
“And I guess I just . . .” He takes a breath. “I wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
“Okay?”
I feel like I’m back in high school calculus, random bits of equations and numbers drifting around me nonsensically: there’s some kind of meaning there, but I do not have the right brain to interpret it.
“Yeah, I mean . . .” A soft breath. “You don’t have to come, you know.”
My laugh sounds more like a cough.
“I mean, of course we’d love to have you,” he hurries on.
The sound of we alone is enough to make the contents of my stomach flip around like I chugged clam chowder, then hopped on a roller coaster. We used to be the we he talked about.
“I just wanted to make sure you knew there was no pressure on our end,” he says.
Our. We.
Let’s get all the most painful words out on the table and make sure each one positively drips with condescension.
The worst part is, even after all this, I’m not positive I don’t love him. I mean, not this version of him, but the part that remembered every important date, who brought home flowers just because he happened to be walking past a cart selling them, the Peter who had my favorite soup delivered to me every time I got sick.
The parts reserved for her now.
“We know how hard this must be for you,” he’s saying, and just like that, he snaps back into the other Peter. The one I hate. “And I just . . . I hate to think of you there, on your own . . .”
As if this whole thing isn’t humiliating enough, he’s called me to make sure I know he feels bad for me. I’m seeing red.
“I won’t be alone,” I say.
“I mean, without a date,” he clarifies, completely unnecessarily.
“I know,” I say. “I’m bringing my boyfriend.”
Even as I’m saying it, there’s a voice screeching in my brain, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
I face the window and pantomime a scream, one hand dragging down the side of my face. I wonder if this exact scenario inspired Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
“Your boyfriend?” Peter’s voice emanates sheer disbelief.
No, my brain says.
“Yes,” my mouth says.
“But . . . you didn’t RSVP for a plus-one.”
I’m not usually a liar. In fact, I still sometimes lie awake thinking about a time in the sixth grade when I’d just switched schools and a girl struck up a conversation with me about my horse necklace, and in my desperation to make friends, some foul demon possessed me to tell the girl I loved horses and grew up going to horse-riding camp every summer.
I’d been horseback riding twice. I fell off the second time, if that matters.
After that conversation, I’d avoided that girl out of guilt. Lucky for me, we moved again six months later.
But apparently the demon has finally tracked me down again, because without thinking, without planning, a lie emerges from my mouth, fully formed: “I didn’t need a plus-one. He got his own invitation.”
The weighty silence tells me Peter is doing invisible calculus now. Only he’s got the brain for it. “You can’t mean . . .” His voice slides past disbelief straight into incredulity. “You’re with Miles?”
No, no, no, the voice in my head screams.
“Yep!” my mouth chirps.
I am instantly back to silent Munch-screaming out the window.
The next silence extends too long. I’m incapable of breaking it, because the only thing I can think to say is, I don’t know why I said that—it’s an outright lie, but I also cannot. Cannot tell him that.
Peter clears his throat. “Well, the wedding’s not for a few months.”
“I know,” I say. “Labor Day.”
“A lot could change before then,” he says.
My jaw drops. Is he really insinuating that my fake relationship won’t survive three months to his wedding . . . when his relationship started just over a month ago?
“We’ll be there,” I say.
NO, my brain screams.
“Okay,” Peter says.
I need to get off the phone before I involuntarily spring a fictional pregnancy on him. “I’ve got to go, Peter. Take care.”
“Yeah,” he says. “You t—”
I hang up.
I pace in front of the window for about five seconds, then go straight to Miles’s door, a sinner on her way to confession.
I knock. No answer.
I pound. “Miles? Are you up?”
I rattle the knob. Or I expect to, but it’s unlocked. So instead, I basically just fall into his room, catching myself against his dresser. The TV atop it wobbles, and as I steady it, a voice says from behind me, “Are you stealing my TV?”
I turn, expecting to find Miles sprawled out in his bed. Instead, he’s standing in the doorway, fully dressed with a grease-mottled paper bag in hand.
I release the TV. “I almost knocked it over,” I explain.
“Why?” he asks.
“I told Peter we were dating,” I say.
He stares at me for three seconds, then laughs. “What does that have to do with the TV?”
