Slightly Married (8 page)

I’m in love with Jack.

I’m not
in love with
Buckley, by any means.

Because I’m
in love with Jack
. I’m marrying Jack.

You can’t be
in love with
two guys at the same time.

And when you’re
in love with
someone, you shouldn’t be attracted to someone else. So I’m not.

“No, I’m definitely not regretting anything,” I tell Buckley firmly—and I’m not just talking about the promotion at work.

“Good. Because you deserve it, Tracey. And I’m really happy for you. You’ve got a great future ahead of you.”

I know he’s not talking about being Jack’s wife, but I pretend that he is. It makes it that much easier to stick my left hand across the table and say, “Guess what?”

He looks down, removing his chopsticks from their red paper sleeve.

I wait for him to look up…

But he doesn’t.

Not right away, anyway.

And when he does, his crinkly Irish green eyes aren’t wearing the ultra-ecstatic expression you’d expect.

Well, the one I would expect, anyway, especially since I dutifully wore it for him when he announced he was engaged.

“You’re engaged?” he asks, wide-eyed and, dare I say…

No, I don’t dare say it.

But I do dare think it.

Dismayed.

That’s what he seems to be.

“Yes!” I say with gusto. “I’m engaged! Yes! See? Yes!”

All right already with the gusto.

“Jack proposed?”

I nod vigorously and repeat my new favorite word, “Yes!”

I add, “On Valentine’s Day, after the wedding!”

Then I add, “So you didn’t know he was going to?”

I add this part because I want to remind myself—and him—that he and Jack are friends.

Maybe Buckley and I were friends first, but he and Jack are definitely friends now. Not that the two of them pal around together without me so much, come to think of it, the way they both do with their other friends.

I’m the common denominator in their relationship with each other. Which is fine. It’s not as if I hang out doing girl things with Buckley’s wife-to-be, either. He’s my primary friend; she a friend by default. I’m sure that’s how she thinks of me, too.

“No,” Buckley says, having broken apart his chopsticks.

Huh? The conversational thread seems to have snapped as well—at least, for me.

“No…what?” I ask him blankly.

“No…I didn’t know Jack was going to propose. In fact…”

He begins rubbing his chopsticks against each other to remove the splinters.

“In fact what?”

“No, it’s just…” He’s rubbing those chopsticks so hard I’m expecting them to ignite any second now. “I was thinking he wasn’t going to.”

“Propose? Did he say that?” I ask, wondering if Buckley knows something I don’t know about Jack after all.

“No! He never said that. I just thought that if he hadn’t done it by now, he wasn’t going to.”

“Why did you think that? You took your sweet time proposing to Sonja.” I mean it as a quip, but it comes out more as an accusation.

Buckley reacts with a defensive, “That’s different.”

“How?”

“Because I wasn’t sure.”

“About wanting to get married?”

“About anything,” he says cryptically, and the waiter arrives with two steaming miso soups.

When he leaves a second later, I wait for Buckley to elaborate on what else, exactly, he wasn’t sure about.

He merely eats a spoonful of soup.

“Buckley.”

“Yeah?” He looks up, spoon halfway to his mouth again.

“You were saying…?”

He blinks. “What?”

“What were you saying? About not being sure you wanted to get married?” I add helpfully.
And about anything else?

“Oh. Right. I mean, you know better than anyone—well, except Sonja—that I wasn’t sure about it.”

It,
I want to ask, or
her?

Because that’s what we’re talking about here, folks. And it’s the first time in ages that Buckley has said anything the least bit ambivalent about his relationship.

“I think it’s just a guy thing,” he concludes. “You know…cold feet.”

I want to ask him if that’s really all it is, but I’m afraid Buckley would think I’m not rooting for him and Sonja to live happily ever after. And believe me, no one wants that for them more than I do.

Okay, well maybe Sonja wants it more than I do. And I’m sure her family, who adore Buckley, want it more than I do. I’m way down on the list of people rooting for their happily-ever-after, I’m sure.

What about Buckley, though?

Does he want happily-ever-after with Sonja?

