One-Star Romance

Natalie Shapiro was twenty-four years old, walking down a city street that smelled like hot garbage and possibility.

A couple of friends with whom she’d gone to college had moved out to the suburbs-already!-and she imagined they spent their time breathing in freshly mown grass. (And drinking wine? Waving to nosy neighbors? Power walking while wearing visors? Natalie didn’t really know anything about the suburbs.) Others had been picked off by consulting firms that sent them across the country each week, and the smell of an airplane was more familiar to them than that of their own bedsheets.

But to Natalie, that hot garbage stench was magic. Not that she wanted to stand right over the trash bag to her left and take a deep breath, but it was nice to know it was there. Because things weren’t supposed to be perfect and manicured at this age, not when you were bravely pursuing what you loved despite the difficulty of it.

Natalie loved writing. And sure, if the city’s most high-powered literary agent appeared in front of her, leaping over the trash bag in her high heels to scream, You! I could sense the power of your imagination from across the street, and I’ve already gotten you a six-figure book deal!, Natalie would have taken that in a heartbeat. (Well, she might’ve had some questions: Was this agent in her right mind? Also, how did she jump in heels without breaking an ankle? Assuming it all checked out, though, Natalie would’ve signed right on the dotted line.)

But despite the occasional daydream, she knew it didn’t work that way. Becoming a writer was tough, competitive. Anyone pursuing it was supposed to struggle and get discouraged for a little while. In fact, the struggle and the discouragement were what made a writer good. If everything came too easily to someone, whatever art she made would probably be shallow, doomed to be forgotten as soon as the reader turned away. So, while a writer figured out what lit her soul on fire and how to express that to the world, she worked a job she didn’t care about, or maybe a handful of jobs she didn’t care about cobbled together. At the moment, Natalie had four part-time gigs: dog-walker, personal assistant to a psychiatrist on the Upper West Side, caterer, and freelance writer for a website that paid her fifteen dollars an hour to regurgitate the latest celebrity gossip. She lived in a sixth-floor walk-up in a bedroom so tiny that she’d had to buy a bed with drawers built in underneath the mattress because there was no room for a bed and a dresser. To put on her clothes every morning, she had to climb on her bed to make space to open the drawers.

But as she juggled jobs and crouched on the bed, the real work was happening, the work of becoming a person with something to say. It was just like all those stairs Natalie had to walk up each day-the climb was annoying, but it did wonders for her health (and ass).

Besides, it didn’t matter if Natalie’s bedroom was tiny, because on the other side of the wall, her best friend lived in a slightly bigger bedroom. Natalie walked down those garbage-strewn streets toward the promise of a night stretching luxuriously ahead of her, a night when she might have the most fun she’d ever had or might end up weeping on a street corner at two a.m. And while she’d certainly prefer the fun version, at least the two a.m. weeping session could be dissected over coffee the next morning with said best friend, huddling, hungover, on their couch, listening to Stevie Nicks or Jenny Lewis or some other woman who understood their pain.

So Natalie charged ahead, stopping only to link arms with her roommate beside her. “Have I told you how absolutely smoking hot you look tonight?”

“Hm,” Gabby said, tilting her head up, a smile cracking across her face. “At least twice.”

“It’s your birthday. You deserve a continuous stream of compliments.”

“Then, please, continue.”

“You look absolutely smoking hot.”

“It’s not too booby, is it?” Gabby gestured at the floral-patterned dress she was wearing, which was, in fact, rather boob-forward.

“You look amazing,” Natalie said. “And besides, why not let the girls see the sights?”

Gabby cackled, Natalie’s favorite laugh in the world. “You make it sound like they’re my sheltered daughters, finally getting to leave the bunker.” She pulled her top up a bit. “I don’t know, Angus was being so unhelpful about how fancy this party was going to be. Like, I assumed it was a fun night out at a bar, but he just texted me, ‘Do your parents prefer a man who wears a tie or a bow tie?’ Which, first of all, is something that I do not think my parents have any opinion about, but, secondly, made me think that maybe he invited my parents to this?” Natalie pulled a face. Gabby’s parents were wonderful, but they had given Gabby a curfew of 9:30 p.m. throughout high school and clearly wished they could still enforce it. “I love them, but I’m not looking to spend the whole night sipping a drink demurely while telling them about my progress at work.”

