Tell It Like It Is
Chapter 8
Will slowly drummed his fingers across the glossy wooden table and tried to keep his eyes from rolling to the back of his head. He hadn't slept in days and the silence that stretched between him and Melanie as they awaited their guests was boring holes in his brain.
"What kind of horrible person shows up late to a dinner meeting?" Melanie asked tightly and Will tried to swallow his tongue. Preparing himself to see Lizzy was requiring all of his concentration. "I mean really!" Melanie continued not even realizing that she'd lost Will's attention. "How rude do you have to be?"
Will continued to ignore her as he poured himself a second (and not his last) glass of wine. As he tilted the bottle back up to cease the flow of the amber liquid he caught sight of a girl across the room in a form-fitting little black dress. She had glossy legs with her hair wrapped into a weird twisty thingy that Will would never know the name of. She was facing away from him as she asked the hostess a question but as another man came and wrapped his hand around her elbow she turned and he really wasn't as shocked as he should have been when he saw her.
Yes of course it was Lizzy, highly decked out (after careful planning that required the help of both Anya, Corey, and the friendly couple that lived across the hall) and ready to kill. She'd rented Christian a tux and as he escorted her across the room to the small table, where Will sat with his mouth agape and Melanie was making frustrated noises, she knew that women's eyes across the room followed him. He looked good in real clothes that hid his tattoos and with his mop of black hair parted and brushed. He was a wiry man, but the suit hid that well, and he was all too glad to allow Lizzy to dress him up for a fancy dinner date. He made it no secret that he thought this new record contract of his made him amazing boyfriend material and he thought this five star lifestyle was something he could get used to. Now that he was famous wouldn't it only be logical that Lizzy would want to get serious?
Melanie wiped her annoyed expression off her face once she recognized Lizzy, which took longer than expected. With Lizzy dressed up like so, Melanie had to momentarily question her previous impressions of Lizzy's beauty. Obviously, she eventually decided, anyone can be gorgeous with enough help.
"Lizzy I was so worried you weren't going to make it," Melanie trilled to mask the fact that she was secretly disappointed. If Lizzy hadn't shown Melanie would have had more than enough reason to trump the growing star in public. She supposed her being twenty minutes late would have to suffice.
"Wouldn't have missed it for the world," Lizzy replied sitting in her chair and shooting her a gleaming white smile that had sarcasm written all over it.
"Sorry we're late," the mop-top said in a deep voice that seemed almost a little eerie to Will for it to be coming out of such a thin man. "Lizzy was getting all hot for me." To different people this phrase meant different things. To Melanie it meant that Lizzy had spent hours in front of a mirror trying, for once, to make herself presentable. To Will, it meant that Lizzy spent hours in bed trying to get Christian to join her.
Lizzy interpreted both and rolled her eyes. "He wishes," she said softly but the entire table still heard her. While Melanie cackled, Will tried to laugh softly.
"Okay baby," Christian muttered as he quirked his eyebrows at her and wrapped his arm over her shoulder. "You can win this one."
Lizzy tried not to cower from Christian's touch or wince at the horrible use of the word "baby" (which in her personal opinion should only be used for people of three years or younger) but she'd never been much of an actress. Luckily, Will was too preoccupied with the man's audacity and Melanie too preoccupied with her own reflection in her silverware to notice the rapidly decreasing level of Lizzy's comfort.
As Melanie finally managed to break her staring contest with the spoon, that was so intense it would have put Narcissus to shame, she turned to Lizzy and Christian. "So I guess we're all past the formalities like jobs and stuff. What shall we talk about then?" Lizzy could easily have guessed that Melanie had created note cards regulating the conversation for the night. She could have guessed and she would have been right because, nestled safely in her $2000 Prada clutch, Melanie had created a small stack of note cards scribbled with possible ice breakers and awkward silence fillers. How else would she manage to keep the conversation centered? (Specifically around her favorite topic: herself.)
Melanie dominated the conversation for much of the night and even seemed to refuse to eat her food just because it might stand between her and expressing a single word. As soon as she saw Lizzy drop her fork and proclaim herself to be full Melanie stood. "Lizzy! Come to the bathroom with me."
Lizzy had never, in her entire life, taken well to being ordered about. She looked up and watched Melanie as if she was some sort of nut-case. (Which is still under debate.) "But I don't have to go to the bathroom with you," Lizzy replied not even making the pretense of following along. Every girl knows of the adequate conversation booth that the bathroom can provide and Lizzy and Corey commonly used this tactic to discuss their men of the evening when they were at clubs, but subjecting herself to more of the egotistical droning of Melanie Slaide was not a torture Lizzy felt she should inflict on herself.
Melanie shot her a look. Not many people dare to defy Melanie's wishes.
"Hell, I'll go to the bathroom with you!" Christian replied, much too loudly, as he stood and joined Melanie on her side of the table. "I've had to pee all fucking night…" Lizzy could hear him mutter as he dragged a reluctant Melanie to the bathrooms. Very proper, she thought as she tried to hide her smile that rose with the look of pure terror on Melanie's face.
