“I’m a simple man, Lilly Benedetto,” Nick says a couple of weeks later, raising his rocks glass in a toast. “But I will admit it is, on occasion, nice to eat dinner at an establishment where one is not worried about accidentally touching old gum underneath the table.”
Lilly laughs. “They should put that on Yelp,” she says as they clink. They’re at Charlotte’s for the December pop-up, Sharon Jones being piped through the sound system and the hum and clatter of the dining room all around them. It’s the last dinner before the holidays, the restaurant cozy and candlelit and smelling of citrus and cedar. Lilly loves this time of year—the whole city full of palm trees decked with twinkle lights and Santas wearing board shorts outside the Salvation Army, the cheery incongruity of celebrating Christmas in a desert.
She likes being here with Nick, too: how at ease he is with everyone around him, making fast friends with a pair of hipster jewelry designers seated beside them and joshing around with the waitstaff. He’s wearing a thermal pushed to his elbows, a leather bracelet wrapped around one wrist. The hair on his arms is golden in the light from the tiny votives lining the long tables. They’ve been seeing a lot of each other lately, grabbing lazy breakfasts at Little Dom’s and going for long walks in Griffith Park; he’s the kind of person who can talk to anyone, who makes friends wherever he goes. He’s also an incorrigible, indiscriminate flirt, making eyes at the middle-aged housewives walking their doodles in Malibu and flashing his most charming smile at the bellman outside the Ace in DTLA, and if it can sometimes feel the tiniest bit tedious to wait around while he chats up the pixie-haired barista at Coffee Bean about the provenance of her fair-trade French roast, well, Lilly thinks there are worse qualities in a person. Better to like everyone than to like no one at all.
Tonight Charlotte’s featuring a Chinese American chef who grew up in Monterey Park, and the air is redolent with ginger and lemongrass and the cocktails spiked with star anise. Lilly and Nick split an enormous bowl of fried rice topped with duck eggs, their sunny yolks flecked with tiny black sesame seeds. The whole effect is bright and festive, the kind of showing that will have Charlotte and Lodge on every food blog in town come morning, but Lilly can’t get over the jangly, unsettled feeling that something—someone—is missing. She tells herself it’s just because her sisters aren’t here—Kit and Olivia begged off in favor of a launch party for some dubious NFT platform, June is nursing a cold, and Mari is Mari; Colin is here, somewhere, though thankfully he seems to have found someone else to pester for the night—and she always feels a little at sea without them. Still, the truth is she keeps catching herself glancing at the door, hoping in useless secret for . . . well.
“You didn’t happen to invite Will again, did you?” she whispered to Charlotte the other morning at yoga, tying to sound as casual as humanly possible.
“I did not,” Charlotte whispered back, fixing Lilly with an extremely skeptical expression as she pressed her thumbs against her third eye. “Should I have?”
“No!” Lilly said, too loudly; up at the front of the room, the instructor glanced disapprovingly in her direction. “Of course not. I just wanted to be . . . prepared. You know. For like. Whatever.”
“Mm-hmm,” Charlotte said, dropping down into a deep forward fold. “Eyes on your mat, Benedetto.”
Now Lilly nibbles the edge of a sparerib, listening with one ear as Nick engages the waiter about some gruesome-sounding Netflix series and clocking with some interest his smooth, warm palm creeping higher on her thigh underneath the table. They haven’t slept together yet, not that she’s necessarily opposed to the idea. The opportunity just hasn’t presented itself, on top of which she has the sneaking suspicion that his bedroom is likely going to be of the mattress-on-the-floor variety, and she’s trying to put off that moment of reckoning for as long as she can. Still, the last couple of days she’s been thinking she ought to just get on with it already: it’s been two years since Joe, and if it’s true that Nick doesn’t make her feel like her very skin is on fire the same way Will did that night in Rebecca Barnes’s hedge maze, at least he’s not a pompous, self-satisfied jackass who goes around getting people fired from their jobs for no good reason.
She waits until the waiter has trotted back off to the kitchen, then laces her fingers through Nick’s. “Hey,” she says impetuously, ducking her face close to his. “Do you want to get out of here?” Charlotte won’t miss her, Lilly reasons. Even if she does, she’ll understand. “Like, now?”
Nick grins at that, one eyebrow arching. “Like now, huh?” he teases. “I mean, yeah. I could probably be convinced.”
