Apart at the Seams Read online

  It’s going to be the big, white, wedding elephant trailing after us, everywhere we go.

  Before my thoughts start showing up in a parade across my face, I check my watch and set my full coffee mug in the sink. I need to get to work on the Emmy dresses since I still have to keep up with the normal preparations for Fashion Week. “I have to pick up five pounds of sequins.”

  Rachel follows after me to the loft, and I feel better once we’ve stepped outside into the city. The concrete has a way of grounding me. The heaviness of the July air wraps around me like a blanket. Everything is going to be fine. Ethan and I can ride out this situation; maybe even secretly laugh together as we lie in bed at night, talking over the idea of a second wedding. He loves me, he loves Beckett, he emptied all of his moving boxes after I rejected his proposal. Which I don’t want, right? A wedding is going to be once again dangling tantalizingly in my face, though this time unlike all those other times, my own wedding is completely within my reach. Do I still not want it if it’s there for the plucking?

  I leave Rachel in the middle of the loft, and slip into the walk-in supply closet, crossing through the back door of it into the sample room. Tabitha isn’t in her usual spot, and I’m about to double back into the closet when Francesca looks up from the two stacks of material she’s feeling with one of her samplehands and asks me how the meeting at the Nightly went.

  Perfect. Wonderful. Fabulous. Most exciting two hours of my life up until this point, but I’m just a little sidetracked by my best friend’s engagement announcement. I swallow down all my enthusiasm and play it cool and professional. “It went well. I was thinking that one of the ways to build unity is to build off of Nigel Howe’s idea of layering hues of blue . . .”

  Francesca cuts me off with a curt head shake. “No, no, nothing in blue.”

  She doesn’t give a deeper explanation, and I can feel my cheeks stinging as if her words have slapped me. All of the excitement I felt walking into the room fizzles around my abdomen like a deflating balloon. There went my grand idea, the part I thought Nigel would love when I showed him my sketches. “No blue,” I repeat. “I have other ideas so I’ll focus on those.” It’s a lie that I’ll have to make true.

  “You’ll have something for me to look at tomorrow? Some first thoughts? I really need to see that you’re on the right track with this. That you can handle designing something this important. If it were me, I wouldn’t have had your first job be something public, like the Emmys. But Nigel asked for you.”

  I want to snarl at her that I just told her my first thoughts and she’s rejected them, but I smile politely and nod, trying to look both grateful and completely in charge even though my instinct is to run into the closet and bury myself under several bolts of velvet. “I’m just going to pick up some sequins and seed beads and create a small sample of some trim on the hoop tonight. I’ll have that in tomorrow along with the drawings.”

  “Wonderful, then you can get to work on the Eisner piece. Arianna, if you want these special projects you need to show me that you can balance them with Davis & Howe’s main line.”

  She makes it sound as if I’m playing designer and this is a whim they’re indulging as long as I do my real work for Fashion Week. I can hear the blood as it moves through my ears, pulsating loudly with each heartbeat. I’m certain everyone else in the room can hear it, too. This is what embarrassment sounds like.

  Francesca dismisses me by turning back to the material. I go into the closet and grab the supplies I need, taking a moment to pause next to the shelf to listen underneath the Katy Perry tunes playing in the other room as to whether Francesca is going to discuss me in my absence. There are a few seconds of conversation about the various weaves of tricotine they’re considering, a debate about the two coquelicot dye lots for the same designer’s material. I’m waiting for Francesca to point out to the samplehands how I’m clearly in over my head if I’m relying on Nigel Howe’s ideas instead of coming up with my own. I don’t realize I’m holding my breath until I exhale loudly, returning to Rachel while I slip the materials into my Prada backpack.

  I’m distracted as we go down the staircase, unable to compartmentalize Francesca’s tone and put her words into perspective. There is too much riding on getting this job right; if not for proving myself to Davis & Howe, then proving my abilities to myself. This project was practically handed to me gift wrapped and on a silver platter. If I can’t hit it out of the park when it comes at me so easily, how can I ever expect to play ball with the big designers?

  Ethan’s baseball analogies are worming their way into my brain.

  I need to shake this off if I want to have any hope of actually turning in something tomorrow. I just need a half hour to take a deep breath and trust that something brilliant will come to me before bedtime tonight.

  Part of me wants to confide in Rachel what Francesca just said in the sample room and then verbally tear apart Francesca with Rachel over a cup of coffee. Maybe I would if I was confident that I had other ideas to explore. But if I tell Rachel about that conversation, then I’ll also have to admit that I don’t have a clue, and that maybe, just maybe, I believe that there’s some truth in Francesca’s fears.

  As we pass the coffeehouse where Noah and I had iced mochas a few weeks ago, I ask, “Do you want to stop at Volt?”

  “Sure,” Rachel agrees. We step inside, my eye immediately going to my former table. It’s empty, even though the store is crowded for midday. I pretend to examine the drink board, my eyes scanning over the words as Rachel asks me about the one topic I want to avoid; I swear that she has a built-in radar for these sorts of things. “So how are the Emmy dresses going?” I glance over at her, and she’s examining her rings, pulling them apart and sliding them back together again.

