Styx & Stones Read online

  “She left. The bitch left me at the altar,” he says for the millionth time, and I have to keep from smacking him in the head the way I used to when we were kids. Of course she left him. She’s a money-grubbing whore who has more Gucci clutches than sense.

  “I know, Pan,” I soothe.

  “You’re the only one, you know that, right?”

  “I know.” The only one who understands him? The only one who is always there and never falters? The only one he still loves after all this time? Yeah, if wishes were horses I’d be a freaking champion rodeo rider. It doesn’t matter which “only one” he means because all of these are true but the last. I’d be his only one for the rest of my days if he’d let me. If he’d just open his damn eyes.

  I trace the lines of his face, the puffiness around his eyes, the bridge of his nose, the smooth angles of his cheekbones and his sharp jaw with its coarse stubble. It’s nice to be able to touch him like this again without Bitchy Barbie shooting daggers at me. Besides, it’s not like touching is a new thing for us. Harley and I have been together since we were five years old. Well, not together—obviously, because he was marrying someone else—but together in the sense that we’ve been best friends since the first day of kindergarten.

  The Hamiltons moved into the Edwardian row house next to ours in Noe Valley, San Francisco, two days before the school year started, and Harley’s bedroom was directly opposite mine. The day they moved in, he waved through the open window. I poked out my tongue and drew my blinds closed.

  The first day back at school, Bryson Hopper pushed me over in the sandpit. Harley helped me up, and then I pushed him over. From that day on, we’ve been pushing one another’s buttons. We’ve also played at other things that don’t involve buttons or any kind of clothing, rather a definite lack of.

  He shakes his head. “Fuck. I spent a goddamned fortune on this wedding. The caterer still has to be paid for all the goddamn food that we didn’t eat, not to mention the venue, the musicians, and the flowers.”

  “The flowers were a gift from me and if you so much as think about trying to give me money for them, I will hurt you, Harley.”

  “They were beautiful; you know?” His head is in my lap now, causing my stomach muscles and other things farther down to tighten and ache. “Your creations always are.”

  “Well, I may have caved on the bridal party frangipanis, but no way was I going to let her get away with covering every surface of the venue with them. Can you imagine looking back at those pictures in ten years’ time?” I ask, exasperated. Harley doesn’t say a thing because he knows how I get around brides with the wrong choice of flowers. You want the happiest day of your life to appear timeless and beautiful, not as if you attended some busted-ass Malibu Barbie luau. And if that is your thing, then you need a new thing ... and possibly the help of someone like Dale Tutela. That man is a god with event planning.

  “If I had my way entirely it would have been gorgeous,” I say breathlessly, dreaming of the wedding I’d been planning for over half my life. I glance down at Harley, whose expression seems so hollow, his bright blue eyes haunted, it breaks my heart into a million pieces. On the flipside, some of the pieces of my shattered heart are jumping for joy. This makes me a horrible friend because I shouldn’t be happy right now. I shouldn’t be, but I am. My best friend is heartbroken, dumped at the altar, and I’m drunk and exulted. I should point out that he’s drunk too, so it’s not as if I’m popping champagne bottles and toasting to a life of him being alone, but even so, guilt worms its way through my gut because this started out as the happiest day of his life and the worst of mine, and somehow everything got turned upside-down.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Harley whispers.

  “There’s nothing you can do. Except open another bottle of this fine champagne that the strumpet’s parents paid for.” I hold up the booze in question and clink it heavily against the open bottle in his own hand that’s mostly gone untouched. “Then, you’re going to lick your wounds and hop a flight to Hawaii where you can spend the entire week of what was supposed to be your honeymoon sprawled out in that big beautiful bed. You can sleep all day, eat delicious food, drink cocktails, and when you decide to move there permanently you won’t even complain when your best friend comes to live in your spare room.”

  “Come with me.”

  I inhale sharply. “What? Oh no. No that’s a very bad idea.”

  “Why? How is it any different from the two of us taking the weekend to drive down to Big Sur, or going to the cottage without the parentals?”