“Nothing,” I say.
He laughs again and turns back to the hallway.
“Where are you going?” I call.
“To get sriracha,” he says.
“Why,” I say, trailing him to the kitchen.
“For my breakfast sandwich.” He drops the bag on the counter on his way to the fridge.
“Did you hear what I said?” I ask.
“You told Peter we were dating,” he confirms, rifling around the fridge for the hot sauce.
“Aren’t you mad?” I say.
He spins back with the sriracha bottle and an unmarked jar of something dark and goopy. “Why would I be mad?”
“Because we aren’t dating,” I say.
“I’m aware.” He dumps the bag out onto the counter, and two yellow-paper-wrapped sandwiches fall out. He slides one toward me, then turns to the already full coffeepot.
“How long have you been up?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Hour or two.” He carries two steaming mugs back to the counter. He gives me a mug with Garfield the cat wearing a cowboy hat on it. “Cream? Sugar?”
I shake my head. I’m not much of a coffee drinker. I’ll just sip enough to take the edge off of this hangover.
Miles opens the jar and spoons a little probably-maple-syrup into his coffee. “Is that good?” I ask, leaning forward to watch.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Seems like it would be, though. Did you drunk-dial?”
“What?” I say.
“Did you call Peter drunk?” he says, unwrapping his sandwich, flipping it open, and absolutely slathering the egg and avocado inside with sriracha.
“No, he called me.”
He pauses with the sandwich halfway to his mouth. He lets out another laugh and lowers the sandwich. “Wait. Did we RSVP to their wedding last night?”
Hearing it said aloud, again, sends a full-body shudder through me. Groaning, I drop my face against my forearms on the counter.
“Wait, wait.” Miles presses his palm into my forehead and tips my face up so he can meet my eyes. “That’s why he called? Because he got the RSVP?”
I nod. “He called to tell me I don’t have to come. That he knows how hard it will be for me to be there, all by my lonesome, so utterly shattered and alone and lonely and unloved.”
Miles snorts. “Smug little prick.”
“He’s six four,” I say.
“Smug giant douche,” he amends. Then, after a minute, “Or, I don’t know, maybe he genuinely thought he was being nice?”
“No, you were right the first time.”
Miles unwraps my breakfast sandwich partway and shoves it toward my face. I take a bite, and then he sets it down in front of my chin.
“Wait!” He braces his hands against the counter, face brightening. “So he called to try to make you feel so pathetic you wouldn’t come ruin his special day, and you told him we were dating?”
“I’m sorry,” I say again.
“That fucking rules,” he says. “How’d he take it?”
“Some silence, some scoffs of disbelief,” I say. “A gentle reminder that the wedding’s not for three months, and there’s no way you and I will still be dating by then. Pretty perceptive of him, given that we’re not dating now.” I drop my face, groaning anew at the fresh round of hammering inside my brain.
“Eat something,” Miles says. “It will help.”
I pitch myself onto one of the mismatched wooden stools at the counter and slide the sandwich toward me, taking a forceful bite.
“Maybe we should date,” Miles says.
I choke. He watches me coughing, an impish grin forming on his impish mouth. “Yes,” I finally manage. “A shared cuckolding is the most fertile ground from which love could ever spring.”
“Yeah, that,” he says, “and it would piss them off.”
“As you pointed out,” I say. “They don’t care. They’re getting married, Miles.”
“And six weeks ago, you were getting married,” he says.
“Hey, if you’re willing to keep reminding me of that daily, I can go ahead and rename my morning alarm something other than WAKE UP, YOU’VE BEEN JILTED, BITCH.”
“No, I mean, a few weeks ago, you and Peter were engaged. And yet, he was jealous of me, and you were jealous of Petra.”
“Excuse you,” I say.
“I’m quoting you,” he says.
“From when?” I say.
“Halfway through the third time you put on ‘Witchy Woman’ last night.”
I narrow my gaze.
“You don’t remember anything that happened, do you?” He seems tickled at the thought.
“I remember Glenn,” I say.
“Gill,” he says.
“Right.”
“My point is, just because they’re engaged, it doesn’t mean they’re above jealousy.” He takes another sip of coffee. I reach feebly toward the maple syrup jar, and he nudges it closer to me.
