Lurching onto his front, Dustin faced Rae. “Stop,” he said. “Just stop it.”
Rae was suddenly back in her childhood home, crouching outside her parents’ bedroom door, eavesdropping on a fight in theturbulent wake of the affair. “For the love of God, just stop it,” her dad had yelled at her mom. “Just fucking stop!”
Rae wanted to crawl out of Dustin’s room back to the penthouse, but she didn’t want to endure small talk with her new roommate, who was annoyingly nice. She wanted to write or even just read, but her thoughts were stuck in a left-brain loop.
She went into the living room, logged on to her laptop from the couch, and worked on building a financial model for a new deal to show how much the business would be worth after the acquisition. With how impossible it was to forecast even a day ahead in her relationship, there was a certain comfort in projecting revenues ten years into the future.
Too quickly, she finished the model. For a quick dopamine hit, she upwardly adjusted the profit margin assumptions so the valuation rose from $3.3BN to $3.8BN.
Then she brushed her teeth, squeezing toothpaste from an empty tube, and climbed into bed beside Dustin. His breathing had mellowed, and Rae knew he was asleep. The room was dark, except for street light encroaching through the curtains.
Dustin reached out to pull Rae closer.
Rae hugged back, but not too firmly to risk waking him up and letting him realize he’d mistakenly taken her in his arms.
As she watched the angular outline of his face, visible but not illuminated, a verse drifted through her mind, something about how half darkness was more frightening than full darkness because there was just enough light to see the crevices.
Not wanting to untangle herself to write it down, she let the phrase live and die as untethered thought.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
PORTFOLIO ENVY
“I definitely want cupcakes at my wedding,” Ellen told Rae one Saturday afternoon in mid-March. “I just don’t want to be mistaken for one.” Head tilted at an angle, Ellen analyzed her white-ball-gown reflection in the mirror of a SoHo wedding dress boutique.
It was a large, airy space with classical music playing over the speakers on a six-song circuit.
“You look like a princess, not a pastry,” Rae assured her from the plush maroon couch she was occupying alone. Her legs were stretched out, black booties dangling just off the side to avoid scuffing the fabric. “But I still like the first one best,” Rae added, loyal to the simple lace dress that had enticed them into the store.
They’d only planned on evaluating brunch menus, not wedding dresses, but Ellen had been captivated by a window display and insisted they pop in “for two minutes, just to get a better look.”
An hour later, Ellen had tried on half the inventory, discarding dresses at the speed she used to discard dates.
“I think that’s my favorite too,” Ellen said. “Could I try it on again?” she asked the toothpick-shaped woman named Tina who was helping them.
Tina, whom Rae had resisted labeling Toothpick Tina, despite the alliterative allure, had made a proud fuss over neglecting another bride’s appointment to make time for Ellen and her dream figure.
“Your wish is my command,” Tina said in her jingly voice. “Though I justhaveto say, I don’t think anything can live up to the drama of this one.”
Rae shot her a Wall Street scowl, aware of Tina’s motive to upsell her on the more expensive dress.
“Ellen doesn’t want drama at her wedding,” Rae said, and Ellen nodded in agreement.
With sugar in her smile and poison in her eyes, Tina said, “Let’s not project our own preferences onto someone else’s special day.”
“I’m not projecting,” Rae said, though she figured she might be.
She tried to imagine the dress she’d wear walking down the aisle toward Dustin one day, but the vision was foggy, like the bathroom mirror after her hot water hog of a new roommate finished her twenty-minute shower.
Ellen waltzed to the fitting room and reemerged one song later in the flowy lace dress, a free-spirited bride-to-be. The veil that Tina put on her—though cluttered with crystals—removed theto-besuffix. Ellen was a bride.
A flash of red cut through the fog of her own wedding day illusion. She still couldn’t see the dress, but she was wearing a Santa hat. The image should have made her laugh, but it flavored her mouth with melancholy. Perhaps she’d put it in third person and write a poem called “The Bride With the Santa Hat Veil.”
“Yes,” Ellen said, staring at herself in the angled mirrors. “This is the one.”
She spoke with the same clarity as when she’d told Rae about falling in love with Perry Street, and then with Aaron, but her voice was softer now, less concerned about announcing her success in capital letters.
Rae felt a stab of jealousy, the kind she’d credited herself with overcoming years ago. She was experiencing portfolio envy, watching Ellen’s basket of investments perform so much better than her own.
