They named her Lauren and buried her next to my dad’s mother. Every year my birthday is my saddest day of the year. But I go visit her grave with my favorite flowers—I figure, as my twin, they’d be her favorite too—and then I have the wildest party of the month because I sense she wants it to be worth it. “I want you to show me you are joyful and happy, always,” my mother cheerfully tells me. So I do. Even when there’s that ache of loss that never goes away, I am determined to be happy.
My parents told me they wanted me to be happy because they were so happy I survived. And so I try to live happy and I never, ever show them that I’m not.
My dad counts my smiles and says I have five smiles—total—and therefore I always make sure he gets to see one of them.
I’m living for two people. I’m trying to stuff into one lifetime what could fill two lives. So I get up every morning and put on my perfect face and promise myself to have the perfect day and to someday have the perfect family. But I’m failing.
And my parents know it.
“Your mother wishes, one day, when you marry, and settle down, maybe you’ll have twins,” my dad said wistfully to me once.
“That would be nice,” I said with a heavy heart and a big bright smile on my face.
Sometimes I wonder if she’d be married already. Lauren.
Sometimes I have a bad day and am certain that maybe she’d have made my parents prouder or happier than me. All I know for sure is that if they’d picked her, she’d make the same hard efforts I do to live happy.
I won’t even be picky about having twins, but I do dream of falling in love with the perfect guy, and having a baby girl and naming her Lauren.
I dream of my guy so much, he gives me an ache. I dream of that look, like the one Greyson looked at me with, a look that tells me that this guy—right here, this breathing human being—thinks I’m enough. Thinks, and is glad, that the one who’d survived was me. Because sometimes I really wish that if only one of us would make it, it would’ve been Lauren.
? ? ?
The day after Greyson
WALKING OUT OF the corner Starbucks cafe is Pandora, one of my three closest friends. The man-eater. Well, not man-eater. She’s just supremely independent, dark, gloomy, and secretive. But that’s okay because I’m happy, chatty, and sunny, so we mesh. Well. We try to. Today she’s going for her Angelina Jolie badass look and her usual dark lipstick and those boots she got on sale that reach her thighs. Even the way she walks intimidates men as she carries our usual coffees up to where I’m waiting at the corner—this was her day to get the coffee, after all—and without a word, we both sip and cross the street on our way to Susan Bowman Interiors.
You could say making things pretty is something Pandora does to make a living, but I do it as art. Because there’s something about a room welcoming you that can brighten your crappy day, and I like making people happy, even in that small way.
“So,” she prods me.
I smile secretly against my coffee lid.
“So, what?” I say. I want to make her beg because I’m a little evil like that. She just brings it out in me. The thing about Pandora and me is: we’re different as hell. So it’s always a push and pull with her, which we both secretly enjoy, I guess.
“So what the fuck. Tell me about the prince who charmed your pants off.”
“Pandora, I can’t even . . . I just can’t EVEN.” My grin hurts on my face and I shoot her a look that says He fucked my brains off and I loved it. “It was . . .” Out of this world. Perfect. Beyond perfect. “I never knew sex like that existed. I never knew I could feel a guy’s touch in my BONES.”
As we reach our floor and head to our L-shaped desks, situated right next to each other, I can’t stop smiling.
Truly, I’ve never experienced anything like this before. I almost feel shy about sharing him with her. But at the same time, I feel like getting a loudspeaker and telling my work colleagues that I think I may, just may, have found the ONE!
“Well, don’t stop there, coy virgin! Tell me the rest,” Pandora insists, booting up her computer. “Dude, getting Starbucks today entitles me to some gory details.”
“I got coffee yesterday and always get shit from you,” I counter as I sit and absently rub the little mark behind my ear, almost a hickey. . . . “I’m not giving you gory details, those are for me to dwell on and fantasize over. But, Pan, the way we connected. The way he looked at me. And looked and looked and couldn’t stop looking at me.”
“Oh, boy, you really are on ecstasy.” She sighs and puts her forehead on her palm as if she’s in for a headache. I know that she hates it when I’m in my bestest mood, so I just grin, start humming, and wonder what my mother would say if she knew about this.
I was married and had you before I was twenty-five, she’s told me all my life.
And I tell her that I’m twenty-five in three weeks and have great friends and a damn career.
But now, maybe, there’s a boy . . .
As Pandora and I start mixing and matching fabrics for our current assignments, my mind drifts off to my phone.
I have this rule that the last one to text should be the one who is next texted.
Greyson texted “And accurate” last night and before I know it, I text him back.
Are you there?
To be honest, I don’t know what to expect. This is uncharted territory for me. I hardly know what my name is today.
One moment I was at a party with so many people . . .
And then I was with him.
And he was with me.
Entirely focused on me.
And what frightens me—no, what haunts me—is not that he gave me the best orgasms of my life, though that rocked, but that I felt something. That his touch went farther than my skin, it went into me.
My skin prickles pleasurably remembering the way our eyes met as we made love, and I keep staring at my phone, waiting for him to text me.
? ? ?
Two days after Greyson
TODAY WE’RE DECORATING one of my client’s new homes. At Susan Bowman Interiors, no matter who’s in charge of the project, everyone pitches in on “the” day when the actual delivery and arrangement of furniture takes place. Basically it works like this:
I meet with a client and get the hang of their budget and taste.