  “Okay for a start, this isn’t Carmel or Big Sur, it’s Hawaii.” I rest my free hand on his chest. The hurried thwamp, thwamp, thwamp, beneath my palm causes my own heart to skip a few beats. “Secondly, it’s your honeymoon, Pan. I can’t go on your honeymoon with you.”

  “It’s kind of hard to have a honeymoon without a bride.”

  I pat the side of his face and he leans into my hand. “No one would understand. You’ve got to do this alone, Harley.”

  “Fuck everyone else. I don’t want to do it alone,” Harley snaps. I flinch a little and he exhales loudly. His eyes slide shut, and his voice is tender and miserable when he says, “The last thing I need is to be alone right now.”

  “You can’t take another woman on your honeymoon. It’s ... bad luck. Besides, I have the shop, and I doubt very much that I’ll be able to get my own room at such short notice.”

  His eyes spring open, and he glares at me. “Why the fuck would you get your own room?”

  “Because we cannot sleep together.”

  “Why?”

  My eyes dart around the luxurious suite, looking for something, anything that constitutes as a valid excuse. Once again, my focus settles on my boobs. “I’m self-conscious.”

  Harley snorts. “About what? Your snoring? That shit’s not news, Rose. We’ve slept together a bunch of times.”

  “Things are different now—”

  “What’s different? That you have a killer rack? I’ve seen it all. It’s not like I’m going to freak out because you have girly bits. Been there, tapped that, remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember.” Oh god, did I remember. His deft hands, soft lips, scratchy stubble, the weight of his hips as they pressed into mine, and the deliciously melty slide of our respective boy and girl bits coming together. The way his mouth tips up in the corner in a satisfied smirk right after he comes. I remember it all too well, and that’s exactly why this is a bad idea.

  “Please?” He begs, and his voice is ragged with emotion. My heart squeezes. “I can’t do this alone. Come with me.”

  Oh I want to. I want to come and come and ... Goddamn him. I’m about to make the biggest mistake of my life, because I never can say no to Harley, and he knows it. He tilts his head and sends me these stupid puppy-dog eyes that have always been my undoing—they’ve always led me into one disaster after another. It’s why I call him Pan. He’s the original lost boy, and he’s always been so damn good at getting me to follow behind him like a lovesick Wendy with Peter.

  “Please?” he whispers, and I’m done for. Manipulative bastard.

  I shake my head and let out a resigned sigh. “When do we leave?”

  Harley looks at his watch. “Fuck, like four hours.”

  “You owe me,” I warn.

  “Yeah, I’ll owe you. I’ll give you anything you want—I’ll build you a goddamn monument in Golden Gate Park for being the best friend a man could have, just please, Rose, please don’t make me go on my own.”

  “Fine,” I say, grinning. “But I get the window seat.” I shove him off my lap and slowly, and very carefully—in other words, drunkenly—get to my feet.

  Harley grunts and lays his head back down on the floor. “Where the hell are you going?”

  “To pack, dumbass. I got a plane to catch.”

  “Don’t leave,” he whines, snaking a hand around my foot. “We’ll buy you shit when we get there. All you need are a couple o
f bikinis.”

  I shake him off and shoot him a look that says he should quickly shut up. He does, grinning for a moment before it’s lost to the shadow of despair that smothers the light from his eyes. “I’ll swing by in an hour to pick you up. Don’t fall asleep.”

  “Don’t fall asleep,” he murmurs. “Got it.”

  “You have everything you need, right?”

  “Everything but my wife.” He raises his champagne bottle in a toast. “Cheers to that.”

  Inwardly, I cringe, but on the outside I just smile and say, “Pan, by the time we’re done with this pseudo-moon, you’ll have forgotten all about the woman who left you at the altar. I’ll make sure of it.”

  With another warning about him falling asleep, I fix my dress, smooth my hair, and leave the room. I practically bowl over the bell boy who’s wheeling a cart with champagne, strawberries, and what looks like a pound of chocolate fudge towards room 317. “Oh, shit. No one cancelled that order, huh?”