I spoon some into my mug and take a sip.
“What do you think?” he asks, leaning forward.
“Pretty good,” I say. “Where’d it come from?”
“Oh, just one of my countless odd jobs,” he says.
My cheeks heat.
He laughs into another huge bite of his sandwich, which reminds me to eat mine. “We’re not going to their wedding as a fake couple,” I say.
He shrugs. “Okay.”
“You’re not going to convince me.”
“Fine,” he says.
“I’m serious,” I say.
“Does he still follow you on social media or did you block him?” he asks.
I squirm on the stool and busy myself with another sip. “I unfollowed him, but I didn’t block him.” Some very pathetic part of me didn’t want to close the door entirely. I wanted him to miss me, even a tiny fraction of the amount I missed him. I wanted him to regret losing me.
I have not made a single post since we broke up.
I go on: “I don’t know if he still follows me or not.”
“Yes, you do,” Miles says.
“Okay, fine, as of yesterday, he did.”
“Can I see your phone?” Miles asks.
“I don’t want to block him,” I say.
“I’m not going to,” he promises.
I hand my phone over, and he sets down his sandwich, chewing as he taps around on the screen. Then he rounds the counter to stand behind me, holding the phone out in front of us, the selfie camera on. He hunches over, hooking his free arm around my collarbones and flashing a dimpled grin.
“What are you doing?” I ask, turning toward him, my nose grazing his cheekbone.
“Got it,” he says, straightening up and pushing my phone back into my hand.
The picture he took is still onscreen. I’m midword, my lips practically on his face, and he’s smiling, a slew of his disjointed sailor-style forearm tattoos draped across my chest in an easy yet vaguely suggestive way.
We look very much like a couple, if you ignore the fact that we also look like two people who’d have exactly nothing in common. Then again, I guess that’s how straitlaced Peter and free-spirited Petra look side by side.
It’s just that Petra wears the aesthetic like an edgy pop starlet, and Miles looks kind of like the guy from high school who intentionally failed his senior year to stick around for a while, then started selling bootleg cologne out of the trunk of his car in the mall parking lot.
Not that I look much better. There’s a smear of avocado on my chin.
“What am I supposed to do with this,” I say.
“Whatever you want.” Miles crumples the paper sandwich sheath and tosses it into the trash.
“Meaning?”
“Daphne.” He slumps forward on his elbows, raking a hand up through his hair. It stays put, defying gravity. His beard is likewise sticking out in dark tufts like he’s a bedraggled and hungover young Wolverine. “You know what I’m getting at.”
“You want me to post this so he’ll think we’re dating,” I say.
“No,” he says, bemused. “I personally want you to post it so Petra thinks we’re dating.”
“Why can’t you post it,” I say.
“Because I don’t have any social media,” he says.
“Right.” I remember Peter telling me this. I’d been scrolling through Petra’s—frankly, professional-grade influencer—feed and not only was Miles not tagged in any pictures, but his face wasn’t even in any. When I asked Peter about it, he rolled his eyes and said something cranky about Miles being too good for social media.
Just the thought of it now is enough to tip me over the edge.
I don’t write a caption. I just post the picture.
Miles grins and high-fives me.
“Are we evil or just immature?” he says.
“I think maybe just bitter,” I reply. “Hey, thanks for the breakfast sandwich, by the way.”
“Thanks for the pep talk last night,” he says.
“When did that happen?” I ask.
“Halfway through the fourth time we played ‘Witchy Woman,’ ” he says.
A fuzzy memory surfaces, just for a second, before submerging into the wine-and-liquor haze again: standing on a sticky floor, in the glow of a neon sign, holding on to either side of Miles’s face as I enunciated as clearly as I could manage: It’s going to get easier. This time next year, you won’t even remember her name.
If we keep drinking like this, he replied, I’m not sure I’ll even remember my name.
Miles grabs the sriracha, and twists the lid back onto the syrup jar. “I’ve got stuff to do, but if you hear from your ex, tell him I said . . .” He holds up his middle finger.
“If you hear from yours, tell her thanks for the new boyfriend.”
“Gladly,” he says, and turns to go.
