“Have you tried the ceviche?” Jules calls over her shoulder later as she walks in the direction of the bar to get us our third round of champagne, tripping slightly as she looks past me to a good-looking man—one I think I recognize from an action flick Max and I saw a while back. The movie star catches her elbow as she starts to fall and soaks in the broad smile Jules gives him as a thank-you. They have a brief discussion before walking slowly to the bar together, continuing their conversation as they stand in line, Jules’ leg propped out, her hand sitting on her hip flirtatiously. I take a bite of my crab cake and glance over at Ben, who’s talking to Max while keeping a close eye on his wife. He catches me staring at him. “She’s just drunk,” he says confidently, but I hear some defensiveness hiding behind his words. “I’m just making sure she makes it back without falling over again,” he adds quickly, as if he needs a reason to be watching her.
“Totally! She’s just blowing off steam,” I add a little too eagerly and wonder why we’re trying so hard to convince each other that what we’re witnessing is harmless. But then I remember Jules’ warning—to stop reading into every little thing. If I’d bumped into a hot actor who had headlined the last blockbuster I’d seen, I’d probably be flirting too.
Ben finally peels his eyes away. “You know how it is—a night away from the kids, and you go crazy.” He laughs. “She deserves to let loose. I’ve been traveling a ton lately. We’ve barely seen each other.”
“You should whisk her off on a weekend away after the wedding,” I say, fighting the urge to shake him, to tell Ben that he is on the verge of losing the woman he’s loved for more than a decade, that she is slipping through his grasp like hot sand on a summer day.
“Maybe. It’s so hard to find a sitter,” he says, and takes another sip of his Jack and Coke.
“We’ll watch them,” I say firmly as Max whips his head up and starts to say something. I give him a look that immediately silences him.
“We’ll see,” he says noncommittally as Jules walks carefully in our direction, clasping two flutes so full of champagne that the liquid is spilling over the tops.
“Did you see who I was talking to?” she says, her cheeks flushed as she sips the bubbles off the top of her glass and hands the other to me. “That was the guy who was in First Night! You know, he was the one who got the girl in the end?”
“He sure did,” Ben says under his breath and drains his glass. Max throws me a What the fuck is going on with them look and I shrug my shoulders in response, Jules either not hearing him or not caring as she sways to the beat of the band that begins to play.
“Let’s go find Liam,” I suggest as I glance behind me, surprised I haven’t seen him yet—we had spied Nikki earlier giving an interview, but Liam was nowhere to be found.
“Looking for me?” I hear Liam’s deep voice and spin around, his normally rumpled hair expertly slicked back, giving his usually slack features a hard edge that I can’t decide if I like.
Liam greets Max and Ben with a firm handshake before pulling Jules and me in for a hug. “You girls look stunning.”
“Thanks,” I say, resisting the impulse to reach up and touch his hair, convinced it will feel like a Ken doll’s head. “Where’s Nikki?”
“Around,” he replies vaguely, and my mind immediately wanders to the picture of her and the guy in the Enquirer, wondering if he’d also be making an appearance here tonight. Hoping, for Liam’s sake, that he won’t. “You know how these thing are,” he adds, all of us bobbing our heads in agreement, even though we have no clue about these things.
Liam grabs a drink from a passing waiter and settles in, telling us funny stories about walking the red carpet with Nikki, confiding that it felt weird to stand by her side and hold her sequined clutch while she regaled each reporter with sound bites she’d rehearsed in the limo on the way here.
“Must have felt amazing being someone’s purse handler,” I say sarcastically.
“It beats sitting at home obsessively binge watching some TV show on Netflix, which you could’ve been doing tonight,” he says pointedly, and I stick out my tongue.
Several glasses of Mo?t & Chandon and turns on the dance floor later, we’re all having a great time. Max and I jump up and down to the beat and Liam joins us in the brief windows when he isn’t being pulled away by Nikki’s “people” for a photo op. Ben is even swinging Jules, instantly taking me back to their wedding day when they’d surprised the guests with a synchronized dance.
When the band begins to play a song I don’t recognize, I pull Max toward the dessert table, which is overflowing with gorgeous delicacies I had been looking forward to tasting all night. But his hand goes slack as we reach the edge of the dance floor and I twist my head to see why, my stomach doing a somersault when I see what he does—Courtney dancing closely with a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair. He raises his hands in the air and she slides herself toward his toned body as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. Gone is the girl who had cried in my car, her red-rimmed eyes now sparkling, her hair sleek, her body tucked into a mini that leaves little to the imagination. I put my hands on my own dress, suddenly feeling like an old maid—Courtney’s beauty had a way of making your own luster dim.
“Max?” I say softly, the noise from the band swallowing my words. I shake his shoulder slightly and say his name again before he finally turns his head, the anguish in his eyes hitting me like a sucker punch to the stomach, the alcohol he’d consumed earlier ripping away the veneer that I realize now must mask his true feelings.