I honestly thought he did.

I think
he
honestly thought he did, too.

But maybe he doesn’t anymore. Maybe he needs to talk about this with a good friend.

A good platonic friend who has no personal agenda where he’s concerned.

That would be me, I tell myself…except that it wouldn’t be me. Because after hearing that Buckley may not be gung ho about marrying Sonja after all, I can’t help but be…well…not all that disappointed.

Wait a minute.

Did I really hear that Buckley may not be gung ho about marrying Sonja?

I mean, I know that’s what I
heard
…but did he really say it?

No. He didn’t. What he said was that he wasn’t sure “about anything,” including getting married.

What else is there?

There’s being in love with the person you’re marrying.

Forgive me if I’m jumping to conclusions here, but…

Well, hasn’t it seemed all along as though Buckley wasn’t a hundred percent on board the Sonja train? It’s like he jumped on when he realized it was about to leave the station without him, and he’s enjoying the ride, more or less…but now he might not want to take it all the way to its final destination. And he wishes he could jump off.

Okay, I really am very clever with my analogies lately.

Too bad I can’t channel all this creativity into a Creative job at the agency.

Too bad I can’t even tell Buckley what I’m thinking….

But I can’t, because that would open the door to trouble. Exactly what kind of trouble, I don’t know. I just sense that I should keep my verbal speculation on the apparent state of his relationship to a minimum.

What I
can
do, however, is ask him how things are going with Sonja and the wedding plans.

So I do.

“Not great,” he replies.

“Uh-oh.” I swear to God I’m psychic. “What’s wrong?”

“Remember how we were going to get married a year from this summer so that Sonja would have time to plan the wedding?”

“Yes.”

“Well, now she wants to expedite things.”

“How much?”

“A year. She wants us to get married in July.”

“
This
July? But that’s only a few months away.”

“I know.” He shakes his head, looking at me.

I shake my head, looking back at him.

Okay, this is going to sound crazy, but remember that old movie
Dead Man Walking?
The one where Sean Penn is on death row and Susan Sarandon is the nun who tries to save him?

The vibe between us is exactly like that right now.

Then again…

Buckley didn’t kill anyone, and he isn’t sentenced to death. And I’m not a nun. Far from it.

So maybe this vibe isn’t
exactly
like that.

“Well,” I say, “I guess since you’re getting married anyway, it doesn’t matter when.”

Yes, that came from the girl who had her heart set on an October wedding before she ever had a fiancé.

“Yeah, but this July is just so soon…”

“You’re right,” I tell him. “If Sonja has her heart set on her dream wedding, it will probably take much longer than that to plan it anyway. Trust me, she’ll figure that out when she starts trying to pull something together.”

I sure as hell did.

“That’s the thing. She says she doesn’t care about the wedding anymore. She just wants us to be married. The sooner the better, she says.”

Aha!

Does my pimply nose smell a desperate bride?

“Did you tell her you’d rather wait until next summer, like you planned?” I ask him, reaching out and putting a hand on his lower arm, all Sister Prejean again.

Or maybe it’s more
My Best Friend’s Wedding
than
Dead Man Walking
.

“Yeah, I told her. Well, I tried. But she wanted to know why we should wait. Then she accused me of not wanting to marry her.”

“At all?”

He nods.

See? What’d I tell you? Desperate bride.

But I refuse to play Julia Roberts to Sonja’s Cameron Diaz. Truly, I don’t want to disrupt Buckley’s wedding plans so that I can steal him away for myself. I’m just his friend, looking out for his best interests. I have a fiancé and a wedding-in-progress of my own.

Buckley sighs and shakes his head, pushing his soup bowl away. I think he’s so upset that he’s lost his appetite until I look down and see that the bowl is empty.

I dip my spoon into my own bowl and fish around half-heartedly for a floating ribbon of seaweed.

Maybe I’m the one who’s lost my appetite.

This just isn’t going the way I imagined it would.

I push away my own soup, which I was supposedly craving so desperately, and do my best not to ask the million-dollar question that I’m sure is on both of our minds.

