Not A Party Person

Yasmin had no fucking clue how she’d ended up at some lowlife’s party. Frankly, she didn’t even know who was hosting; neither had she cared to ask when her coworker at the beauty salon had suggested she come along. Now she was here, drinking their booze. Might as well take advantage of the open bar. Thanks, whoever paid for it, she thought indifferently, a glazed look settling over her eyes as she stared at her now empty glass of wine with the newly opened bottle in her hand that she had grabbed from some shelf — or perhaps it was stolen from someone; she couldn’t remember. Whoever owned the house had clearly invited everyone in the whole city and their mother. Wherever she turned were strangers, drinking, chatting, laughing. She chugged straight from the bottle, scarlet liquid dribbling down her chin. With a slight grimace, Yasmin wiped it away with the back of her hand while filling her glass to the rim. Some spilled onto the counter, but she didn’t bother cleaning it up. Before she left the bar, she finished off whatever was left of it in the bottle in one go, head tipped back as the last droplets flowed down her throat.

If it wasn’t clear already, she was not leaving until she was piss drunk. That wouldn’t be difficult, considering her dinner today had consisted of nothing more than a small bowl of quinoa salad five hours ago. The wine helped fill the emptiness in her stomach, but it also meant everything went straight to her bloodstream. It showed in her already swaying walk and the unfocused look in her eyes, if anyone cared enough to look closely. Other than her coworker Daniela, she didn’t know anyone there. Her night so far had been uneventful.

God knew that her parents would lose their fucking minds if they saw her in this state, reeking of alcohol. Not to mention the slinky blue spaghetti strap dress she was wearing, sequined patterns stretching over the bodice that clung to her frame; the bottom of the hem consisted of a series of frilled stripes that resembled torn rags. To anyone that didn’t know fashion, anyway. At most, it reached her mid thigh but left very little else for the imagination. Which was precisely the point. By the end of the night, she would probably find some adequate bloke — or a loser, if they were hot enough — crash at their place, then sneak out the next morning before he woke up and give her parents some lame excuse about having spent the night at her friend’s house. Foolproof idea. Yasmin smirked to herself, thinking about her clueless parents back home. They never questioned her good girl act. Which, perhaps, made it funnier.

Discarding the empty bottle at nearest disposal—in this case a random table—Yasmin strutted and surveyed the crowd. Her coworker was nowhere to be seen, probably busy making out with some finance bro in a room somewhere. Figures. Bitch.

Scanning the people in attendance, no one seemed nearly interesting enough to strike up a conversation with. Not that she had expected anything else from this place. Feeling already over it, she wobbled over to one of the tables and dropped heavily into one of the seats with a sigh, carelessly handling her full wineglass like she’d forgotten she was holding it. She barely registered the wine that flowed over the rim and spilled onto the ground, and perhaps the table as well. Even if she had: whoops?

The smell of chicken suddenly mixed with the usual stench of sweaty twenty-somethings and liquor. Instinctively, her lip curled. She had smelled worse while working late hours at Lumìere, and she’d definitely seen worse clientele, but at least that place had some standard of class. Everyone there either had enough money that they could afford to lose it, or those who couldn’t but gambled all their savings away anyway at least tried to dress the part. Here, the dress-code ranged from fast-fashion apparel that could potentially pass for designer, to ugly cargo pants.

Someone had ordered chicken wings to their table. Her table. The one she had so conveniently claimed without paying attention to whoever else was there. She shifted her gaze to the guy on the opposite end of the table. Probably that guy. He looked older than her, tired, or perhaps just annoyed. For that, she couldn’t blame him.

“Who eats fried chicken at this hour? At a party?” Yasmin said with obvious skepticism, slurring her speech. Yet, her body betrayed her when her mouth watered at the thought of stuffing her face, the quinoa salad that had done nothing to satiate her long forgotten.

Never A Dull Moment

For a week and a half, Lola has been learning the shape of being wanted.

Quietly, at first. Carefully. Like one wrong breath might startle it away. But the Fontenot house keeps offering it to her in small, stubborn ways until she has run out of graceful places to hide from it. Nora calls her into the kitchen like Lola has always belonged near the stove, handing her a spoon, asking what she thinks, then gossiping about Mason with a fondness sharp enough to make Lola laugh into her hand. Cash talking music with her in the easy, serious way of someone who understands songs are not decorations but weather, something you survive and shape at the same time. Elle pulls her into games and pop culture arguments and betrayals against Mason so completely that Lola has begun to understand family loyalty here includes absolutely humiliating the man they love most at the table.