“Good,” Lilly says, glancing a kiss off the side of his mouth. “Let me just run and powder my nose, and then I’ll, you know. Do the convincing.”
Nick laughs, raising his glass in her direction. “I honestly cannot wait.”
She gets up and threads her way through the maze of long wooden tables, heading for the ladies’ room; when she rounds the corner into the dim, narrow hallway, she stops short at the sight of Charlotte with her back to the door of the storage closet. Colin—Colin?—is looming over her, suddenly taller and more intimidating than Lilly thinks of him as being; one hand is braced on the wall beside Charlotte, and the other very much on her ass.
The panic and rage surge through Lilly like a riptide, some earthquake in the middle of the Pacific sending a tsunami of cortisol through her veins. “What the fuck?” she demands, booking it down the hall in two huge steps and whacking Colin on one arm. God, she should have known. Guys like him are like this: they get one speck of acclaim and they think they can just go around taking whatever the hell they want, putting their grubby, entitled paws on asses as far as the eye can see. Where are those women from the New York Times when you need them? They’d grind him up in a Vitamix and eat him with a Tostito. “Get the fuck away from her.”
She’s so intent on giving Colin a piece of her mind that it takes her a second to register Charlotte’s hand on her arm, the way she’s pulling Lilly away from Colin and slotting herself in between them. “Lilly,” she’s saying. “Lilly Lilly Lilly, stop. Stop.”
Lilly turns to look at Charlotte, breathless. “What?” she asks, blowing a strand of hair out of her face.
“It’s not what . . . I mean, we were . . .” Charlotte trails off. “This,” she tries again, reaching for Colin’s hand and lacing their fingers together, “is like . . . a thing that’s happening.”
“Wait, what?” Lilly repeats. She’s hallucinating, she must be. There’s no way Charlotte could have been fooling around with Colin, of all people, because she wanted to. “No it isn’t.”
Charlotte shoots her a look. “I was going to talk to you later tonight,” she says quietly. “The two of us have been . . . you know.”
“I don’t!” Lilly exclaims, looking frantically back and forth between them. “I definitely do not.”
“Lilly,” Charlotte chides. “Come on.”
“No, no, I get it,” Colin says, completely misreading her horror. “Foods touching, et cetera.” He grins. “The foods, in this situation, being Char and me.”
Charlotte laughs at that, her hand still tucked into his for safekeeping. Lilly only stares.
* * *
Charlotte gets called into the kitchen before Lilly regains the ability to make compound sentences. Back in the dining room she sits down hard across from Nick, who’s chatting animatedly about blockchain with the second lead from a Starz show about a pod of sexy mermaids who do organized crime. “Hey,” he says. “Ready to go?”
“Why?” she asks, momentarily forgetting, then remembers and shakes her head. “I just caught Charlotte fooling around with my cousin in the hallway,” she announces, reaching for the bottle of wine on the table and splashing a generous amount into her glass.
“Whoa.” Nick smiles crookedly, slinging an arm around the back of her chair. “Good for them.”
“What? No! Not good for them,” Lilly corrects him. “Not good for her, especially. Colin, you might recall, is the worst. He’s one of those guys who calls himself a sneakerhead. His favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen.”
Nick looks at her blankly. “I . . . don’t know who that is.”
Lilly tries not to roll her eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” she concedes. “The point is, she’s amazing and hilarious and successful, and he’s a total chump with exactly zero redeeming qualities.”
“Didn’t you say he was nominated for an Academy Award last year?”
“That is emphatically not the point!”
It comes out louder than she means for it to, and the merman enforcer looks over curiously; Nick shoots him a look that pretty clearly communicates Women, am I right, and Lilly briefly considers stabbing him with a fork. “Relax,” he says, patting her arm conciliatorily. “The heart wants what it wants, no?”
“Can I ask you something?” Lilly snaps, draining her wine in two big, unladylike gulps. “Has anyone, ever, in the history of the universe, been calmed down by someone telling them to relax?”
Nick’s cool-guy attitude falters then, just a little. “Easy,” he says, which is even worse than relax as far as Lilly is concerned, but she doesn’t say so out loud. “I guess I just don’t understand why you’re getting so worked up about it, that’s all.”
“Because—because—” Lilly breaks off. She wants to tell Nick that Charlotte deserves a soul mate. She wants to tell him she’s tired of watching Colin get things he hasn’t earned. She wants to tell him that sometimes the gulf between how she knows things should be and how they actually are is enough to make her crazy, but she doesn’t know how to explain that to Nick, or to anyone else, really, so she’s left sitting at this table with an empty wineglass and enough potential energy roiling inside her to run clear out to the desert and back.
