Page 15 of Maid of Dishonor
“Good,” I whisper, nodding, though I’ve never even read this book. “Good. They deserve a happily ever after.” I continue to wipe the tears from her face, smoothing her hair out of the way. Then I just wait for a minute, letting her calm back down.
When there are no more tears for me to dry, I let go of her face and stand. A cascade of pins and needles floods down my feet and ankles, but I hold out my hand to the perfect woman on the floor in front of me and pull her up. Then, as one, we crash onto the couch.
We rest in silence for a few minutes.
“Feeling better?” I say after a while, grinning over at her.
“Yeah,” she says with a heavy sigh. Then, suddenly severe, she says, “Don’task if I’m on my period.”
Psh. Like I would. I’ve made that mistake more times than I can count. Any speculation about Sam’s menstrual cycle is now always kept to myself.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I say, still grinning. “Now. How do you feel about turning your considerable brain power toward something more cheerful, like stopping a wedding?”
“The bookwascheerful!” she says. She wipes her eyes. “It was just really sweet, and I just have a lot of feelings, and…yeah, maybe I’m PMSing,” she mumbles.
I shake my head. “I don’t know why you do this to yourself. You pick books youknoware going to make you emotional, and you dive in headfirst anyway. You could try just…not reading those books.”
Sam looks genuinely scandalized, like I’ve suggested she sell her firstborn child. LikeI’mthe unreasonable one for suggesting she not read books that are going to make her cry.
“Or not,” I add quickly. I’m not stupid; I know when to retreat. “So. The wedding?”
“Yeah. Right. The wedding. Stopping weddings is not cheerful, by the way,” she adds, referencing my earlier comment.
“And yet it’s not going to make you sob,” I say under my breath. When Sam wallops me on the shoulder, I just laugh. “Fine, fine. Well, I really think the only way Maya is going to let this go is if she sees what kind of man Chet really is—”
“Chad,” Sam corrects.
I wave this away. “She already knows somewhat; she never has anything good to say about him.”
“That’s true,” Sam admits. “If she had been there at Joey’s when Chad—”
“Chet,” I say, mostly because I’m curious to see what she says.
“Yeah, I’m not calling him that,” she says firmly. “His name is Chad now. Only that one name can truly encompass everything about him.”
I grin. “All right. You call him Chad.”
“Thank you,” she says, sounding dignified. “Now, as I wassaying”—she glares at me—“if she had seen the way Chad hit on me at Joey’s, she would have been repulsed. She definitely wouldn’t want to marry him.”
I snort. “Yeah. He was day drunk—”
“Which we don’t condone but also cannot rightfully judge, due to the fact that both of us went through our college days of overindulgence,” Sam cuts in, looking a little sheepish.
I pause, thinking. “Conceded,” I finally say with a reluctant nod. “All right. We don’t judge him as a person for being drunk at two in the afternoon,butneither do we condone it or see it as a promising sign for his impending fatherhood. Fair?”
“Fair,” she says, nodding.
Idojudge him, actually. I judge him in a big way. But Sam is a better person than I am. “He also got handsy,” I say. “That one’s inexcusable.”
“Agreed,” she says, looking uncomfortable.
Thinking of Chad—no,Chet—touching Sam makes my teeth clench, and when I think of him marrying my cousin, I get even angrier. “That man is the Anti-Carter,” I say through gritted teeth. “He’s everything I loathe.” It’s the disloyalty that gets me the most. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re with a woman, you’rewithher. You carry her picture in your wallet and her smile in your heart. You don’t drunkenly hit on strangers. “He’s my nemesis,” I decide.
Sam laughs, looking surprised. “Your nemesis? Really? That’s not a thing. In real life people don’t actually have neme—” she breaks off, frowning. “Nemesis…es? Nemesises? Nemeses?” She glances at me. “Nemeses, right?”
I snort. “One reason I went into physical education is so I didn’t have to do things like spelling tests. Don’t ask me the plural of ‘nemesis.’”
“I think it’s ‘nemeses.’ Either way, I think that might be the wrong word.”