“Right, it’s your twenty-fifth birthday party. You’re supposed to do something wild and crazy.”

“I was thinking,” Gabby said, “maybe tonight is the night that I finally dance on a table.”

“Whoa, tiger.”

“Okay, shut up. My cousin did it once and fell off and broke her rib. Also, I’m afraid of heights. So there’s a lot to consider here.”

“We can find you a low table,” Natalie said. “Like, a coffee table.”

Gabby nodded seriously. “You know how I get into it when I’m dancing, so please spot me. But if I’m falling off at the wrong angle, get out of my path. No sense in us both getting concussions.” She smoothed down her thick wavy hair. “Of course, this whole conversation is moot if Angus did invite my parents.”

“That does seem like something Angus would do,” Natalie said, her tone snarkier than she’d intended. Gabby raised an eyebrow, and Natalie rushed on. “He’s a great guy! But maybe he doesn’t always think things all the way through?”

In other words, Angus was an absolute moron. Despite being in his midtwenties, Gabby’s latest boyfriend was somehow an unholy amalgam of a sturdy middle-aged man (complete with beer belly and dad jokes) and a toddler who threw himself into all sorts of ridiculous situations because he hadn’t yet learned anything about the world. Angus had managed to cling on to Natalie’s gorgeous, ambitious, going-places best friend for a full year now, and Nat was not quite sure how. The most persuasive theory she’d hit upon was that Gabby and Angus shared a highly specific kink, and Gabby wanted to milk that for a while before settling down with a man who deserved her.

Sure, in the moments when Natalie really stopped and looked at herself in the mirror (pert face; dark brown hair that never quite did what she wanted it to do; big smile full of big teeth, resembling a cartoon mouse that some fairy godmother had turned human), she could admit that part of her disdain for Angus came from his trying to take her spot at Gabby’s side.

Gabby and Nat had lived together ever since freshman year of college, when some administrator in the housing office had decided that Natalie Shapiro from Philadelphia and Gabriella Alvarez from Long Island would do just fine as roommates. Who was this administrator? She had probably picked their names at random, yet Natalie wanted to send her a large basket of expensive nuts.

Because Natalie didn’t believe in love at first sight. Well, not anymore. She had for a brief window at age fourteen after watching the Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio version of Romeo + Juliet while on vacation with her mom at the beach. For the whole rest of their stay, she’d walked by teenage boys on the boardwalk, intensely trying to catch their eyes in hopes of activating a soulmate connection. Only one boy really looked back, though he’d turned out to be less interested in true love than in the possibility of a hand job behind the funnel cake stand.

But she had experienced that feeling of locking eyes with another person and knowing immediately that your world had changed. It hit her when she was lugging a box of books into her dorm room, on the verge of dropping them all. A girl sitting on a neatly made bed rushed up to help. Nat caught a glimpse of the dorm room before she saw the girl’s face. Somehow, this small room, with its two extra-long twin beds, already felt cozy, lived-in-a vase of fresh flowers on the desk, pretty yellow curtains, a framed poster of Paris on the wall (every college girl was required to love Paris) next to a painting of a nature scene that Nat had never seen before.

“If you don’t like any of this stuff,” the girl said, noticing Nat’s gaze, “I can totally take it down!”

“No,” Nat began. “It’s amazing. You did all this already? Weren’t we only allowed to get into the dorm rooms, like, three hours ago?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t want to wait to make it feel like a home.” Their eyes finally met. They grinned at each other. And there was no rational explanation, but still, Natalie knew in that moment: Gabriella Alvarez was going to be a love of her life.