  “I’m sorry?” Bell boy asks. He has a baby face and strawberry blond hair, and he’s cute in that boy-next-door sort of way. Well, maybe not in my boy-next-door way, because the boy who lived next door to me was, and still is—thank you, Jesus—a complete fucking knockout.

  “You’re taking that to 317, right?”

  “Yes, Mr. Hamilton asked that it be promptly delivered to the room at eight p.m.”

  “Yeah, here’s the thing,” I say. “When Mr. Hamilton ordered that, he was unaware his bride-to-be was a lying, cheating skank who would leave him at the altar. So at the risk of him losing his shit and trashing his hotel room, it’s probably best if you just turn around and take that back to the kitchen.”

  The boy stares at me like I just kicked him in the shin. “But it’s already been paid for ...”

  I pluck the pearly white “congratulations” card off the tray and fish out a pen from my clutch. “I tell you what—why don’t you take this to room 313? Her parents are staying just down the hall.” I make a lazy hand gesture in the direction of their suite, though for all I know I could have been pointing towards the service elevator because the man-child in the monkey suit is staring down the hall, looking confused. “Maybe they could use a drink after their daughter ran out on her fifty-thousand-dollar wedding.”

  “I don’t think I can do that ...”

  “Of course you can.” I place the newly edited card back on the tray and remove a couple of bills, shoving them in his shirt pocket. He balks when he reads my scrawled handwriting defacing the pristine card.

  Congratulations!

  Your daughter’s a whore.

  “I can’t give them that.” The man-child shakes his head, and I lower my own to be able to read his name tag. Is it possible to suddenly become dyslexic? Because I think this might be a thing. Bran. That’s a weird-ass name, and in a city full of hipsters, you hear a lot of weird-ass names.

  “Bran,” I slur, and throw an arm around his shoulder as if we’re buddies from way back.

  “It’s Brian, actually.”

  “Bra-in,” I correct and screw my face up, wondering why his parents would choose such a difficult name for their child. “I’ll give you all the money in my purse if you take that card and that cart to room 313.”

  “Ma’am—”

  I gasp loudly. The sound echoes down the empty hall. “You did not just call me ma’am. So not cool, dude. I’m young-ish. I’m hip, and I have totally great tits.” I grab the boobs in question and jiggle them to prove my point.

  He licks his lips in what looks like a nervous gesture, his gaze darting to my cleavage and back to my face as if he’s afraid I might slap him for his efforts. “You ... you do. You have totally great tits.”

  “Right?” I agree. “You can’t call a woman who has great tits ‘ma’am’. It’s soul destroying.”

  “Sorry,” he says, but Bran doesn’t sound sorry at all.

  I pluck a strawberry from the tray and dip it in chocolate, shoving the whole thing in my mouth while making the universal sign with raised brows and a bobbing head for this shit is good. “Come on, man. Just take the cart to 312, pleeease?”

  “Er ... you said 313.”

  “Exactly.” I throw up my hands in exasperated agreeance, stumble around the not-so-bright man-child known as Bran, and wander off down the hall to the elevator, smiling all the while because I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy my best friend isn’t wearing a wedding ring on his finger right now.

  Who gets married in February anyway? That might be fine if you live in Canada and are okay with freezing off your lady parts at a white winter wedding, but a San Franciscan wedding? No. Not unless you’re hoping your bride will just up and float away on the next big gust of wind. Turns out we didn’t need the San Franciscan weather to lose Harley’s fiancée, but that didn’t matter, because this was never meant to be his wedding day. And he was never meant to walk down the aisle with that trollop by his side.

  One day, it will be me watching the way his eyes crinkle at the corners and brim with tears as I walk toward him. One day, it will be my ring he wears and I, his. One day, I’ll marry my best friend.

  I just need a little time to convince him of that.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ROSE

  I turn my key in the lock and stumble through the front door of my shop, Darling Buds. Yes, the name may have been inspired by our shared love of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, but ten years of playing Wendy Darling to Harley’s Peter will do that to a girl, I suppose. Just to annoy the ever-loving crap out of my very best friend, I like to say it came from H.E. Bates’ novel, The Darling Buds of May. I think he knows that isn’t true.