  “It’s fine.”

  She doesn’t pick up on the terseness of my answer. “Are you going to get to meet everyone from the Nightly?”

  I hope ordering will get us off the topic, but she brings it back up again once we’ve asked for our drinks. As we sit down, I try to distract her by telling her about Noah, figuring it will satiate her desire to talk about celebrities and we’ll revel in the weirdness of it. But Rachel’s reaction is nothing like I expected. Her brow furrows. I watch the grooves between her eyes deepen as she cocks her head to the side, listening as I tell her about the woman at the dry cleaners, about Noah’s suggestion that we get coffee afterward. As the skin folds, I work harder to convey exactly how it felt in the moment. This was different. The wait wasn’t just frustrating, it was excruciating. Getting coffee afterward wasn’t indulgent; it was two people breathing deeply after witnessing a New Yorker on edge.

  “I don’t get it,” Rachel admits. Her pursed lips make me wish I had never started this conversation. “Why would you get coffee with a stranger?”

  That’s the point; he wasn’t a stranger. He felt familiar by the time we left the dry cleaners, like a camp friend I had just met that morning and was choosing to sit with at the opening campfire. I knew what he did for a living, knew his girlfriend’s—well, now ex-girlfriend’s—name, where he bought his shirts. Not that Rachel would ever understand that. All she was focusing on was that she would never take a chance and have a conversation with someone she didn’t know, and she was using that fact to judge me.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “Because we had just lived through what may be the most frustrating thirty minutes of my summer.” That wasn’t hyperbole; it had been incredibly annoying. “Because he was funny and interesting to talk to for an afternoon. Because we were both thirsty and a block from this coffeehouse.”

  “But why would you choose Volt? In a city full of Starbucks, why would you choose the coffeehouse that is tied in everyone’s mind to dating and relationships?”

  I know that Rachel is looking for reassurance that all is well with her brother. “This wasn’t a date,” I
say evenly. “There was nothing romantic about it. I didn’t even get his number, and I didn’t give him mine. We even spoke about Ethan at one point. I did nothing wrong. I just grabbed coffee with this funny person I met at the dry cleaners. Can’t someone go out with someone of the opposite sex and not have it be a date?”

  I flip through a mental Rolodex of Rachel’s friends and realize that there is nary a man in sight. It doesn’t help that she got married somewhat young, which pretty much puts you on a fast track to socializing with other couples, and that her job field is overwhelmingly slanted toward female participation. I literally can’t think of a male friend she had at college that wasn’t dating one of her girlfriends. I struggle to find a time when Rachel has grabbed coffee or gone to dinner or even chatted at a party with a stranger of the opposite sex.

  It’s on the tip of my tongue to admit that I only told her about Noah because I didn’t want to talk about the Emmy dresses, that it isn’t a big deal at all. But I can tell from the look on Rachel’s face that regardless of how Ethan and I feel about how I grabbed coffee with Noah, Rachel doesn’t approve. And it drives home the problem that has been plaguing us since we first told her that we were dating; she inserts herself into our relationship as if we’re a threesome rather than a couple.

  And as much as I love her, I resent the company. The look on her face speaks a thousand words, none of them the ones I want to hear.

  I RETURN FROM checking on Beckett and settled back into our bed with my sketchpad. Ethan eyes it for a moment and then looks back at the television screen. He’s already jokingly referred to it as my new boyfriend since it’s been attached to my hip all evening. I’ve drawn out twelve designs; actually twenty-four in all since I created a complimentary suit for every dress. My plan is to scatter two or three of these combinations through the group.

  “You know, all work and no play makes Jill a dull girl,” he tells me.

  “Do you think I’m a dull girl?” I ask, barely paying attention as I erase a stray line off the page.

  “Why don’t you set down the sketchpad for the night and show me how exciting you can be?”

  I swallow down my first instinct to snap at him that I’m under a lot of pressure and want to get this right. But he’s not wrong; I don’t want to get into a bad habit of bringing work into our bed, and we do need to make time for one another. I completed twelve designs and created a sample trim on the loom, working through the afternoon and into the evening as he fed and bathed Beckett. I’m as prepared as I can be for tomorrow’s tête-à-tête with Francesca, and it would be better to decompress a bit before I enter the loft.

  I place the sketchpad on the floor and cuddle down into the crook of Ethan’s arm draped across the top of my pillow. He calls it his “Arianna-shaped space” when I skate perfectly against him, my body plugging into the nooks created by his arched shoulder and ropey arm. He slides his hand underneath my hip, almost as if to lock me in place, and I rest my cheek against his chest.

  On the television, David Lear reports the news from his desk. I glossed over my morning on the set because we had enough to digest with Rachel’s engagement, and I skipped over telling him at all about the conversation with Francesca because I was too embarrassed. I’ll just wait to see how she feels about my first sketches.

  I glance up at Ethan, wondering what’s taking him so long to start initiating sex, but his eyes are trained on the screen, while his hand massages my hip. Lear is presenting a touching piece about a British singer who died from a drug overdose last week. It’s a departure for the comedy news show, and after Lear’s sobering final line, the screen goes black for a moment and then flashes up information on national substance abuse programs. It’s not really the sort of thing that gets one in the mood.