The server appears just then, setting dessert down in front of them: tiny, intricate ginger cakes topped with fresh whipped cream and edible flowers. “Forget it,” Lilly says finally, lifting her fork and taking a bite. She can tell objectively that it is very delicious. Still, it tastes like sand in her mouth.
* * *
She sticks around the restaurant until the last of the stragglers have finished their nightcaps, turning down Nick’s offer of one last drink at a bar he knows nearby. “Next time,” she promises, though if she’s being honest with herself the zing of excitement she felt when she thought about going back to his apartment has already fizzled, fading like a cheap pair of jeans. “I’ll text you.”
Once he’s gone she finds Charlotte cleaning up in the back, wiping down the prep station with a kitchen rag while Aretha Franklin wails on a little Bluetooth speaker and tonight’s featured chef packs up her knives. “Dinner was incredible,” Lilly says, reaching out and touching the woman’s arm; she can’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three, her glossy dark hair in a thick rope down her back and her expression equal parts dazed and elated. “Whenever you open a place of your own, I’ll definitely be first in line.” She looks over at Charlotte, who’s scrubbing at a crusted patch of sauce on the industrial range like it’s personally offended her. “Can we talk?”
Charlotte exhales, dropping the rag on the counter. “Totally,” she says, washing her hands and leading Lilly back out into the dining room, untying her apron before sinking onto a stool at the bar. “Do you want to go first, or should I?”
“I mean, you should, right?” Lilly shrugs. “Explain yourself, et cetera.”
“Explain myself?” Right away, Charlotte straightens up. “Lilly, I thought you stuck around so you could apologize.”
Lilly stares at her blankly. “For what?”
“Are you serious?” Charlotte laughs, though in truth she doesn’t sound particularly tickled. “For being a horror show at my place of business, to start with.”
Lilly thinks back on the scene in the hallway, considering the possibility. “To Colin, maybe,” she concedes after a moment. “Not to you.”
“Lilly!” Charlotte says, in a voice like maybe Lilly just isn’t paying attention. “Colin is my boyfriend.”
“Oh my god,” Lilly says, dropping her head into her hands, “please don’t say that.”
Charlotte sighs loudly. “Can you stop?”
“No!” Lilly fires back. She doesn’t understand what’s happening here; it feels like she’s talking to a stranger, not a person with whom she’s been sharing a stall in a public bathroom for the better part of a decade and a half. Charlotte and Colin? It’s like when June was hooking up with Pete Davidson, only worse. “Also, I’m sorry, he’s your boyfriend? Since when?”
“Since recently!”
“I mean, it would have to be pretty recent, since you literally just met five minutes ago.”
Charlotte rolls her eyes. “We literally met at your high school graduation, Lilly. And again at your mom’s fiftieth, and another time at Kit’s wedding weekend, and then also in the ER after Junie’s Gatsby thing—”
“Okay fine,” Lilly interrupts, throwing her hands up. “Whatever.” She’s flailing, she can feel it, like she’s tripped at the top of a mountain and is scrabbling for purchase as she somersaults her inelegant way down. “You guys are childhood sweethearts and your love for him has been simmering in secret since puberty. That didn’t seem like something you wanted to mention to me?”
“No, actually! Because I knew you were going to react like this.”
“I’m reacting appropriately!”
“You’re reacting like a psycho!” Charlotte shakes her head. “Can I ask you something?” she says, then presses ahead before Lilly can respond. “Has it ever occurred to you that it’s possible your objections to Colin have a lot more to do with you than they do with him?”
“Of course it has,” Lilly says, feeling her face heat up. “And I can assure you, my objections to Colin are a direct result of twenty-eight years of tolerating his smarmy, entitled, largely talentless—”
“He’s not talentless, Lilly!” Charlotte shakes her head. “He’s not. He’s smart, and he’s kind, and he’s actually been really good to me so far, and I’ve gotta tell you, to the outside observer it sort of seems like maybe you’re jealous that he’s doing what he set out to do instead of hanging around his parents’ house waiting for something to happen—”
“And to the outside observer it sort of seems like you’re settling for the poor man’s Zach Braff because you’re afraid you’re never going to find a guy who isn’t a total loser!”
