Page 63 of Unromance

xx Celia

Gently, she pulled the elaborate gold chains from the bag, flipping them over to study the diagram on the back. Hair jewelry. Rich people could adorn anything. Only, unlike vajazzling, she was kinda into this. She could picture the delicate gold interwoven with the updo Celia had taught her how to do in the dressing room. It was a shame she couldn’t wear it.

Her chest felt tight, much like it had the past two days. Her whole body ached like she’d jumped out of a moving vehicle and rolled for miles. She’d taken her temperature, but nothing. She didn’t have a cough or a fever, just unending nausea and lack of energy.

Her phone buzzed on the coffee table, and she rushed over, disappointment clogging her throat that it wasn’t Mason.

Not that she was waiting to hear from him or anything.

“Hi, Lily,” she sighed, sinking back into her couch. A waft of eau de Mason floated up from the cushions, enveloping her in its musky, spicy scent. It was truly a wonder how ingrained it was, though at this point it might be a side effect of whatever illness she had. Delusional scents or something. She’d looked it up online, but that only led her down a rabbit hole of obscure diseases that all meant she was dying.

“Wow,” Lily said brusquely. “You don’t answer my texts and then you answer my call like the Grim Reaper himself is phoning you.”

“Sorry,” Sawyer groaned, lying sideways so she could nuzzle her face into a Mason-scented pillow. Not that that waswhyshe was doing it. “I’ve felt like shit the past two days.”

“Oh no,” Lily said sympathetically. “Are you okay? Anything I can do?”

Sawyer shrugged at the ceiling. “No. Don’t worry, I’ll rally by tomorrow.”

“Good.” She could feel Lily’s beaming smile on the other end of the line. “We’re so excited to host you and Mason tomorrow.”

Sawyer’s stomach bottomed out like she was about to have a violent bout of diarrhea. She’d been so focused on beating her writer’s block, she’d forgotten Lily had wrangled Mason into attending hangover brunch. “Oh, uh, about that. Mason and I, uh, I dunno, we’re, like, done?”

The noise Lily made could only be described as the human version of a record scratch. “Say what now?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” Sawyer sighed, before launching into the whole story anyway.

Lily listened in such complete silence that Sawyer had to check more than once that the call hadn’t dropped. The longer she spoke, her words became more rambling, less a clinical retelling of what happened and more a downward spiral. She thought she’d finally found her rhythm. But when Mason threw her that curveball, she hadn’t known what to do. It was easier to stick to what she knew, what was working. It would be less painful, she’d thought, to just let that one ball drop than to try to juggle it all and risk dropping everything. But dropping Mason… she still wasn’t sure whether he was glass or plastic.

“Everything was going great, and then Horny Sawyer took over and ruined everything. I really care about him, Lils. I want him to be happy so badly it’s painful. Is that normal? I—”

Lily snorted, and it was so unexpected that Sawyer’s rambling cut off immediately.

“What?”

“Yeah, Sawyer, it’s normal. I think there’s a word for it, hold on. Hey, hon.” She raised her voice, calling across their apartment. She heard the answering grunt from Beau. “What’s the word for when you really care about someone and their happiness and also want to fuck them on a consistent basis?”

She didn’t hear Beau’s response.

“No, I can’t say that,” Lily replied. “That’ll give Sawyer heart palpitations.”

Another muffled reply from Beau.

“No, she’s not actually having heart palpitations, she’s just havingfeelings.”

“I hate you,” Sawyer mumbled.

“No, you don’t,” Lily said matter-of-factly. “Sawyer, you know what this is, right?”

She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer, so she said nothing, but Lily wasn’t easily deterred.

“You’re acting just like you did when Sadie left.”

“I didn’t know you then,” she protested feebly.

“No,” Lily agreed. “But you told me all about it that night we each had a bottle of wine. How you thought you had the flu for two months, but really you were heartbroken. Though I’m sure this is only a cold, because you couldn’t possibly be heartbroken now. The two of you were just friends, right?”

“Right,” Sawyer agreed, not trusting the innocent affect Lily was putting on. It was like Lily had heard all the thoughts Sawyer had left unsaid and was calling her out on it.

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