Page 19 of The Lovers
“Do you remember that friend I told you about—the one I had a falling-out with the summer before college?”
I’m a coward who can’t even come out to her best friend. Can’t even come clean about what happened and how I was the one to blame.
“How could I forget? You made me work extra hard at friendship thanks to that chick.”
An unearned fear.Such a tool.
“I had a lot of walls up,” I say.Tool, tool, tool.
Nina gives me an exaggerated raise of her eyebrows. “You were totally bricked in.”
“She’s here.”
Her eyes widen and she stands up on instinct. Fight or flight, I can’t be sure.
“Hereas in, at the wedding venue?” she asks, and I nod. Now it’s her turn to take a hefty gulp from her rainbow-colored reusable water bottle. “What’s the fucking chance?”
Pretty high considering I pulled the same tarot cards as we pulled on a fateful Halloween night back when we were twelve, right after we shared a churro and went through the hall of mirrors holding hands, the same cards that the psychic told us meant we were Twin Flames, cards that almost always accompany the start of a fated romance.
“She’s the wedding planner,” is the detail I decide to share instead.
“Name,” Nina says, clicking away from the FaceTime screen.
“Do not google her.”
“I most certainly am,” she says. The screen is paused because she’s typing. “It was Julia something…?” My jaw clenches. “You can tell me or I can look at Millie Morgan’s Instagram and find the info through sleuthing. Your choice.”
She’s a bulldog when it comes to getting what she wants. I’m in a losing standoff.
“Julia Kelley,” I say through tight lips.
Seconds skip past while she googles and I rethink my decision not to open the bottle of wine in the fridge.
Her face rematerializes on my screen. “She’s a stone-cold hottie in a veryall of my shirts are dry-clean only, I need to be fucked into oblivionsort of way.” Her eyes flick off to somewhere that isn’t my face in her phone and she grins, toothy and broad. “No, ma’am, you are not the one who needs to be fucked into oblivion.” Ah, a customer. “Have a magical day.” I snort. Nina looks back at the camera. “I don’t know what a beige banana like that was even doing in the Heathen Hearth booth, anyway.”
“Maybe she’s corporate in the streets, pagan in the sheets.” I try to sound lighthearted, but it comes off more asswallowed a bug.
“You’re totally freaking out,” she replies.
“It’s been over ten years since I saw her.” Gulp. Water. Wish it was wine.
“You never looked her up or anything? Not once, not even when you were drunk or PMSing?” She sounds skeptical, but she’s wrong. The pain of our falling-out plus the yearning for her closeness was an equation for inaction. I never gave in to the urge, even when it did fleetingly flutter through my brain. I was petrified of what I might find—or feel—if I did.
I shake my head.
“Wow, look at the universe,” she says.
“My karma can’t possibly be this bad.”
“Doesn’t sound bad to me, babe,” she replies, her voice thoughtful. “These sorts of fractures need repairing. Ya know, maybe this is all for your healing.”
“Julia was a lot of things, but capable of healing me isn’t one of them.”
“Your life is in chaos. Your mom and dad are splitting up, with Momma coming out and proud, Daddy-o unraveling at the teddy bear seams. You broke up with a hottie who was definitely marriage material without so much as a tear shed. Then this gig dropped into your lap likefate.” She says the word like it’s a gift, but I feel it like a gut punch instead.
The Wheel of Fortune card is most intrinsically, most authentically, linked to the hands of fate. That turn of the wheel can’t be stopped, but where it does finally land is most certainly right where it should.
“You’re Mystic Maven,” she continues. “What does your intuition say?”
