Page 40 of Stay Awake
On the way here, I worried that without me to act as a buffer, they’d get into another argument and it would ruin the evening. It saddens me that my best friend and my boyfriend can’t stand each other. Those two have gone from barely tolerating each other when I first started dating Marco, to pretty much detesting each other. Things are at a point where Marco rarely visits my place at all if there’s any chance that Amy will be there.
It started shortly after I began dating Marco. He and Amy got into an argument over politics. It became more than a little heated. She’sprogressive. Marco says he’s a moderate. Amy insists he’s actually a conservative in disguise.
It’s true they have radically different views of the world. Marco’s a lawyer turned entrepreneur who worships at the shrine of capitalism. Amy’s an idealistic doctor who considers money to be a dirty word. Although, as Marco has cynically pointed out more than once, that might be because her family had so much of it.
I listen to the rising notes of the sax as I watch Amy put her hand on Marco’s arm and hold it there as she makes a point. The gesture is typical of Amy. She’s warm and incredibly tactile. She’s always hugging, rubbing arms, or massaging shoulders. It’s part of her charm, along with the way she bats her eyes like a femme fatale in a cartoon to get anything she wants.
And I do mean anything. Amy gets freebies wherever she goes. At restaurants, it’s free meals. Bartenders always give her free drinks at bars. When she travels she gets flight upgrades. One time on a girls’ trip to Aruba, she complained to the hotel manager that her assigned room stank of stale cigarettes. She was offered a free upgrade to a beach villa along with a complimentary massage at the hotel spa.
It doesn’t hurt that she’s drop-dead gorgeous. She has delicate features and long flaxen hair that she inherited from her Swedish grandma. But it’s not just her looks that make her stand out. Amy has bucketloads of charisma. She’s one of those rare people who instantly lights up a room just by walking into it.
Neither Amy nor Marco has seen me yet. Their seats are pressed back against a wall, which forces them to sit unnaturally close to each other.
I feel a twinge of unease when Amy flicks her hair—one of her go-to flirty gestures that I’ve seen a thousand times before when she sets her sights on someone. Amy falls in love so frequently that I honestly lose track of all her boyfriends, and she falls out of love even faster. Except with Brett, the surgeon she’s been dating since last year.It’s the first time I’ve seen her so in love that it’s the guy who has the upper hand in the relationship. Luckily for Amy, Brett is besotted with her, too.
Unlike Amy, I’m always the heartbroken one who cries on her shoulder, while she consoles me with hilarious, and largely made-up, stories about being dumped by various boyfriends over the years. I know they’re made up because Amy instigates all her breakups. It’s one of many secrets she’s shared with me over the years.
It’s thanks to Amy that I met Marco in the first place. She was asked on a blind date; a friend of a friend’s brother. She only agreed to the date if they could each bring a friend and make it a blind double date. Marco turned out to be that friend.
It was at a Japanese restaurant. We bonded over our terrible chopstick skills. Marco and Amy argued over whether sushi should be eaten with chopsticks or fingers. Amy insisted the correct way was using fingers. She lived in Japan for a semester when she was a sophomore and claimed to have survived on a diet of sushi and sake.
By the time the evening was over, I was head over heels. Marco, apparently, not so much. It took him three weeks to call me. He said it was because he was snowed under with work, although I later gathered, by joining a few dots, there had been another girl in the interim.
“There she is,” Amy screeches when she sees me approaching the table. “Marco and I were wondering what happened to you.”
Amy stands up and wraps her slender arms around me in a clingy hug. Compared to Amy in her sleeveless figure-hugging rose silk dress, I feel positively grimy. Since I had to come straight from Q’s creepy preview, I didn’t have time to go home and change into the sexy midnight-blue dress I was going to wear tonight. I put on makeup in the cab over here and opened up the collar of my wine-colored satin shirt to display a striking black pearl pendant that belonged to my mom.
Amy takes her seat at the head of the table. I sit where she was sitting next to Marco, surrounded by a cloud of jasmine that Amy left behind like a scent marker.
“You look stunning, Liv,” Marco says, kissing me.
He puts his arm possessively around the back of my chair and caresses the nape of my neck as we talk. I explain that I didn’t have time to go home and change.
“Liv, honestly, it doesn’t matter. You look amazing in anything. Or in nothing,” he whispers, laughing softly at the faint blush that runs across my cheeks. I lean my head against his muscular chest for a moment, reveling in the security of being with Marco after the unsettling experience at Q’s art preview.
“What were you and Amy talking about when I arrived?” I ask eventually.
“You. It’s the only topic Amy and I agree on.”
“Really? What about me?” I say, amused, because he’s right; I’m all they have in common.
“We talked about how you’re never on time. You’d be late to your own wedding.”
“It’s funeral,” I correct playfully, smiling at his inside joke. “I’d be late to my own funeral.” Marco mixes up his idioms on purpose to amuse me, rather than because English is his second language. He speaks it as flawlessly as his Italian.
“Well, either way, you really are never on time, Liv!”
“You two can criticize my lack of punctuality all you want just as long as Amy wasn’t discussing plans for my birthday. I have an awful feeling that she’s planning a surprise party. I’ve told her so many times that I hate surprises, especially surprise parties. Everyone always tries to act so…”
“Surprised,” Marco finishes my sentence.
“Exactly.”
“Well, we were talking about you, but I promise that surprise parties didn’t come up. I was telling Amy how lucky I am that I broke my ironclad rule against blind dates the night we met,” he says. “If I hadn’t gone that night then I’d never have met you.” He kisses the back of my hand and squeezes it tightly.
A waiter comes by the table and fills my wineglass with Rioja.
The other dinner guests are mostly Amy’s work friends from the hospital. The hospital crowd inevitably talk shop whenever they’re together, which can get boring for the rest of us who have no interest in hospital politics.
