Oh. God.
Jane thought of the way she’d felt totally comfortable with her body around Luke, the way she’d walked around naked in front of him, feeling like a ripe peach, when all the while she’d looked like Jell-O.
“Gee, thanks, Mom. I’ll hurry right over to the mall after this and buy myself a nice, sturdy, support undergarment.”
“Have you tried that new Hot Zone diet? I’ve lost three pounds on it in the past week. My dress for the wedding is almost too big!”
Fad diets were all a part of her mother’s lifelong quest to remain a size two.
Jane looked around, desperate for an escape. “Excuse me, but I need to use the ladies’ room,” she said, praying her mother wouldn’t decide to join her.
Jane hurried out of the room and down the hallway, passing Michael along the way. He’d just left the men’s room, and he smiled and nodded as he passed. Jane went into the women’s rest room, then closed the door behind her and leaned against it, savoring the silence. After a moment, a shuffling sound from one of the stalls alerted her to someone else’s presence.
She made her way to a stall and closed the door, before someone else could come out and start talking to her about lipstick or support undergarments or anything else.
Doing the obligatory before-peeing check for toilet paper, she found a full roll, and the rest of the stall looked refreshingly clean too. For the prices at this restaurant, the rest rooms had darn well better be sparkling clean.
Jane was searching for the top of her panty hose when she heard it.
A moan, loud and clear, in the next stall.
She froze and strained her ears to listen, then called out, “Are you okay?”
Whoever it was didn’t answer, but she was almost positive she heard someone say “shh.”
Bending down, she then saw something she could honestly say she’d never seen before in a women’s rest-room stall—two sets of feet, one a man’s, and one a woman’s, toes facing the same direction.
Black trousers sagged around the ankles of the male feet, which were clad in a very large pair of black wingtips. Oddly familiar shoes, she realized, because they were identical to the ones she’d noticed Bradley wearing tonight.
But when her attention focused on the woman’s feet, Jane’s stomach stopped hovering around her knees and dropped straight to the ground. Those were Heather’s strappy white heels, the same ones she’d bought with Jane a month ago, and that was undoubtedly Heather’s signature ankle bracelet, the tiny gold chain with a heart attached.
What in the hell was going on?
Jane blinked, and blinked again, waiting for her brain to process the incomprehensible. Heather couldn’t have been in a stall with Michael, because Jane had passed him heading back into the restaurant on her way in. And she couldn’t have been in a stall with Bradley, even if those did look exactly like his shoes…could she?
Her heart racing, she irrationally tried to think of logical reasons why a man and a woman would be in a bathroom stall together, in what looked like a very compromising position. Maybe she’d dropped her engagement ring down the toilet and he was helping her find it? With his pants down? Okay, that made no sense, but maybe he’d…lost a contact lens…down his pants, and she was helping him… Helping him do what, exactly, while she was facing away from him and standing nearly between his legs?
Okay, so every explanation except for one made absolutely no sense. Jane swallowed the tight, burning sensation in her throat that came with accepting the horrible truth—that her sister, who was about to get married tomorrow, was in the next stall doing it doggy-style with a man who was not her fiancé.
With a man who was wearing the exact same shoes as the object of Jane’s nearly decade-long crush.
A faint shuffling, and the motion of their legs, suggested that they’d continued with their little bathroom tryst in spite of Jane’s unwelcome presence. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and sat down hard on the toilet seat.
A few moments later, a muffled grunt—the unmistakable sound of a man coming but trying not to be noisy—came from the stall and Jane felt her shrimp appetizer coming up the wrong way.
She stood and turned to the toilet just in time to lose her shrimp into it, the sound of her sickness echoing throughout the rest room. She grabbed some toilet paper to wipe her mouth as lots of shuffling took place in the next stall, and she turned around just in time to see, through the gap between the stall and the door, a male figure pass by. Tall, blond hair, blue shirt.
Bradley.
She turned back to the toilet and heaved again.
A toilet flushed, and a moment later, Heather’s voice asked, “Janie, are you okay?”