Both of them are quiet for a minute, the air between them strained and sludgy. Lilly digs the heels of her hands into her eyes. She’s spent the last few years worrying she’s never going to be anyone but a reality TV footnote, destined for nothing but casual mockery. It sucks to know Charlotte thinks so, too.
“Look,” she says finally, “it’s late. Obviously we’re both tired, and—”
“Yeah,” Charlotte agrees, not quite meeting her eyes. “Of course.”
Lilly picks her purse up off the table. Neither one of them says good night.
* * *
She stomps out into the parking lot, unlocks the Honda. She only finally got it back from the mechanic a couple of days ago, and she mutters a quiet thank-you to Joe, wherever he is, when for once the car starts up as soon as she turns the key in the ignition. She feels uncomfortable and exposed, like she’s walking around in public with a visible panty line. She has no idea why Charlotte blew up at her like that—after all, what is a best friend even good for, if not to save you from romantic shame and degradation at the hands of their loser cousin? Lilly’s, like, seventy-five percent sure she’s not the asshole here.
Sixty-five.
Fifty at least.
She idles in the parking lot for a minute, head back against the seat. She used to imagine this car still smelled like Joe, his skin and his laundry detergent and the wintergreen gum he always chewed, the zing of it behind his teeth whenever they kissed. Now it kind of just smells like rust. It’s starting to feel this way lately, like maybe he never actually existed. Like he was a character on a show that got canceled two seasons ago.
When she gets back to the house June and Olivia are sitting at the kitchen island in the half dark, passing a pint of low-calorie dairy-free frozen dessert back and forth. “How was dinner?” June asks, waving her spoon in greeting.
“It sucked,” Lilly announces, tossing her purse on the counter with more force than is perhaps strictly necessary. “Did you know Charlotte is sleeping with Colin?”
She’s fully expecting her sisters to gasp in piercing horror but instead neither one of them says anything for a moment, like they’re a pair of elder matchmakers taking the union under consideration. “Did you know?” Lilly presses, suddenly filled with deep suspicion.
“No,” Olivia says thoughtfully, “but it makes sense, right? They’re both, like, nerds.”
Lilly whirls on her. “Charlotte isn’t a nerd,” she says witheringly.
“I mean, she kind of is,” Olivia counters without malice. “Not in a bad way.”
“She won a James Beard Award two years ago!”
“Okay, so she’s a nerd with a James Beard Award.”
Lilly sighs loudly, holding her hand out for the ice cream. She doesn’t know why nobody seems properly outraged here. “Are you listening to this?” she asks, turning to June. “Colin! I would literally rather be alone for the rest of my life, rattling around this house with pantyhose on my head like Little Edie, than have sex with Colin.”
“That’s good,” Olivia puts in helpfully, “since it would be incest.”
Lilly rolls her eyes, frowning down at the cardboard carton. “What am I even eating right now? PS, it’s disgusting.”
“Kit and I are doing a partnership,” Olivia tells her, peering curiously at the label. “I think it’s mostly just air.”
“It tastes like lint.”
“Does she seem to like him?” June asks, pulling one leg up onto her stool and resting her chin on her knee. “Charlotte, I mean.”
“I—” Lilly breaks off. She thinks of the way Charlotte was looking at Colin out on the patio the night of Charlie’s premiere, as if she was actually interested in whatever boring, pedantic thing he was talking about. She thinks of the dozens of bad Tinder dates Charlotte has endured in the last five years. She thinks of the way she reached for his hand in the hallway at the restaurant earlier this evening—instinctive, like she’s already gotten used to the way it feels in hers. “Kind of,” she admits grudgingly.
“Well then,” June says, shaking her head when Lilly holds the rest of the poison ice cream out in her direction. “Maybe it’s not such bad news after all.”
“Why are you like this?” Lilly asks her. June only grins.
Lilly says her good nights and shuffles crabbily upstairs to the bathroom, where she brushes the fake-sugar aftertaste from her mouth. She should have known June was the wrong person to talk to about this. She should have brought it to Mari, who never has a nice word to say about anybody. She should have brought it to Kit. Still, the more she thinks about it the more she realizes she doesn’t actually want to complain to Mari or Kit.
As a matter of fact, the person she actually wants to complain to is—
Well.
She pushes Will’s face from her mind and crawls under the covers, stares at the sliver of moon hanging in the purple sky outside the window. She doesn’t fall asleep for a long time.