It has been good.

So good she almost distrusts it.

Since that night in Mason’s room, since love came back into the light between them and neither of them ran from it, something in her has loosened. They have not named everything yet. They have not sat down with all the sharp little questions and asked what shape they are now, what shape they could be later, what happens when Seattle and Lethe and want and fear all come to the same table. But the knowledge has been enough for now. Mason knows she loves him. Lola knows he loves her. The truth lives quietly beside them, no longer starving behind the door, and it has made ordinary things feel almost holy.

Waking beside him.

Brushing her teeth in his bathroom while he makes faces at her in the mirror. Her dress hangs from the back of his chair. Her makeup on his dresser. Her earrings set carefully beside whatever nonsense Mason has emptied from his pockets. His hand finding her waist in the hallway like it is allowed to know the way now. His family says her name from other rooms as if the house has started practicing how to keep her.

She has felt happier here than she has in over a year.

Which is exactly why the mirror has become an enemy.

Lola stands in front of it for the fifth time, barefoot on Mason’s bedroom floor, peach heels waiting near the bed like patient little witnesses. The dress is right. She knows the dress is right. Long and soft and pink with tiny flowers, fitted through the bodice, sweet without becoming childish, romantic without begging too hard to be noticed. Her gold cross rests at her throat. Her jewelry catches gently in the afternoon light. Her makeup is finished after being finished once, ruined by her own nerves, and finished again with hands she forced steady through sheer pride.

The hair is the problem now.

The hair has decided to betray her.

She has tried the braid three times. Maybe four. She has lost count somewhere between the second spiral of anxiety and the third time she told herself to stop being ridiculous. It should be easy. It is only hair. Only a cookout. Only more of Mason’s family come over with children and stories and side dishes and whatever opinions people carry without meaning to show them too early.

Only his grandparents.

Only his sister and brother-in-law.

Only more people who might look at her and wonder what Mason sees.

Her stomach pulls tight again.

Lola hates herself a little for it, for how quickly the old fear finds her even here. The Fontenots have been kind. More than kind. They have made room for her in ways that still catch her off guard. She knows that. She believes it now, mostly. But the world has taught her caution too well for one sweet week in Tennessee to undo it completely. There are always new people. New eyes. New chances for the old story to begin again with a pause, a glance, a question placed too carefully or too bluntly. A girl like her learns to count exits without looking like she is counting exits. Learns to make every detail of herself beautiful enough that nobody can find the seam.

The dress has to be right.

The hair has to be right.

Her voice, her smile, her hands, the way she stands beside Mason, the way she says thank you, the way she laughs, the way she takes up just enough space to seem confident and never quite enough to be accused of asking for too much. Every detail becomes part of the same frightened little prayer: let them see me kindly. Let them see me correctly. Let me stand beside him and look like I belong there.

She lifts her arms again and tries to separate the strands, but her fingers are clumsy now from frustration. The braid slips loose before it has even become anything. Lola exhales through her nose, tight and quiet, holding the hair tie between her fingers like it has personally failed her.

Then she hears him.

Before the knock. Before the voice.

The stairs give him away first, that bounding, reckless rhythm she could probably recognize in another country, blindfolded, half asleep, after a lifetime. Mason taking steps two at a time because Mason has never met a staircase he did not feel personally challenged by. The sound moves through the floorboards and into her body with such immediate familiarity that some of the panic loosens before he even reaches the door.

Her knight in mismatched socks.

Her ridiculous boy.

Her Mason.

He knocks anyway. Of course he does. Lola looks at herself once more in the mirror, tries to arrange her face into something softer than nerves, then turns toward the door with her hair still loose over her shoulders and the failed hair tie caught in her hand.

“Come in.”

Mason enters, and the room changes.

It always does. That is the embarrassing part, maybe. The way he can walk into a room in ripped jeans and some random t-shirt, hair unstyled, socks mismatched, looking exactly like himself and therefore devastating. Lola has spent almost two hours trying to become beautiful enough for strangers, and Mason arrives looking like a man prepared to be tackled into the grass by children and still somehow makes her heart forget every sensible thing it knows.

His face lights up when he sees her.

That does more for her than the mirror ever could.

The compliment comes from him bright and immediate, with no inspection in it, no hesitation, no careful politeness. Just Mason looking at her as if beauty has arrived fully dressed in pink flowers and bare feet in his bedroom. Lola feels the smile she has been forcing become real at the edges. Soft. Shy. Helplessly warmed by him.