Unfortunately, my best isn’t good enough, and I hear myself ask, “So is Sonja right about you not wanting to marry her at all?”

I wait for Buckley to tell me of course she’s not right.

But some small part of me hopes he’ll tell me that she
is
right, and he doesn’t want to marry her after all.

Why
am I hoping that? Good question. I have no business hoping that.

“Forget I said anything.” Buckley heaves a two-ton sigh as the too-damn-efficient waiter pops up to whisk our soup bowls away.

He simultaneously replaces them with two sashimi deluxe lunches.

And I try to forget Buckley said anything. Really I do.

I pour soy sauce into the little square saucer beside my plate and I try to forget, because an otherwise engaged woman has no business having a vested interest in the romantic status of an otherwise engaged man.

I jab the tips of my chopsticks into the blob of green wasabi paste and transfer a hunk into the saucer, ferociously mixing it with the soy.

I mean, we’re friends, Buckley and me. Aside from anything that ever happened between us—or didn’t—in the past, friends is all we are and it’s all we’re ever meant to be.

If we were meant to be anything more, we wouldn’t both be in love with other people.

Well, I can’t speak for Buckley but
I’m
definitely in love with someone else.

Jack and I clicked from the start. He’s everything I ever wanted—smart, loyal, kind, loving, a good person. A
great
person. My family and friends have welcomed him with open arms, and his family has done the same with me. We belong together and we’re going to have a great life together.

There isn’t a doubt in my mind about that, or about marrying him.

Not when I’m actually
with
him, anyway.

Not any other time, for that matter, aside from right now, today, when I’m with Buckley.

I guess any lingering feelings I might have subconsciously been harboring for him just aren’t going away as quickly as I expected them to, now that I’m engaged.

Then again, is that any surprise? It’s not as if a person can just turn feelings on and off depending on her marital status.

It’s not as if someone puts a ring on your finger and bam!—you’ve turned off every bit of attraction you’ve ever felt for anyone else in your life.

Too bad, because wouldn’t that be convenient?

As I pinch a slab of raw pink tuna between my chopsticks and dredge it through the soy-wasabe concoction, I find myself envisioning a bunch of levers in my back, behind my heart. They’re all labeled with names: Jack, Buckley, Will.

The Jack one, of course, is full-throttle up. The Will one is entirely turned off—and it’s about time, don’t you think?

The Buckley one is hovering in the halfway zone, like a light switch on a dimmer. I imagine giving it a firm yank and clicking it off altogether, but it seems to be kind of sticking somewhere in the middle, flickering.

“Wow, I’m a shitty friend,” Buckley announces abruptly.

I look up in surprise. “What?”

“You just got engaged. We should be celebrating. You celebrated with me when I got engaged.”

Yes. But not wholeheartedly.

Only he doesn’t know that.

“Here I am dumping my problems on you when we should be toasting your engagement.” He scowls. “What’s wrong with me?”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. We need…we need champagne. That’s what we need.”

“They don’t have it here,” I say as he spots the waiter and raises his hand. “I tried to order it that day we were here when you got engaged, remember?”

No, he doesn’t remember. He was too caught up in his newly engaged elation to have noticed anything that day.

“Well,” he says now, “let’s finish eating and go down to the Bubble Lounge for a toast.”

“Can’t. That’s way downtown. I’ve got to get back to work.”

Not to mention, I’m afraid of what might happen if Buckley and I started drinking champagne together, given the state of his relationship and my frayed nerves.

“We’ll stay in midtown, then.”

Tempting, but…“Can’t. Really. You have no idea how crazy it is at work with this presentation coming up.”

“How about after work, then? I don’t have any plans. Do you? We can have dinner.”

“No, I’ll have to work late—” I
soooo
am not looking forward to that “—and Jack has a focus group or something anyway, so…”

“Oh, right. Jack should come. That would be great,” he says, but he doesn’t look all that convinced.

“Listen,” I say, “let’s set up a dinner with Jack and Sonja so that we can all go out together. To celebrate. With, you know, champagne and everything.” And everyone.