Frankie had lit up at being validated, her eyebrows raised, the edges of her grin pointing northward too, and Ezra decided right then that she could be good for him, even with her messiness, even with her blunt force. She added, just to drive the point home: “Yeah, what are you even doing with her, with your life? Don’t you know that you’re in control of your own destiny?”
And then someone cued up “You Give Love a Bad Name” on the jukebox, and everyone behind them cheered, so Frankie dragged a reluctant Ezra to the dance floor, where they all screamed the chorus so loudly the walls shook.
“So... you don’t remember last night?” Ezra said now, twelve years after they’d first met, more gently than before because he didn’t know what other tack to take here. Frankie scowled, but then she was never particularly good at acknowledging mistakes. Much less apologizing for them. “We couldn’t have... gotten married,” Ezra continued. “I only had that ring on me because... it’s for Mimi. And now you... I mean... No... it’s impossible. Besides, where would we have done that... here?” He waved a hand as if to acknowledge this idyllic gem of a college town in Western Massachusetts, which had three bed-and-breakfasts and a used bookstore and a bakery that specialized in cinnamon buns but certainly no all-night wedding chapels. “It’s not exactly Vegas.”
But then Ezra remembered that Connor had asked one of his Middleton hockey teammates, Alec Barstow, to get ordained online, which sounded completely preposterous, but Connor swore it was legit.
“Mimi?” Frankie asked flatly.
“My girlfriend? Obviously.”
“You planned to ask her to marry you at April and Connor’s wedding?” Frankie made a face like he should know better.
“No,” he said. “I did not plan on asking her to marry me at a wedding. I was planning on—afterward—” He stopped. He didn’t need to justify himself to his college girlfriend.
“Oh,” she said, but said it like:ooooooooh, a guise of understanding riddled with sarcasm. “The gesture grandé. Your specialty.”
“Hey.” He held up a finger. “Do not.”
“Do not what?”
It was true that Ezra had long been a fan of a grand gesture. A decade ago, he’d probably overcompensated for his feelings for Frankie by using any opportunity to go big. The time he’d brought Paris to her behind their dorm; the ill-fated, heady decision in front of Burton Library that led to their destruction; the hotel room he booked the night he was certain they were going to sleep together for the first time. It was one of those quaint B and Bs because his only other choice was the Red Roof Inn on the outskirts of town, and even if Ezra didn’t understand Frankie in the ways that he wanted to by then, he knew well enough that she’d grown up in a four- or five-star hotel kind of way. So he put the room on his close-to-maxed-out card, and scrambled around lighting too many candles and tossing literal rose petals on the duvet, and he cued up music from Sade because Frankie had once said that her songs were “pure sex.” Frankie arrived after her last lecture, just as dusk was settling in, and he swung open the door, ready to woo her, and she took it all in and tilted her head, laughed, then said, “Is this all just to get me to sleep with you? Ez, I would have done that in the dorm.” Then she took off all of her clothes and pulled him on top of the rose-petaled duvet.
“Well, thank goodness, Mimi isn’t you,” he said now, his voice dull. “So please do not insert your opinion where it isn’t welcome.”
Indeed, Mimi, like Ezra, loved a grand gesture—she’d been clear on that from the night they met when they were deemed “100% compatible” by a questionnaire they both filled out at a work event she was hosting. A proposal at midnight of the new millennium would be exactly what she wanted. Hedidn’t have to stand here and explain all this to the woman who wouldn’t get that in the first place.
“Anyway,” Ezra continued, “later. Not at the wedding.”
“Shit!” Frankie yelped, already over it. “The wedding! What time is it? I can’t be late!”
The wedding. The reason they were back on campus in the first place. April and Connor worked here now—April taught nineteenth-century literature, and Connor was the assistant coach for the Division 2 hockey team. When Ezra got the invite, he thought of Frankie briefly—Will she be there?—but Frankie had such a big life in Los Angeles, so far removed from most of their social circle, that he didn’t linger on the worry of seeing her again.
“What time is it?” Frankie said again. “How is there not a clock in this room?”
“I have a phone,” Ezra replied.
“So do I. Everyone does!” Frankie tutted. “It’s 1999. That doesn’t make you special.”
Ezra blew out his breath, and then they both cast about. Frankie patted down the bed; Ezra dropped to his knees looking on the floor. Frankie opened the closet, which was still full of a student’s belonging. Ezra found his down coat by the front door and checked the pockets.
“Where are our phones?” he said finally, when there were no corners to scour, no flat surfaces they might be overlooking.
“So we may be married and we’re missing our phones and we are in your old dorm room,” Frankie cried. “And I’m supposed to believe that you have no memory of this?”
“What? You think I, like, did this intentionally? Like... with drugs?”
Frankie made a face like she didn’t really think that because Ezra Jones had never even smoked a joint, but she had to start with a theory somewhere.
“Who’s to say this isn’t on you?” he jabbed back. “You and your...” He threw up his hands. “Rock-and-roll lifestyle.” He was immediately mortified and wished he could recant.
“You are, like, literally the last person in the world I would want to hook up with!” Frankie snapped, then quieted. “Besides, I mean, I would also never do that—drug you. For obvious moral reasons. I don’t need to drug someone to get them naked.” Then she squeezed her eyes closed and looked wobbly on her feet.
“Are you ok?” Ezra asked.
“I am obviously not.”
“I meant... I mean, not about all of this. But physically. Are you ok?”