Now, Gabby and Natalie had lived together long enough to be considered common-law married in the eyes of New York State, a milestone they celebrated by referring to each other as “my beauuuuutiful wife” in increasingly ridiculous voices while trying not to crack up. Gabby had made their New York apartment feel even homier than the dorm room, though it was practically the same size. She painted patterns of blooming hydrangeas and roses on the walls. (That pretty nature scene she’d hung up in their dorm room had been one of her own creations! Art was just a hobby, she claimed, though Nat cherished a hope that, someday, Gabby would chuck her advertising job and make a go of the artist’s path with her. Gabby sometimes approached life like it was one giant checklist, but she was never more relaxed, never looser, than when she was painting.) She pushed their couch into a nicely centered position and somehow knew the correct number of pillows to put on it so that you always had back support but weren’t overwhelmed, which Nat considered a real talent. She organized their spice rack, hung their pots and pans from the ceiling, and breathed life and air into the tight space. Natalie knew how to arrange words on the page, but Gabby knew how to arrange their life together.

Yet Angus had wormed his way in, lingering around their apartment at unexpected times so that Natalie actually had to close the door when she went to the bathroom (a thing she and Gabby never bothered to do when it was just them), which of course was silly and small and a sacrifice she’d be more than happy to make for Gabby to spend time with a man who was worthy of her. But instead, Angus was a guy who told unfunny jokes and had spent his life failing upward with the security of family money. He had swooped in to tell Nat that she should not plan anything for Gabby’s birthday because he was on top of it and then had planned a party at some bar in MIDTOWN, of all places, a stretch of New York City that she and Gabby did their best to avoid.

“You might want to fix your face before we go inside,” Gabby said.

“Huh?”

Gabby laughed, reaching out a finger to poke at the space between Natalie’s eyebrows. “You’ve got an angry crease right here. What’s wrong? Are you getting upset again about how Emily Dickinson was never fully appreciated in her lifetime?”

“Yes,” Nat said, “but I suppose I can let that go for one evening.”

She clasped Gabby’s hand in hers, and together, they walked into the night that would upend their lives.

2

As the party swelled around her, Natalie could admit that Angus had not done a terrible job. The inside of the bar felt less soulless than the other restaurants Nat had been to in this area. People milled around in party dresses and nice pants-some of Gabby’s coworkers, their friends from college, Angus’s business school classmates. No parents in sight, thank God, although there was Gabby’s sister, Melinda, who was always difficult to pin down, the flighty older daughter to Gabby’s steady younger. Kudos to Angus for getting her to show up. The lighting was dim but not dark, the soundtrack of Justin Timberlake and Miley Cyrus thumped pleasantly underneath everyone’s conversations, and, in a nice change from the establishments Natalie tended to frequent, the floor wasn’t sticky.

Natalie nudged Gabby and pointed to a low table over in the corner. “That little guy is calling your name.”

Angus came running over, skidding to a stop in front of them. “Milady,” he said to Gabby, doffing an imaginary hat for some reason, then throwing out his arm to indicate the rest of the room. “Your party awaits!”

“Baby, this is incredible,” she said, and he put his arms around her, her stiletto heels making the two of them the same height (five feet six inches).

“You look . . . wow, you’re stunning,” he said, going moony at the sight of her boobs but even moonier at the sight of her face. Then he blinked and registered Natalie’s presence. “Oh, hi!”

Already, people in the crowd were angling for Gabby’s attention. Angus gave her a little push forward. “Go and greet your adoring public!”

Angus and Natalie both looked after Gabby as she disappeared into the throng, then turned to each other. Angus had an uncharacteristically nervous strain to his smile as he cast about for a conversation topic, his hair a messy mass of dark blond curls. Ah, screw it. Natalie could make an effort.

“How’s life?” she asked.

“Busy. I’ve been advising my father on growth strategy, on top of all the responsibilities of business school.” Natalie had heard that the biggest responsibility of business school was getting drunk at networking events, but she gave Angus a serious nod anyway. Angus went on. “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but my father owns a furniture empire.” (He’d mentioned it every time they’d hung out.)

“I’ve seen the billboards,” Natalie said. “‘The Futon King of New Jersey,’ right?”