“And Shakespeare,” Chaz says now. “He was an adulterer. So at least hell won’t be boring.”
“I’m not an adulterer,” I say. “I’m not married. I’m just engaged. And we’re on a break.”
“Did you specify the parameters of the break?” Chaz asks. “Did it include rampant monkey sex with your fiancé’s best friend?”
“Stop it,” I say. “You took advantage of me when I was in a weakened emotional state.”
“Me?” Chaz starts to laugh, his stomach muscles causing my head to bob up and down. “You assaulted me in your parents’ driveway. I was just coming by to pay my respects, and the next thing I knew, your tongue was in my mouth, and your hand was down my pants. I was so scared, I almost called nine-one-one to report a sexual predator on the loose.”
“Seriously,” I say. “What are we going to do now?”
“I can think of a few things,” Chaz says, lifting the sheet that’s covering us and looking under it.
“We can’t let animal lust get in the way of our friendship,” I say.
“I don’t want to be friends with you,” Chaz says matter-of-factly. “I stopped wanting to be friends way back last New Year’s Eve. Remember? You’re the one who had to go and ruin everything by getting yourself engaged to someone else. While I was sleeping, I might add.”
I roll off him and lie on my back, staring at the ceiling, which is made out of that hideous stuff that has sparkles in it. There’s an overhead light that has been crafted to look like an old-fashioned lantern. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it has a lipstick camera in it that has been videotaping our every move for the past two hours. The Knight’s Inn seems like it might be that kind of hotel.
Which makes it the perfect place for my tawdry affair with my best friend’s ex-boyfriend and my fiancé’s best friend.
“You don’t even believe in marriage,” I wail miserably to the lipstick camera. If there is one.
“Well, if I did, I certainly wouldn’t marry you, that’s for sure,” Chaz says. “You’d just go around sexually assaulting my best friend behind my back while I’m in France and you’re at your grandmother’s funeral. You’d make the worst wife ever.”
I lean over to hit him, but he rolls over on top of me, pinning my arms down beneath the sheet. A second later, he’s staring deeply into my eyes.
“Lizzie,” he says, looking serious for a change. “You need to stop beating yourself up about this. You and Luke have been over for a long time. You should never have said yes when he asked you to marry him. I told you that that morning in your apartment. If you had listened to me then, you could have saved everyone a lot of heartache. Especially me. And yourself.”
I glare at him. “Do you think I don’t know that?” I demand. “But you didn’t exactly go out of your way to act like Prince Charming that morning, you know. You could have just told me you loved me then, you know.”
“I seem to recall that, number one, you never gave me the chance… you were already engaged to someone else by the time I woke up, and that, number two, I did tell you I love you, and you took it as a joke and walked out.”
I blink. Then say indignantly, “You mean at the sports bar? But you were so nasty! I didn’t think you were serious.”
He looks hurt. “I bared my soul to you, and you thought it was nasty. Nice.”
“Seriously,” I say. “You were horrible. You couldn’t possibly have expected me to think you meant a word that you said—”
“I was mortally wounded!” Chaz insists. “The woman I loved, and whom I thought loved me in return—don’t lie, you even said at Jill Higgins’s wedding the night before that we were going to try taking things to another level—had just pledged herself to another!”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous,” I say. “Agreeing to take things to another level and saying that I’m in love with you are two completely different things.”
“If I was nasty, like you say, I had a right to be,” Chaz says. “You were acting like a crazy woman. Getting yourself engaged to a guy who is so completely wrong for you—”
“You didn’t seem to have any objections when Luke and I got together last summer,” I point out.
“Sure, I had no objections to your sleeping with him,” Chaz says. “I never thought you’d want to marry the guy. Especially when I knew perfectly well you weren’t in love with him.”
Still pinned beneath his body weight and the sheet, I can only glare at him some more. “I beg your pardon,” I say. “But I most certainly was.”
“Before the Great Christmas Sewing Machine Incident, maybe,” Chaz says. “But not after. It just took you awhile to admit it to yourself.”
I blink at him, trying to figure out if what he’s saying is really true. There’s a part of me that’s sure it isn’t.
But there’s another part of me that’s equally scared it is.
“But you finally came around to admitting you’re in love with me now,” Chaz says as he reaches for the room service menu. “So what does it matter? Now I need sustenance. All of this cuckolding makes a knight hungry. What should we have? Beef nachos supreme? Or… ooh, bacon and cheddar potato skins with sour cream. Such fine fare this establishment offers… oh, wait. Cream cheese and turkey pinwheels. Who could resist?”
“I can’t tell him,” I burst out.
Chaz stares down at me. “About the cream cheese and turkey pinwheels?”
“No,” I say, poking him through the sheet. “Get off me, you weigh a ton.” Obligingly, Chaz slides off me. “Luke. He can never know.”
Chaz leans up on one elbow, his head in his hand. “I can see why,” he says, regarding me, his blue eyes expressionless. “Who eats turkey with cream cheese? That’s a disgusting combination.”
“No,” I say, sitting up. “About us. He can never know about us.”
Chaz’s tone doesn’t change. “You’re going to marry Luke and keep me around as a boy toy? How twenty-first century of you.”
“I… I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I say. “How can I… I mean, he loves me.”
Chaz taps the menu. “Lizzie. Let’s just order. We don’t have to figure it all out tonight. And they stop serving at eleven.”
I chew my lower lip. “I just,” I say. “I… I’m not very good at this. At being… bad.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Chaz says with a grin. “I think you did an exemplary job of it earlier.”
I lift up one of the flat, uncomfortable Knight’s Inn pillows and smack him with it. He laughs and tugs it away from me, then wrestles me back down to the mattress.
We barely order our nachos in time to make the eleven o’clock cutoff.
“Where were you last night?” Sarah wants to know when I come tromping into the house the next morning.
“And aren’t those the same clothes you were wearing yesterday?” Rose asks cattily.
Their eyes light up a second later, however, when Chaz follows me through the screen door.
“Chaz!” my mom cries, looking genuinely delighted. “What a surprise!”
“I’ll say.” Rose shoots me a look so laser sharp, it might have melted steel. “When did you get into town, Chaz? Don’t tell us… last night?”
“How sweet of you to come,” Mom says, going to give Chaz a hug. Having dated Shari for so long, he’s an old family favorite. Well, with my parents. My sisters don’t play favorites. Except among their kids.
“Of course I came,” Chaz says as my mom releases him and my dad wanders in from the den, his reading glasses perched on top of his head and the newspaper dangling from his fingers. “I was a big fan of Mrs. Nichols.”
“Well, my mother was something of a character,” Dad says, shaking Chaz’s hand. “Good to see you.”
Rose and Sarah, meanwhile, are taking in the beard burn that no amount of foundation on my part has so far been able to cover up. Chaz’s five o’clock shadow starts growing at approximately ten in the morning, and any kissing after that takes its toll. Conscious of their scandalized yet delighted gazes, I check out the new offerings—a pie from one of the neighbors, a floral arrangement from Gran’s dentist—while Chaz accepts Mom’s offer of coffee and a piece of the coffee cake the Huffmans brought over.