Will glanced at her. He could tell, despite her blocking her mouth with her napkin, that Lizzy was trying to fight off a fit of giggles, so he took this as his opportune moment to speak his first words of the night, "You can laugh if you want to."
Lizzy gave a quick giggle then regained her composure in record time. Lizzy, back in the day, had been known for her inability to stop laughing once she'd started. "Thank you. I probably would have collapsed a lung if I'd tried to hold that in."
Will shrugged and looked at her, finally allowing himself to take her all in. She smelled of jasmine and her regular scent of coconuts, which sent Will's head into a tizzy, and her skin seemed much more muted than her old Florida tan, but her eyes; her sparkly green eyes still laughed at the world and in this precise moment that was specifically directed at Melanie. "So, Christian seems… nice," he replied quickly breaking his eyes away from her to keep himself from noticing anything else, as he distracted himself with what was left of his salmon.
Lizzy snorted and coughed. "I'm sorry," she said as she held up the water glass she'd been taking a sip from. "I choked on my water."
Will shrugged. "It happens to the best of us."
Lizzy tried not to snort again. "So I suppose that makes you one of the best then."
Will looked back up at her blankly. It was easy to tell that she still nursed scars that filled that statement with sarcasm. Now, however, was no time for apologies that should have been given years ago.
"So, Will, are you as totally, blissfully happy as Melanie commonly proclaims you to be?" That was Lizzy for you. No beating around the bush, no indirect questions, she could cut to the heart of the matter (which in this case just happened to be Will's heart) with the briefest of statements.
Will looked up at her coldly. "Are you?"
She could also cut straight to the point with her answers too. "With Christian?" She casually flicked her hand in the direction that Christian had drug Melanie off to. "Hell no. That's over, if it ever really started in the first place, which I don't recall to consenting to. But with the rest of my life? It's amazing. I love my jobs. I love my friends. I even love my tiny little apartment that I pay way too much for."
Will looked at her for a second. The way her lips spread across her face in a genuine smile only served as a reminder that his didn't. "So I suppose Erin asked you to be godmother then?"
Lizzy smiled even bigger. "Yes. And you, I suppose, are going to be the godfather?"
"'Say hello to my little friend,'" he replied doing his best Al Pacino impression.
Lizzy laughed for a second and smiled even wider. "Will, that was Scarface. Not The Godfather."
Will smiled back. "Oops."
"You're such an idiot," she replied as she continued to laugh quietly.
"I miss this, Lizzy," he found himself saying as he watched her try to suppress her giggles. "We used to be such good friends. Hell, we didn't even get to heckle Erin and Eddie at their wedding!"
Lizzy stopped her laughing, which appeared more as though she was having a heart attack, and looked at Will. "First off Will, I did plenty of heckling. I was the one that suggested they should elope when we were in Vegas. And secondly, you forget that before we were friends we hated each other's guts." She looked back up at him as he stared at her. "We've spent much more of our lives hating each other than we ever did liking each other."
Will hesitated before he replied, "Yes, but you forget that while you were hating me, I was falling in love with you."
Lizzy found herself without a reply as she drained the rest of her glass of wine. Witty rebuttals were her pride and joy, her major talent in life, and here she tried her best to cover the fact that Will was the one who had finally managed to transcend them.
"I am so sorry!" Melanie chirped in, slightly breathless as if she'd ran back to their table, as she plopped down back into her seat beside Will. "I got a call that I just had to take. You know how business is."
Will finally broke eye contact with Lizzy and looked to his left at Melanie. Was it wrong of him? All of it. Was it wrong to know, especially now that he was around her again, that it was Lizzy? It would always be Lizzy. "Oh. What about?" he asked Melanie, trying desperately to keep such a thought from his mind. He's engaged. He's engaged to a beautiful, high powered, non-gold digger… that he… that he… liked. That he liked a lot.
Melanie hesitated and stuttered for a second. For someone who had every word she ever said highly planned out, why did Melanie suddenly seem caught off-guard?
Lizzy controlled her eyebrows to prevent a look of confusion and watched as Melanie's eyes flashed with momentary panic. She then felt a hand slide across the width of her back as Christian walked past her and fell into his seat. "What'd I miss?" he asked slowly, his face flushed with a beaming smile.
"Can I get you any desserts?" the waiter asked politely as he displayed a beautiful tray of delicious desserts.
Lizzy knew how good that chocolate cake looked sitting nestled on the shiny, silver tray but she suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to get the hell out of that restraunt. She now, after her simple talk with Will, knew that a single word from her could send Melanie Slaide in to a spiraling pit that would quickly doom her "oh so perfect relationship."
Suddenly, it wasn't about making Melanie uncomfortable. If she meddled, she could destroy her. She wished she never had that power.
Raise your hand if you think Lizzy overestimates her power.
Now try to guess if my hand is raised!
hehe I need motivation for writing my next chapter. Reveiw or I could suffer serious brain trauma and forget my entire plot line. Hmmph thats would suck.
Remind me how much I like you guys.