Page 62 of You Say It First

Don’t call me buddy, Colby barely managed to keep himself from saying. “Yeah, uh. Well. Thanks anyway.”

“Colby—”

“Okay. Uh. Bye.” Colby punched the screen to end the call.

For a moment, he just stood there, staring blindly out into the traffic. So that was the end of that, he guessed. This was why it was stupid to get your hopes up about stuff in the first place: because people were generally full of shit, and they inevitably let you down, and then—

He glanced down at the phone in his hand, his brain shorting out for a white-hot second as he caught sight of the date on his calendar app:

May twenty-fifth.

Holy shit, today was—

And he hadn’t even—

And he wasn’t—

“Hey,” Meg said cheerfully, coming out of the salon behind him with her hair in a fancy updo, tucking her wallet back into her purse. “You ready?” Then her eyes narrowed for a moment. “Everything okay?” she asked. “Who was on the phone?”

Colby hesitated for a moment. There was no fucking way he could tell her—about Doug or his dad or the anniversary, any of it. He could not believe he had to go to her rich father’s wedding right now. “Sure,” he said finally, jamming his phone into his jeans pocket. “Let’s go.”

Thirty

Meg

“Are you sure everything is okay?” Meg asked for what felt like the twentieth time since this morning, sitting rather miserably at a big, round table in a fancy seafood restaurant while her dad and Lisa swayed to a song by the Cure.

She could tell it felt like the twentieth time to Colby, too. “Everything is fine,” he said, which was obviously a lie. He’d been in a terrible mood since he’d gone with her to get her hair done this morning, sullen and withdrawn and generally crabby. He’d sulked all the way through lunch at her favorite grilled cheese food truck in Montco, then taken forever to get changed back at her mom’s house. She’d knocked on the door to the guest room five minutes after they were supposed to leave for the ceremony and found him sitting half-dressed on the mattress staring sulkily at a pair of paisley socks. She’d hoped he’d cheer up when they got to the actual wedding, but if anything he’d just gotten grouchier: he hadn’t even danced when the DJ had played “Motown Philly,” even though last night he’d made this big show of telling her what a secretly stellar dancer he was. “Seriously.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Meg.” Colby reached across the table for his soda and didn’t quite look her in the eye. “Can you stop picking at me?”

“I’m not picking at you,” she said, aware that it wasn’t entirely true. But it was like he’d gone somewhere she couldn’t get to him, and she didn’t know him well enough to know how to get him back. Sure, it had felt awkward between them in person before—they’d fought, even—but it had never felt like this. She had no idea what she’d done wrong. It occurred to her that her dad’s wedding was kind of a stupidly high-stakes event to have brought him to, and for the first time she wondered if maybe that hadn’t actually been the best idea.

Meg frowned and glanced around the restaurant, all white tablecloths and gleaming wood, waiters in white jackets bustling around with crumb scrapers in hand and enormous live lobsters scuttling around in a tank near the maître d’ stand. They’d had the ceremony on the patio at sunset, Lisa’s daughter, Miley, reading a poem by e. e. cummings while a violinist Meg’s mother would have utterly hated played softly in the background. She’d reached out and laced her fingers with Colby’s, feeling wobbly and overwhelmed, but he’d pulled his hand away and scratched the back of his neck instead.

“Okay,” she said finally, pushing her chair out and standing up. The DJ was playing a Jackson 5 song now, and her uncle Jim was waving her over from his post near the buffet. “Well, I’m going to go dance, then.”

“Okay,” Colby said with no affect at all. “Go ahead.”

Meg sat down again. “Can you stop?” she asked, faintly aware of how shrill she sounded. Emily and Mason sat across the wide circular table, just far enough away that they could pretend not to notice. She lowered her voice anyway. “Why are you talking to me like I’m other people? It’s just me.”

Colby sighed, scrubbing a hand through his messy hair. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be an asshole. I just don’t know why you need to talk everything to death, is all.”

“Really?” Meg’s eyes widened. “I thought that was, like, kind of the entire point of our relationship, actually.”

Colby frowned. “Yeah, I’m a dumping ground for your every thought and feeling, I know.”

“I—wow.” Meg blinked back sudden tears. All at once, everything about him being here seemed insane. “You’re being kind of an embarrassing dick right now, do you know that?”

That was the wrong thing to say; Colby seemed to fold in on himself, like a video of a collapsing star. “I’m embarrassing you, huh?” he said, and his voice was so quiet. “Well. That was only a matter of time, I guess.”

Meg’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

“You know what it means.”

“I don’t, actually.”

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