A Taste of Utopia by L. Duarte

won’t tell her anything.”
    “Then I’ll tell.”
    “Fucking no you won’t.” I can’t bear to even imagine Lottie thinking what happened last night wasn’t real. Because, fuck me, it was as real as it gets. “You will get a refund. It will be as if this was indeed a casual date.”
    “I can’t lie to my best friend,” she says, sitting on the couch and holding her head between her hands.
    “Lie about what?” Lottie asks as she exits the bedroom. “Chloe, what’s going on? Why are you here?” She furrows her brow. Her eyes flick to me and back to her friend.
    With long steps, I cross the distance between us. “Nothing, baby.” I link my fingers with hers.
    Chloe stands up. “It’s just that—”
    “It’s on Facebook,” I interrupt Chloe.
    “What’s on Facebook?”
    “A picture of our wedding,” I say.
    “How? Did you post it?” Lottie looks at me.
    “No, my guess is that Cher posted after she snapped that pic of us. I recall her saying something about posts and I thought she meant you had notifications on your Facebook or something.”
    “Oh, my God. Mom.” She turns to me with startled eyes. They’re so worried it shatters my heart into a million small shards. “Where’s my phone?”
    I fish my jeans pocket for it and hand it to her.
    “Oh God, please let Mom not have seen this. Please, please, please,” she chants, switching on her device.
    “This doesn’t look good. Shit,” she says, staring at the phone’s screen.
    “What?” Chloe and I ask.
    “Twenty-eight missed calls.”
    I can see her fingers trembling as she opens her contact list.
    “Oh,” she says, her face drooping like heated wax. “Home.” She points to the missed calls.
    She closes her eyes and inhales a deep breath. And for a moment, I feel sorry for putting her in this position. I have no family, no ties, no one to care about what I do. But in my eagerness to be with her, I acted like a selfish bastard, convincing her to marry me to satisfy my whim to have her.
    “I have to call her back. But what do I say? Oh God, just now . . .” She swallows hard. “That she has recovered.”
    I glance at Chloe, who mouths the word “cancer” back at me.
    Another pang of guilt surges through me. “Wait. Don’t call her yet.”
    “I have to. The sooner I call, the easier it’s going to be,” Lottie says.
    I pace the room, my hands pulling on my hair. “We need to strategize for damage control.”
    “I know how to do that. It’s called annulment, one, two, three, poof! It’s over. It’s erased from the records,” Chloe says.
    For a reason that escapes me, my heart stops only to restart with a jolt.
    “Oh yeah, and what about her mom?” I ask lamely.
    “She’ll get over it. C’mon, it’ll be less of a blow to deal with an annulment than to accept a marriage. Especially under this circumstance, ” Chloe says with a sting in her voice.
    “Stop!” Lottie says. “The two of you need to stop this bickering.”
    “He’s not thinking straight. Listen to me, Lottie, we can have Dad’s attorney on it.”
    “Lottie’s a big girl, able to make decisions on her own,” I say, and turn to face Lottie. “We’ve got to figure out a way to make it less of a blow when you talk to your mom.”
    “There’s no way around it. Mom’s going to be devastated. I mean, who marries someone twenty minutes after they’ve met them? If only we’d dated for a while,” Lottie says.
    “That’s it,” I say, strolling back and stopping in front of Lottie. “You can tell her that we met a while back. No specifics with dates, places, etc. Just that we fell in love and eloped.”
    “But that’s a lie,” she says with tears brimming in her eyes. “To my mom . . .”
    “Argh. I hate to admit it, Lottie, but he’s right.” Chloe shoots another deadly stare at me. “I know you hate lying,” she says, approaching Lottie. “But think about it, honey. If you tell your mom you eloped with someone you’ve known for a