“You…you came,” Garrett muttered.
He glanced quickly at me, but refused to stay on my irises for too long, which I surmised would be an acknowledgment of the crime we had committed. Locking eyes with Maggie Vine would be like watching that video from The Ring: cataclysmic.
“Of course we came,” Summer said.
Summer’s eyes pointed down to Garrett’s twitching fingers, as he nervously stirred his flowery gin cocktail. He always beamed in my presence, and it didn’t take a body language expert to see that the sun had darkened. I shifted in my heels, biting my tongue and darting my eyes around the tent. I had never been anxious around Garrett. If anything, Garrett always had the opposite effect: he smiled, and my shoulders dropped. Not today.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said lowly, into my disappearing glass of wine.
He nodded curtly and scoured the room for an eject button.
“Well, you both enjoy,” Garrett said, with a forced smile directed at Summer, and Summer only. The smile left his lips the moment his eyes brushed mine. He curved his body past me, fast-walking toward a distant group of his suit-and-tie-clad finance coworkers.
I dared to meet Summer’s eyes, which were already narrowed on my face.
“What. Was. That,” Summer demanded.
I shifted my body beside a cater waiter, grabbing a round, dusted chocolate puff pastry from a tray, and stuffed it into my mouth so I wouldn’t have to speak.
“Real smooth,” Summer said.
The pastry was hot and chewy against my gums, and then it cracked against my teeth. This was absolutely not chocolate. I could taste a bizarre swirl of Starbucks and something fried against my tongue. I refused to let it go down my throat, terrified that my lack of maturity had just upended twenty-seven years of full-on vegetarianism.
“What—what is this?” I asked the waiter, around a mouthful of this.
“A dusted espresso shell with a double-fried frog leg center,” the waiter said, quite plainly, as if it wasn’t the most unhinged combination ever.
I ducked behind the hydrangeas and spit double-fried Kermit’s remains out into a paper napkin, directly onto the beautifully monogrammed G and C. I chugged my rosé, swishing it in my mouth like it was Scope—which honestly, was a normal thing to do at a winery. I leaned down behind the flowers, and spit out the remaining carnivorous leftovers into my wineglass.
“Come with me,” Summer said flatly.
In true fashion, Summer did not give me a chance to follow her lead. Instead, she pinched her firm grip around my elbow and dragged me away from the tent, pulling me into the vineyard.
She stopped once we found ourselves with the glowing tent in the distance, both of us smack-dab in between two far-reaching rows of grapevines. Summer crossed her arms and waited for me to speak. I admired the grapes, eager to deflect.
“It’s so pretty here, isn’t it? Like, straight out of a party from The Hunger Games.”
“Is he still a good kisser?” Summer asked, eyes staring me down.
She knew. Of course she did. I exhaled, relieved that it was finally Sharing Time with my best friend.
“First of all, it’s completely Dave Matthews’s fault.”
“Wait. You guys kissed weeks ago, and you didn’t tell me?”
I reddened, shrinking under Summer’s shadow.
“ME”—she continued—“your best friend in the entire universe, the most important human in your life.”
“At least your self-esteem is intact.”
She glared at me.
“I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you—I should have told you. It happened, and I don’t know what to do with it,” I said, now pacing and fanning myself with my dress.
“How did ‘it’ happen?”
I froze, sucked in the floral air, and then opened my mouth. The words flew off my tongue like one giant exhale. “Well, so a handful of years ago I asked Garrett to spend the rest of his life with me when I turned thirty-five, and he showed up at my birthday, we kissed, but then he told me he was engaged. Super upsetting. To complicate matters, I also sort of promised that I would find Asher Reyes when I was thirty-five and he promised he’d find me—that’s a promise we made to each other more than once, and here we are.”
I inhaled, finally taking a breath.
“I’m sorry, do I need to break out my Google translator, or are you going to decode that run-on sentence for me?”
I opened my mouth, and I started to fill in the blanks.
28
THIRTY-FIVE
SUMMER STARED DOWN AT ME, dumbfounded, as I finished telling her everything. I twirled a grape on the vine, eager to avoid what would follow: her biting judgment.
“You’re a little marriage pact whore,” Summer said, her eyes wide against the dimming blue afterglow.
“I’m blanketed in the warmth of your support.”
“This is worse than that movie where Julia Roberts made Dylan McDermott promise to marry her by twenty-eight, and then she tried to break up his wedding to a fucking twenty-year-old.”
“Dermot Mulroney,” I corrected.
“Dylan McDermott and Dermot Mulroney are two different people?”
“Yes.”
“Huh…” Summer said.
Summer stared past my face, her lips slightly parted with the pop culture epiphany. She shook her head and pointed her eyes back to the task at hand: my self-afflicted chaos.
“Seriously. Maggie. How fucked-up do you have to be to ask two different guys to promise they’ll marry you?”
“Apparently, exactly this fucked-up.”
“At the very least, you could have given Asher thirty and Garrett thirty-five, just to space your chances out. But honestly: Why? Why did you ask Asher to marry you at thirty-five?”
I stared at Summer, holding my arms, not wanting to unload my issues.
“Your mom?” she said, reading my mind.
I nodded. Summer started to pace in front of me, like a PR shark circling a crisis.
“This is a whole phenomenon,” she noted.
“What is? Marriage pacts? Being casually ruined by our parents’ lack of therapy? Showing up at your soulmate’s engagement party?”
“Retrosexuals,” she said. “High school sweethearts who reconnect. The world is a garbage fire and nostalgia is cheaper than drugs and therapy. There was an article that said for older millennials, backsliding into your teenage hormones is a comfort—like re-bingeing a late-nineties WB show.”
Well, I did embody the angst of a teenage girl holding back tears as Sarah McLachlan howled in the background. There was even a love triangle. I was living out my own episode of Felicity, but none of it was comforting.
Summer raised her eyebrows at me.
“You just told me Asher’s been working on this movie project for several years. So why announce it now?” I opened my mouth to answer, but she had already formed her own conclusion. “He was waiting for that open door to walk through. A promise that he could deflect as a joke—when really, he’s thought about ending up with you this entire time.”
There was an undeniable swirl in my gut, shooting like a rocket up to my brain stem and nodding emphatically. Instead, I scrunched up my face.
“I don’t know…we were babies.”