I Object [gxg]

9. The Wedding: Worst Friend Ever Edition

I keep saying it too late. At least, that's what I tell myself when I inevitably wake up back in 2018 on the day of the wedding.

If I'd just told Nessa the second she got home, before Connor arrived with the pizza, maybe she wouldn't have given him a second glance. Maybe she'd have realized that something amazing had been in front of her all along, much like I had about three months into our friendship.

I still remember the day it hit me. It didn't start out as anything special. Nessa had convinced me to come with her to a party, my first. Being a party virgin, I'd let her dress me up in a short skirt and flannel cutoff shirt.

At first it was flattering, the drinks everyone offered me. Well, the drinks the guys offered me. It seemed like the second I finished one off another would land in my hand.

Didn't take them long to start asking for things in return. Nessa had found me in the bathroom, the tears on my face a relic of both humiliation and puking my guts out, and unlike any normal person, she hadn't run away.

I still remember how she didn't push me off when my clammy hands clamped around her arms. I still remember her fingers running through my hair. And I still remember the tiny spark of something—like an ember that had maybe been there all along, but that I'd never felt the need to really search for.

I remember thinking as she held me that I was just drunk, and surely the upheaval in my chest was just the remnants of stomach acid in my esophagus. That this—the steady beat of her heart against my ear, the puffs of her breath tickling my hair like feathers—it all fell under the umbrella of friendship.

But when I woke up the next morning, I still felt all of it.

I always wonder if she felt it too. But then I see the way she looks at Connor, and I imagine it's the same way I look at her. That he makes her feel the same way she makes me feel.

But there's a popular theory that just knowing someone likes you is enough to foster feelings. It changes the whole game. I learned on that bathroom floor that impossibilities close doors, but don't lock them. We do that on our own, when we focus exclusively on the open ones.

So maybe I just need to open my door.

"Do you remember that party we went to freshman year?" I ask Nessa as we enter the church.

"Which one?" she returns.

"The first one."

Her face falls, and I hold my breath. It would be too much to hope that she's about to admit she's making a huge mistake and she's secretly loved me all along, too.

"I'm still so sorry about that," she mumbles. "I thought it would be like high school. Just stupid truth or dare games and yeah, a couple people hooking up, you know.... At least, that's how it was here. But this town stops where campus begins."

That's funny. I always felt the crushing influence of the town over the more free-spirited campus. If we had existed solely in that college bubble, I might have told her back then. But the backwards, yet still nosy, presence of the surrounding area and its locals kept me locked up.

"I always thought that night corrupted you," Nessa adds.

"In a way," I say slowly, my accelerating heart suddenly slamming the brakes on my plan. "You remember in the bathroom, right? I looked like complete crap—you came in right as I was hurling into the toilet. And you just pulled my hair back and, I don't know how to explain it, but I saw something—"

A loud clatter from outside perforates the thick door, and Nessa's eyes bug out. "What was that? Please tell me that wasn't the flowers for the altar!"