Page 6 of The Holiday Honeymoon Switch
“I’m great.”
“It’ll happen,” Holly says, misinterpreting her friend’s morose expression. “He’s out there somewhere right now, just waiting to meet you. I wonder where he is.”
Ivy unlocks the door to her apartment, and they step inside as Holly keeps talking, her voice dreamy. “He could be anywhere. In this city or…maybe a dude ranch in Montana…”
“Now there’s an idea. I’ve never slept with a cowboy, maybe I need to?”
“Not sleep with,marry,” Holly corrects, following Ivy into her tiny galley kitchen, where Ivy pours pints of water from the tap, and tequila from a blue-and-white ceramic bottle. They head into the living room, where she’s set up the coffee table with makeup remover, cotton pads, sheet masks, and snacks. She cues up the movie as Holly starts removing her eye makeup.
Once she’s done, she sips her tequila. “Sogood,” she says.
“Only the best for the bride-to-be.”
“I love that we both drink good booze. I’ve never seen the point of drinking just to get drunk.”
“Al-though, every once in a while, getting lightly buttered—”
“Gently toasted.”
“One and a half sheets to the wind.”
“—is really a lot of fun. And as you said, this chocolate is going to reverse-age me—”
“Plus, you’re already perfect—”
“These sheet masks are going to restore and rejuvenate me, and despite the drinking, I’ll look fine tomorrow.”
“Better than fine, Holly. You’re going to be the most beautiful bride in the world. With the best heart. Also, the smartest.”
“Thanks, friend. Movie time?”
Ivy hits play, and the moment Brad Pitt gets randomly walloped by a car while crossing the street, Holly dissolves into laughter and they rewind and replay it, the way they always do. “I’m so sorry,” she says, trying to catch her breath. “I know it’s not supposed to be funny, but…” Pitt flies through the air again, and she buries her face in a throw pillow that comes away damp from her tears of mirth.
Then they reach the moment when Pitt’s character tries peanut butter for the first time. As usual, Holly says, “This partalwaysmakes me crave a peanut butter sandwich,” and Ivy goes into the kitchen to make her one—just as Ivy’s door buzzer goes off.
Holly raises an eyebrow. “Is this one of your booty calls?”
“God, I hope not,” Ivy says. “The guy I’ve been sort of seeing is an emergency room doctor, though, so he does keep odd hours. Maybe if I ignore him, he’ll go away.”
But the buzzing continues until Ivy stands, exasperated. “Hello?” she says into the intercom.
“It’s Matt. I need to see Holly.”
“Matt? Awww,” Holly says. “This is so sweet! So un-Matt-like!” She stands—but then her eyes widen with alarm. “This issoun-Matt-like, to just show up, all spontaneous and romantic. Do you think something is wrong?”
Ivy was wondering the same thing. But she smiles and says, “Of course not. Your groom is so madly in love with you, he needs to see his bride-to-be the night before the wedding. For a passionate good-night kiss.”
But when Holly is gone, Ivy slumps against her front door, her sense of forboding intensifying. Matt seemed so off tonight. Something isn’t right, and Ivy knows it. She distracts herself by going into the living room and picking up her cell phone. There’s some work stuff she ignores given that she is now officially on vacation, and a new email from Aiden Coleman, the host of the eco-cabin in the Hudson Valley she has rented for the two weeks following Holly’s wedding. This is her annual art honeymoon, which she takes every Christmas season. Ivy studied visual art in college, and even got a partial scholarship at Cooper Union because of her talents. Her professors encouraged her to pursue making a living with the lush oil pastel landscapes that were her art school signature. But while her unconventional, bohemian upbringing is one she looks back upon fondly, Ivy has always craved more stability for herself. Making a living trading landscape art, the way her father had insisted she surely could, held zero appeal. So, in her last year of college, she took some graphic design courses and found she was good at it. She graduated, and the final art show of the year was the last she ever did. She left her art behind, surprising everyone except herself by taking an internshipat Imagenue, one of New York’s most prestigious branding studios. Now she uses her artistic skills and visual-storytelling abilities to help build brands. She doesn’t love her job, but she likes it. It pays the bills, which is important given that living in New York City as a single woman is not nearly as effortless as Carrie Bradshaw made it look in the ’90s. Ivy had student loans to pay off, and after that was done, paying rent in her favorite neighborhood—Greenwich Village, which she fell in love with during college—was expensive. She needs her job.
Except that during her first two years in the corporate world, Ivy found herself falling into a mental, spiritual malaise that veered far too close to full-blown depression for her comfort. So, she decided to take her first ever “art honeymoon” during her third year working at Imagenue. She booked a cabin in the Catskills, and spent fourteen glorious days eating instant ramen and sketching the landscape, which was at once pastoral and rugged, stark and luscious. Eventually, all the oil pastels she brought had been reduced to colorful stubs, her fingertips tattooed rainbows. She gave the pieces to friends and family, hung some in her apartment, and felt better. It was enough. It got her through the year. So she did it again, and kept on doing it. In fact, this year was going to be her fifth art honeymoon.
She taps out a quick reply to Aiden, telling him her estimated arrival time in two days, and allows herself a momentof anticipatory excitement about two weeks spent solely focused on creativity before she goes back to worrying about Holly, and why Matt’s here.
When she hears her friend’s key in the door a mere seven minutes later, her body floods with relief. No one breaks off an engagement the night before the wedding insevenminutes. He really did just want to kiss his bride-to-be good night. Maybe Husband Matt will be more palatable to Ivy than Boyfriend Matt has been.
Except, when Holly enters the living room, the laughing, silly, slightly tipsy friend Ivy saw seven minutes ago is gone.
“Holly!” Ivy jumps up from the couch “What happened? Are you okay?”
