I liked orange because it reminded me of the Woodsmen, but that color stuff had said I was a summer so she’d been correct. However, Taylor was insistent that Kiya was absolutely wrong about the other issue of her relationship, and they continued to argue as we shopped. I finally picked a dress (slate blue) and they calmed down as we went to the shoe department. They wore the same size and found a great pair on sale that they planned to share, which would work since they lived together.
“I’m sorry. I just worry about you,” Kiya told her as we left to get dinner.
“I know.” Taylor put her arm around her roommate’s shoulders. “But I’m good. We’re all happy with our choices.”
“I am,” I assured them. Things in my life were going very well. I’d just received approval for interior paint at the practice facility, and no one in the Office of Stadium Affairs had seemed to notice that I meant we would paint the entire interior, and not just the Woodsmen side.
“I am, too. Totally happy,” Kiya announced. She and Myles were taking things slow, she promised, and she hadn’t said anything about her former Cado in a while. I had seen her reading some old texts, though, when she had promised Taylor that she’d deleted everything and that she’d (finally) blocked him. I hadn’t brought that up.
“I’m happy. I definitely am,” Taylor reiterated. Over our meal, she also told us some details about the night before, which she’d spent with her friend, and Kiya’s mouth gaped open.
“Shit, Tay! You did that?”
“I know. I wasn’t sure I wanted to at first, but I thought about it and decided to give it a try. I would ten-out-of-ten recommend it,” she said. “Have you done it, Cate?”
I shook my head. “I’m not interested.”
“Are you going to sleep with Ronan when you guys are away?” she asked. “Regular style?”
They were disappointed that we wouldn’t be spending a romantic night in Chicago. “The place doesn’t matter,” Taylor told me, and she was right. We could have done it anywhere, but we weren’t going to do it at all.
“He suggested that but I said no. Well, I didn’t really say no, but I freaked out and he took it back,” I explained.
Kiya nodded sagely, but she was staring at our other friend. “Because you know that you feel more for him than friendship so you’re aware that getting physical—“
“Kiya, I swear to Christ, give it up!” Taylor ordered. And they started squabbling again and Taylor texted Victoria for backup, but she didn’t answer. It turned out that she’d been napping and not too busy to come out with us after all.
I wasn’t nervous about meeting Ronan’s family. I was only curious about them, but I was absolutely nervous about the flight. “We’ll be fine,” he said as we went through the airportearly that Saturday morning. He had already taken my hand, right after we went through the security part. It wasn’t a long walk to the gate because this was small compared to what I’d seen of the airport in Salt Lake City. No, it was better not to think about all of that.
“Cate.”
I looked up. “Yes?”
“I can feel your hand shaking,” he said.
“I’m trying not to be afraid. I really don’t like to feel that way.” I tried to be the duck that I used to be. What had happened to the duck?
“Everybody’s scared of stuff. You know how I am about rats.”
We both shivered. “That’s natural, because they host fleas that carry the plague,” I reasoned. “The Black Death wiped out fifty million people.”
“Hell’s bells, is that right? Ok, my fears are justified,” he agreed. “But you could be scared of other things, too. I am.” He listed some of them while we waited to board. “I don’t like wooden popsicle sticks. I get creeped out by how they feel against my teeth. I don’t like gnomes, either.”
“Really?”
“They’re grubby and they squat,” he explained. “What’s there to like?”
I determined that I wasn’t afraid, not of gnomes or anything else. But I did hold his hand as we boarded the plane, which was pretty cramped compared to the private jet. He took up hiswhole seat and we raised the armrest so that he took up a good portion of mine, too, but I didn’t care. It felt better to have him so close but the flight was smooth and non-bumpy anyway. No one drank bourbon the whole time, either, and I didn’t miss the smell of that in the glasses or in the puke when it came back up.
“This was fine,” I declared as we waited to disembark. Since he was too tall to stand upright in here, not even in the aisle, we waited in the seats until it was our row’s turn.
But now, Ronan seemed unhappy himself. “Yeah, it was fine.” He looked impatiently toward the exit. “We should go straight to the hotel, if we can ever get off this plane.” He had rented a room so that we could get dressed for the wedding and leave our bags. My lunch friends, who had participated in several weddings as bridesmaids, junior bridesmaids, and flower girls, as well as attending as guests, had explained that the groom and his groomsmen usually hung out together before the ceremony. But Ronan’s brother hadn’t wanted to do that. He hadn’t wanted any kind of bachelor party, either, or a trip, or anything. The girls had thought that was weird but it made sense when I considered that maybe this marriage was more like a business arrangement.
In the car on the way to the hotel, I expressed that idea to Ronan. “Maybe your brother’s fiancée got pregnant and they both wanted the baby, but it’s not a love and romance kind of thing,” I suggested. “That’s why they’re not doing a big wedding.” Victoria especially had told stories of hugely ornate weddings that she had attended and it seemed to me that she equated the size of the guest list with the depth of the bond between the couple. She’d said that she wanted a giant wedding forherself, and Taylor had thrown out that she wasn’t interested in marriage (then she and Kiya had gotten into another argument).
He seemed to mull over my theory. “You could be right,” he answered. He sounded unconvinced. “I think he’s just not much into ceremony crap. I wanted to go to his high school graduation but he took another shift at work and skipped it.”
“Did he go to yours?”
