Page 99 of What's in a Kiss?

“Liv, don’t,” Masha says.

“How was your honeymoon?” I ask.

“Great,” Masha says, like she’s answering someone at the DMV.

“I missed you.” The words slip out, and I hear how obvious it is that I mean it. I see Masha hear it, too. Whether or not she wants to admit it, she knows me.

She sighs. “What’s all this about, Olivia?”

Though I practiced my approach several times with Fenny, I find myself speaking from the heart.

“A week ago, at your wedding, something happened.”

“I know,” she says. “I could have handled that better—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” I say. “From what I’ve learned in the last week, I don’t blame you for what you said at the wedding. For the past ten years, you and I have been living in two completely different realities.”

Masha rolls her eyes at the ocean. “Here we go. The pressures of the rich and famous.”

“Mash,” I plead, badly wanting to take her hand, to seize her shoulders, to reach her somehow. “Please listen to me. Here’s the thing. In the reality I’ve been living in, we’re still best friends.”

She sighs. “Olivia, if that’s what you wanted—and sure, there was a time when I wanted our friendship back, too—then you wouldn’t have dropped me when you left home. You might have made time for—”

“I’m not being clear enough,” I say. “The Olivia you know...” I pause, unfamiliar with the details of how I dropped her. “Does the wordsuckscover it?”

Masha nods.

“But I’m talking about an actually different reality. Like awaking dream, or science fiction. Where you wake up in a house you don’t recognize and a life you don’t understand. It happened to me. It’s happening now. And where I come from? Where I really live?” I take a stabilizing breath. “It’s not just that we’re best friends, Masha. You’re my favorite part of my life. I don’t have a lot else there, but even if I did, you’d still be my favorite part.”

She looks at me. “I don’t understand.”

“We get tacos at Guisados on Tuesdays and we go Christmas tree shopping at the crack of dawn on Black Friday. We see every Marvel movie in the theater, and we’re saving for a trip to Egypt. The last time you went fishing was a week ago when I took you out on this boat and played this music and served this beer and ate these ribs. And when you reminisced about my dad, you let your eyes get misty, and I did too, and we both knew it wasn’t so much about my dad as that whole era when our lives were laid out before us like wrapped gifts we could shake but not yet fully know. You caught a big ass halibut and it was awesome. You were happy and you were scared about your wedding. And I was your maid of honor, and you had this tiny perfect ceremony with eighteen people and a gold palette and a celebrity yogi officiant.”

Masha’s jaw drops. “That’s the wedding I wanted.”

“I know,” I say as goose bumps fleck my arms. “And it was all going perfectly, until your officiant—”

She cuts me off. “No one believed me—”

“I know, your mom said if you went with a non-rabbi officiant, you’d rue the day—”

“Rue the day,” Masha says at the same time.

“In the life I’m coming from,” I tell Masha, “I pulled your mom aside in her backyard and spoke to her.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘The rue is due to you.’ ”

A smile teases the corners of her mouth.

“I don’t understand,” Masha says. “How did you know? I didn’t even tell Eli. He couldn’t have told Jake.”

“Because I was there. I was there for all of it.”

“No, you weren’t. You were too busy. Too important. And you have been for a long time.”

“I’m a Lyft driver, and a bad waitress, and a furloughed part-time drama teacher. I’m single and can barely make my rent. I know in your version of reality, that’s not the Olivia you know, but having lived in her shoes for this past week, I really have to tell you that even that Olivia is not too busy and certainly not too important for you. For our friendship. She really misses you, Masha. All the time.”

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