“So do you,” she says, because it is true and because he deserves to hear it from someone who means it this much. “You always do.”

It is absurd, maybe, to say that when she looks like she is attending a garden party and he looks like he may soon be used as playground equipment, but Lola means it with her whole foolish heart. Mason’s never about effort. It is the way he stands in his own body, the way kindness sits visibly in him, the way his smile reaches her before his hands do. She is the luckiest girl alive, probably. Loved by someone this handsome, this gentle, this painfully himself.

He comes closer, talking about Ally and the grill and everyone’s eyebrows surviving, and Lola laughs softly despite the tightness still living beneath her ribs. The image helps. Mason and Cash at the grill, both eyebrows intact, the family cookout still whole for now. His hands find hers, warm and grounding, and only then does she realize she has been worrying the hair tie between her fingers like a rosary.

His question lands exactly where she has been trying to hide.

“Excited or nervous?”

“It is okay to be both.”

Of course he would see it. Of course Mason, who notices when her smile is a fraction too polished, who has learned the difference between her performance voice and her real one, would walk in and go straight to the little frightened thing under the dress and makeup and gold cross. Lola looks up at him, and for a second she tries to be brave in the decorative way. The easy way. The pretty version of fine.

“I’m almost ready,” she says first, because it is safer than answering. Her fingers uncurl, offering him the hair tie with a small, defeated look. “I just can’t get the braid right.”

A breath.

“Can you help me?”

The confession is ridiculous, but it is also the edge of something larger. She knows he will hear that too. The braid is not really the braid. It is the old panic trying to make a ritual out of every visible part of her. It is the child who learned that presentation could be armor. It is the woman who still sometimes believes if she is pretty enough, soft enough, careful enough, nobody will ask the question in the cruel voice. Nobody will look at Mason and then at her and decide the math does not add up.

She lets him hold her hands anyway.

Lets herself be held there in front of the mirror, with the dress nearly perfect and her hair undone and her courage somewhere halfway assembled. “I’m excited,” she says, giving him her best little smile.

It lasts maybe one second.

Her mouth gives up the lie before the rest of her can stop it.

“Actually, I’m terrified.”

The laugh that follows is small and embarrassed, but real enough. She looks down at their joined hands, then back up at him, searching his face for the thing she already knows will be there. Gentleness. Patience. Mason looking at her like nerves are allowed to take up room too.

God, she loves him for that.

For a week and a half, this house has made her feel like she can breathe. For a week and a half, Mason’s family has given her kindness with no invoice attached, no correction hidden inside it, no demand that she become someone else before being invited to the table. But this is another circle opening. Another set of names, another set of eyes. Grandparents. Relatives. Children who will likely adore Mason instantly and steal him by force. People who love him might decide, because people have decided worse with less, that Lola is not the right kind of girl for their Mason.

A girl like her.

The phrase arrives old and ugly, and she hates that it still knows the way in.

Her thumb moves once over his knuckle. She keeps her voice soft because anything louder might break it.

“Do you think they’ll like me?”

There is more inside the question than the words can carry: Will they like me if they know? Will they like the way I stand beside you? Will they see me clearly and still be kind? Will they think I fit here? Will they think I fit you? Will I embarrass you? Will wanting this family, this afternoon, this place near you, make it hurt worse if the answer is no?

She says none of that.

She only looks at Mason in the mirror-bright room, pink flowers and bare feet and unfinished hair, trying very hard to trust the life that has been so gently opening around her.

Confessions…

Tell Her.

How’s he supposed to do that? He wakes up and sees the sun and then his next thought is her. She’s the last one he has before he goes to sleep. Sometimes, he loses his appetite all day when he knows he’s gonna see her, and has to force-feed himself. Sometimes the sleep doesn’t last as long as it should — he preoccupies himself far too often thinking of how she woke up in the bed of his truck, like God put her on a line and dragged her right to him to say I’m serious.

Dallas laughs a little. A bit incredulous, a bit awkward. His heart is beating like a rabbit’s in his chest, quick and light because it seems like all the blood’s rushing to his hands and neck and face.

But, fuck it. What’s he got to lose?

He shrugs, chews the inside of his lip, then stops.

“Well, I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you.” Not even just pretty sure, but he’s trying to make light of it the best he can. It doesn’t really work; there’s a heaviness that comes with saying it, a weight he wants to shift and hide back in the crook of his chest to keep it to himself. Too late.