Chapter 1: A Long Day
It was nice to be included in the wedding party, I suppose. I'm not a huge fan of traveling down the coast, and I'm not exactly a suit-and-tie sort of guy myself, but Arnold has been cycling through different women for about fifteen years, or as long as I've known him, and he's finally settled on Samantha, an athletic brunette with two kids of her own from a former marriage. Arnold was an usher at my wedding--I screwed the pooch back then. I should have bumped him up to groomsman. But now Arnold is sticking it to me. I'm a groomsman in his wedding, even though I don't know any of his friends, and all the bridesmaids are insanely out of my league, and I have all the personality of a wet fish. I'm still driving down to fucking Malibu for a beach wedding. Why? Fucking why, Arnold? I get it. You win.
So I stumbled through the rehearsal while my wife watched from the fold out seats in the giant back yard where the caterers were setting up for tomorrow while I realized just how ill-fitted the rented tux was, and we glared at each other under the sun, and the bridesmaid I was stuck with looked at me like I was some sort of boiled fish she was stuck with. And I agreed with her. I did not belong there, fucking melting in the sun.
The drive down nearly killed us. We got lost in the mountains above LA, somewhere. I think we cut through a national park, at some point, and the GPS cut out and we took some wrong turns that added to our trip an hour or three--and at some point, my wife demanded that I let her out of the car, so I did. Cathy got the fuck out of the car and stood at some canyon vista and I left her there for a minute before turning the car around to pick her up again because you can't show up to a wedding without your plus one after all, and instead of mowing her over and plunging down the cliff so that we both died together like I wanted, I rolled to a stop and I let the love of my life back into the car, and we sat in the air-conditioning for a minute and we collected our thoughts and then I started driving again. We found our signal and we made it to the rehearsal dinner in time, anyway.
Cathy is a shrewd woman. She knows what she's doing. She's terrible at packing for trips, but she likes to be the navigator. For this trip, I let her book the hotel, which is part of the reason she agreed to come on this trek down the coast. Because she saved a couple hundred dollars, booking a hotel maybe forty minutes away from the venue itself. So it's not glamorous. Everyone else is staying in Holy Christ it's Malibu by the Beach, which is nice. We're staying some place else, like a suburb for poor people. The hotel is a chain, something meaningless and sordid and dirty. But she probably saved some money. How much, I don't know. And I don't mind, really, because Cathy knows how to travel.
When we get to the hotel after the rehearsal, I am still edgy. Angsty. Hungry and tired and probably a little dehydrated and thinking about how earlier in the day she had been so unbearable I was ready to drive us both off the edge of a cliff. The wedding is in the spring, in Malibu, but the day is hot like summer, and not windy like you would think for a beach place, and I am sticky with sunblock, so I rinse off in the shower. There's not even a pool at this hotel.
"That's my fault too, isn't it?" she asks me.
She knows I like hotels with pools because I like to send her out poolside in her bikini. Cathy is slender. Her hips are wide and her bust is small, and she has long, long dark red hair that falls to the middle of her back. She makes no effort to do what the other women do. She's different that way. She doesn't paint her face elaborately with shades of makeup or spend several hours on her hair every week. Sometimes I wish she would. But also, she doesn't bother so much with clothes, either. Bras are always optional for her, and she has never been shy about prancing, she calls it. I call it showing off, when I talk to my friends about it. But she says she's just being comfortable, when she lets it all hang out. She can get away with it more because she's an A-cup, she thinks. It's not like she's a D-cup with giant floppy titties hitting you in the face as soon as she walks into the room. That's how she thinks about it, anyway. My friends always back her up, when she explains it to them.
"I just wish--you know, we could cool off a little," I tell her. "It's been a long fucking day."
At least I don't have anything to do during the ceremony. I have to walk down the aisle with a bridesmaid and stand there for the wedding. In the morning we will help return the suits and stuff. That's my job. Show up. Support Arnold.
"It has been a long day," she agrees. "And it was a long drive. It's hot in here, isn't it?"
That's her code. She means to tell me to open the curtains and the window, to let in some fresh air. The air conditioner in our room works, but right now she wants fresh air. As soon as I pull back the curtains and crack the pane a little, she takes her clothes off. It's our little routine, on date nights, when we get a hotel like this, and tonight is no exception, which surprises me.
"Don't act so shocked," she said. "It's hot in here, and you've been nothing but unpleasant all day," she tells me, while she wriggles out of her tiny blue panties.
She's got a little bush today, trimmed and straight and well presented. Sometimes she goes bare. Other times she goes wild. Today it's like she wondered if one of the groomsmen might see her naked on this trip. They won't, of course, because she picked a hotel forty minutes from the upscale hotel where everyone else is staying. My eyes drift out to the run-down parking lot outside, where the sun is setting, and where half the stalls are empty and the other half are filled with run-down beaters and rentals from businessmen on their way to whatever it is that businessmen do in Malibu-adjacent cities on a Saturday. We're on the second story, not far from a staircase. No one is coming up to look in our window.
"That's what I don't understand," I reply. "I haven't been on my best behavior today. Why am I getting rewarded."
Cathy rolls onto the bed, naked, her glorious bare ass pale in the lamplight. The sun is setting outside.
"You're not," she says. She gets out her phone and starts scrolling. "I need some space. Go for a walk. Leave me alone. I'll text you when you can come back. Maybe go get me some food from a drive thru."
That's when I understand. She's pretending to punish me, but really, she's playing her game with me. She's going to lay her, flaunting herself at the window, casually ignoring any pedestrians along the walkway like a gallery exhibition, while I observe at a distance.
"Don't take your room key," she tells me. "I'll let you in when I decide."
I lock the door behind me.