  “The Nightly always does the right thing,” Ethan comments, shifting a bit during the commercial break to get some circulation in his arm, and I wonder if I misread his intentions.

  “I know,” I agree.

  “Really, I heard these DJs on the radio mocking her. This is exactly what the media should be doing; giving resources to actually help people. The students at school were talking about this. It’s on their minds. We have a chance to actually make a difference and get them to reconsider drug use.”

  “It’s sexy when you get all passionate like that,” I tell him.

  He pulls away a little to look at me better. “I care about my students.”

  “I know. That’s what makes you such a wonderful teacher.”

  The show comes back on, David Lear introducing that night’s guest, a childhood star who is gunning for a comeback as a mature actress. I tune out what is happening on the screen and slowly bring my bare foot down Ethan’s leg, my toes smoothly passing over the curve of his calf. He gently tenses the muscle in an open hug.

  “Hey,” is all he says. I look up at him again and he raises his eyebrows at me while simultaneously slipping down on the bed until our foreheads are touching. For a few seconds, we pause like that, looking somewhat into each other’s eyes—though at the close distance, the brown irises blur with his pupils, creating a shadowed sea. He tips his chin forward to kiss me, and I close my eyes, leaning into him, needing in the moment to be closer, to merge with him until we can’t tell if this is my liver, his bone. I press my body into him, tugging upward at his shirt so we can lie skin-to-skin.

  “We need to lock the door,” I breathe.

  “Beckett can’t get out of his crib.”

  “Watch this be the one night where he does. Do you want to be about to climax and hear a toddler sucking a binky alongside the bed?”

  “You torment me, Ari,” Ethan moans, but he rolls off me enough to allow me to slip out and cross the room in order to twist the small knob. I turn down the baby monitor as I pass it and mute the television, though I leave on the picture, allowing the unnatural glow to highlight us like stage lights. I slip back in underneath his body, trying to find where we left off.

  For the first few seconds it feels awkward, as if our bodies don’t remember one another. I’m distracted thinking about how I should have turned the television off. Knowing the Nightly is flickering behind me makes me think about work, whether my drawings are any good or whether I’m a few hours away from embarrassing myself. I screw my eyes closed tightly, blocking out everything else in the room, and for a moment it works, my mouth once again hungrily moving against Ethan’s lips, down his chin, across his neck.

  My hand gropes over Ethan’s shoulder, scurrying crab-like over the surface of the side table until my fingers close around the remote control, and I point it toward the television, contorting my arm at an awkward angle in order to create a straight line, and feel for the largest button at the top of the clicker. The effect is immediate, not only creating a visual hush as if someone has dropped yards of velvet over us, but a mental hush, a quieting, and I concentrate on Ethan breathing, the rhythm of the air moving in and out of his nose as his lips work against mine.

  This is what it was like in the beginning, after he had walked me home from his sister’s party, our hands stuffed in our pockets and mouths muffled by scarves. After I paid the babysitter, Ethan asked me for a cup of coffee, telling me that he needed reinforcement before he headed back over the bridge into Brooklyn. I made it, telling him that I had to call his sister to process the party itself, and we curled up on the sofa with our cups of coffee, facing each other while she talked about the cute Spanish boy that her brother had brought with him. I didn’t tell her that her brother was sitting across from me, the steam from the coffee sometimes obscuring the lower portion of his face when he lifted it up to drink.

  The longer we sat on the sofa staring at each other, the more he transformed into a delicious secret—like candy tucked into a drawer, like a five-dollar bill found at the bottom of a seldom-worn coat’s pocket. I had never been attracted to him, but I spent the hou
r studying all of his features; his dark eyes and long lashes and the arch of his brow. His full lips and aquiline nose and the rocky jutting of his cheekbones. The day-and-a-half’s worth of stubble across his jaw. His short brown hair and his lanky arms and his runner’s legs. And I could tell that Ethan was studying me; the highlights in my blond hair and my wide-set eyes and my broad smile. I played with the ends of my hair, flicking them with my fingernail, while Ethan stretched out his legs and gently brought his foot over mine on the floor, covering up the top of my sock with his own, applying a light, delicious pressure.

  “Beckett is howling,” I lied to my friend, hoping she couldn’t hear the longing in my voice. I hung up on her, and then stared shyly at her brother, feeling less brave now that there wasn’t a phone call between us, now that his sister was truly no longer in the room.

  “My sister can talk,” is all he said to me as a transition before he leaned over and kissed me that night, our first kiss, and we were so amazed by what had happened that we barely did anything else for the next few hours until Beckett woke up in the morning for real. We just lay in my bed, arms entwined around each other, barely talking, sometimes kissing, and just staring at each other.

  That next day, I had walked through my apartment after he went home feeling like Rita Hayworth in Pal Joey, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, the only thing missing was that amazingly gorgeous butter-colored dressing gown with matching fur-trimmed housecoat with the sheer panels. I felt exactly as she did when she stared into the mirror after dropping the coat strings she just fastened around her neck and brushed her hair off her shoulders in quiet ecstasy.