  Darling Buds is a tiny little store with a studio apartment above it on 24th Street. It’s sandwiched between a kitschy home décor boutique and an independent bookstore, and located just a half a block down from the smallest Wholefoods you’ve ever seen. And the best part about living where I work? No daily commute. It’s just a few doors down from Harley’s apartment too, which is why I’ll never move. Unless of course he does.

  I’ve always loved flowers; I’ve loved to put my hands into the soil and grow things ever since I was a kid. When Harley was running his Tonka trucks through the dirt, I was planting blades of grass and imagining they’d flower into luscious, fat rosebuds, or a beanstalk that led to the sky. Much to my mother’s dismay, when it was time to say goodbye at my Grammy’s funeral, I was found rearranging the wreaths and the coffin spray—because everybody knows you don’t put daffodils in a mixed bouquet, and if they hadn’t known, they did now.

  I gather my face products, toothbrush and toothpaste, and a few low-maintenance items of makeup, placing them in a travel bag and throwing them on the bed, then I take my suitcase from out of the closet and start randomly tossing in articles of clothing. I’m choosing between two pairs of swimsuits when a key slides into the lock downstairs. My parents are the only ones with a key so I don’t give too much thought as to what they’re doing here and I continue packing.

  “Well she must be here; the lights are on,” my mother says, presumably to my dad.

  “Mom?”

  “Oh, Rose, good you’re here. She’s here, Herb.”

  “I heard,” Dad says matter-of-factly, as my mother’s footsteps echo up the stairs. “Alright, bring them in.”

  I race out to the landing and almost collide with my mother on the staircase overlooking the shop. She’s switched out her deep navy Tadashi Shoji cord-embroidered lace cocktail dress for a velour hot pink track suit with Juicy stamped over her ass. For a woman who owns basically every wrap dress that Diane Von Furstenberg ever put out, I’m surprised the two items coexist peacefully in her wardrobe. Embarrassing leisurewear aside, my mother has impeccable taste; she’s like the Blythe Danner of SF. My dad, on the other hand? Not so much. He wears argyle sweater vests all year around, unless of course there’s a function to attend, and then he swaps argyle for tweed. Today he’s in a burgundy velour Adidas tracksuit. Wh
at is happening with my parents right now? Did someone put LSD in my champagne? My dad is also, I note, having delivery guys bring in all of the arrangements from the wedding. Harley’s wedding.

  “Ah, what’s going on?” I demand while my mother parks herself in front of me on the top stair.

  “We thought we’d bring these back. Seems a terrible waste not to resell them.”

  “They were a gift, Mom,” I explain. I don’t have time to go into detail about the fact that I can’t resell flowers that have already been cut and wreathed, or the centerpieces that will start to droop in a few hours’ time.

  “Yes, and the wedding was called off. Traditionally, if a wedding doesn’t go ahead, people get their gifts back.”

  “Mom, you can’t give back flower arrangements. I can’t sell these. They’ve been at the hotel all day, and they’ll start dying off pretty soon.”

  “Oh relax.” She waves me away with a lazy hand gesture. “Rochelle said to bring them back here. They’re devastated, by the way. How’s Harley holding up?”

  “Well, let’s see, his fiancée left him at the altar and he’s been humiliated in front of two hundred friends, relatives, and strangers. How do you think he is?”

  “Poor boy. Still, he dodged a bullet if you ask me. I knew that whore wasn’t going to go through with it; I could see she had cold feet from a mile away.”

  “Mom!” I chastise.

  “Well, it’s true.” She shoos me back up the stairs and because I know my parents, and I know that there’s no halting the disaster going on downstairs, I trudge back to my suitcase and continue loading it up with things. I don’t know what things, because so far I’m definite on the fact I have toiletries in my bag and possibly one T-shirt—everything else, I’m not sure about.

  There’s a crash from downstairs. I listen for a beat. I don’t hear muffled curses or panicked screams because someone fell through a window, so I carry on packing, but shoot my mother a stern look. “Will you please tell Dad not to break anything?”