Page 7 of One-Star Romance

“Then I think it’s good. As long as he’s happy.”

“Mm.” They sipped their drinks in silence for a moment, until Natalie couldn’t stop herself. “It’s just so quick, right? You should be ending your twenty-fifth birthday puking on the subway, not getting engaged.”

He gave her a sideways glance. “I’m not sure you should aspire to puke on the subway.”

“I’m obviously not aspiring.”

“Sounds unpleasant, not to mention inconsiderate to the MTA workers—”

Natalie swatted his arm. “Bad example, okay?” Rob looked down at where she’d touched. Had she hit him harder than intended? “I just mean that now’s the time to be trying things, figuring out what we want.”

In the center of the room, Angus was picking Gabby up and squeezing as Gabby wiggled, tugging the hem of her dress down so she didn’t expose herself to the roomful of well-wishers. As Natalie watched, a partygoer jostled past, unintentionally pushing her into Rob. She collided with his chest, and he startled, his arms coming up to steady her, gripping her shoulders. Their area of the bar had grown crowded, everyone grabbing another round of drinks to celebrate, and for a moment, Natalie didn’t have the space to move backward, the two of them thrown together, suddenly still in the midst of chaos. The shouting and laughing and Daft Punk’s new single blasting on the speakers for the third time already that evening, it all seemed to blur around her. The only thing she could focus on was the weight of Rob’s hands on her shoulders.

“Sorry,” she said, her voice faint.

“That’s all right,” Rob replied, his dark eyes intense. “To what you were saying, though…” His voice caught, and he cleared his throat, eyes still locked on hers. Still gripping her, steadying her in a way that made her feel entirely off-balance. “Maybe some people get lucky. They find someone early on and don’t need to figure anything out because there’s no doubt at all.”

Amid all the turmoil inside her at the turn the night had taken, something sparked in Natalie’s chest. Fluttered. And then a twinge of guilt. Dammit, she should have mentioned Conor by now. The space behind her had cleared. There was no excuse for her to keep touching Rob.

“I’m probably having trouble wrapping my mind around it because marriage feels so far away for me.” She stepped back, leaned against the bar, and looked over at the crowd, away from Rob’s gaze. “I mean, I get hives when my boyfriend wants to sleep over two nights in a row.”

Rob blinked, then nodded. “Ah. Is your boyfriend here?”

“No, he’s out of town doing an artist’s residency.”

“An artist, huh?”

“A writer. You’d approve of him; he did an MFA.” Rob rolled his eyes and she went on. “He writes these experimental short stories. They’re brilliant.”

At least, Conor received enough accolades that the stories had to be brilliant. If Natalie didn’t understand them, she probably wasn’t smart enough. Conor liked to give her drafts, then insisted on watching as she read. Whenever this happened, half of her mind paid attention to the story. The other half silently freaked out, struggling to find something intellectual to say.

“The wounded rabbit. So…melancholy. I couldn’t help thinking of the lost innocence of childhood,” she’d said the last time they’d performed this strange ritual.

He’d furrowed his brow, as if disappointed in both her and himself. “I was actually hoping to convey the crushing weight of capitalism.”

“Yes, I was about to say that I felt that too!”

Conor took her to literary salons with his friends from his writing program. Natalie tried to network. But Conor’s friends were terrifying. If they found someone, particularly a writer, lacking, they immediately knew the perfect, devastating sentence to expose that person’s deeply uncool core.

God, there were so many ways to like all the wrong things in this world, weren’t there? Was there anything more pathetic than having bad taste? When she was younger, Natalie had just wanted to write things that made people feel, things that people understood. She’d fantasized about a version of herself wearing a flouncy, indulgent nightgown and drinking champagne while typing away. But Conor’s friends made her feel like the only way to write well was to smoke a cigarette and burn it on her arm, and then catalog the pain she felt. Everything made her feel that way, actually, from book reviews in papers of note to the writing classes she’d taken in college, and when she looked at the novel she was currently writing, she wanted to despair—it had no animating fury, no bite. Conor’s friends would snark about it for hours. She had to toughen up and dig deeper if she wanted to write anything of value in this world.

“I’ve personally never gotten into experimental short stories,” Rob said, “but he sounds impressive.”

“Oh yes, he’s very fancy,” Nat said, and forced a grin. “Not sure why he bothers with me.”

Rob’s eyebrows knitted together. “Don’t say that.”

Her breath caught in her throat. Because suddenly Natalie knew that she was playacting with Conor, keeping up a facade of being cooler and artsier than she actually was so that he wouldn’t get bored. Somehow, she’d shown more of her true self to Rob in the past hour than she had to Conor in the entirety of their three-month relationship.

But she didn’t want to be the kind of person who clung on to something that wasn’t real just so that she didn’t have to be alone. She’d seen where that had gotten her mother. After her father had left (five days after Nat’s bat mitzvah), Nat’s mom had dated a string of men who had broken her heart, and Nat’s too by extension. Throughout it all, Nat had picked up the pieces, and her mom had been fine eventually, because it was the two of them against the world. But when Nat had gone off to college, her mother had been unable to stand the silence and loneliness of her empty house.

Soon enough, she was engaged to Greg, a man Natalie barely knew, a man Natalie’s mom didn’t even seem to like all that much. She was just so far out of Greg’s league that she knew he’d never leave her. She tolerated him, and Nat couldn’t think of anything more depressing. (Well, she could. Climate change, etc.) Now, her funny, lovely, bubbly mother spoke through gritted teeth, always annoyed, wishing for the solitude of which she’d been so afraid.

A chill ran through Natalie. God, she hoped Gabby hadn’t just consigned herself to the same fate.

“All right, doppelganger,” Rob said, breaking through her reverie. “Tell me what I need to know about Gabby.” Natalie turned back to him, and Rob shrugged. “I’ve got to do my research, because Angus asked me to be his best man.”

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