A Wedding in the Sun

Chapter 27

Oscar had woken early as usual and only so many games of Uno could keep him from dying of starvation, so Adrián dressed reluctantly in a pair of slightly misshapen linen shorts he’d bought the day before and one of the billowing shirts that were easy to put on, stuck his feet into his flip-flops and trailed his bouncing son down the stairs to the breakfast room, dragging his feet.

He didn’t want to see any of the people on the other side of the door – he didn’t want to see people. Oscar was a pleasant enough distraction, but the wedding was starting to feel like a room with shrinking walls and spikes.

He didn’t want to see Jo – well, his pride didn’t. The rest of him had been difficult to convince. He really didn’t want to see Mónica in case he bit her head off in frustration. He didn’t want to see Alberto and Barbara, or the aunts and cousins who all knew he’d inherited Alberto’s guitar.

At this rate, he’d sit down to play at the reception and something dark and angry would come out. They’d all think he wasn’t over Mónica and shroud their schadenfreude with overblown sympathy and he’d drown his sorrows with too much anisette, making Jo grateful for her narrow escape.

As it turned out, he didn’t even need to enter the breakfast room for trouble to come to him.

‘?Ahí viene! ?Los vi juntos en el balcón – abrazándose!’

The aunt using crutches hobbled through the doors, giving her pointed finger a morning workout. Adrián stilled, grinding his teeth as his mind raced to find the least-bad response – or any response to the aunt’s shrill testimony that she’d seen him ‘hugging’ someone on the balcony. He didn’t have to guess who she meant. Mierda.

Mónica appeared in the doorway of the breakfast room. ‘Calmate, tía María Dolores.’ Adrián swallowed an untimely laugh with some effort. It was María Dolores who had hurt her foot – and she did exist. ‘I’m sure there’s an explanation for whatever you saw.’ Mónica’s gaze snapped to his as though saying, ‘There had better be an explanation.’

If what María Dolores had seen was him with his hands all over Jo and their mouths quite busy, his explanation wasn’t going to be satisfactory.

‘And Anamaría heard them smooching in the labyrinth!’ María Dolores added with a humph. Damn, that was it. Not María Rosa. That other gossipy aunt was called Anamaría.

‘We were not smooching in the labyrinth,’ he muttered.

‘But you were being amorous on the balcony!’ she said triumphantly.

Adrián opened his mouth and took a deep breath, but he still couldn’t decide if he could conceivably deny it. If he hadn’t been so raw from last night, he might have declared that it was true, that he and Jo were a thing now.

But as it was, what was the point in opening this can of worms in front of Mónica’s family if the ‘thing’ between him and Jo hadn’t meant much?

Another aunt – María Busybody was probably her name, which rhymed in Spanish and he felt quite clever for thinking that one up – rushed into the fray. ‘I saw them holding hands! They were leaning over the balcony like Romeo and Juliet and he kissed her hand!’

Adrián was fairly certain he hadn’t kissed Jo’s hand, but he rather regretted the oversight now. ‘It was not like Romeo and Juliet. Juliet was up on a balcony and Romeo below, calling up to her. My room is next to Jo’s and the balconies are connected. It wasn’t like bloody Shakespeare at all!’

‘But you were? Kissing Jo?’ Mónica asked quietly – too quietly.

‘Not with a balcony wall between us!’

She unfortunately wasn’t put off by that. ‘In the labyrinth? On your way to Pe?íscola? Last night? Did you seriously start something with Ben’s ex-wife on the way to my wedding?’ Her voice grew quieter and higher-pitched and Adrián’s hair stood on end.

‘I knew he was a rotten egg, Mónica,’ the other aunt hurled into the conversation. ‘Let him go and marry Ben’s wife in a registry office and divorce her there too!’

He tried not to flinch, but it was difficult.

‘He’s just trying to upset you!’ María Dolores insisted.

‘I am not!’ he insisted. ‘Yes, something happened with Jo, but it didn’t have anything to do with this wedding – at least not how you’re thinking.’ He wasn’t sure if Jo believed that, but he did. ‘We didn’t say anything because I knew how your family would react and I didn’t want to make a scene.’

‘Oh, you didn’t want to make a scene, but you got it on with my fiancé’s ex!’

‘Trust me, that fact nearly stopped us in the first place – and will probably stop anything else happening.’

‘Anything else?’ she asked, her voice nearly a shriek. ‘Are you two going to get married in some bizarre wife swap?’

María Dolores crossed herself.

‘We don’t have to do this now?—’

‘Mamá! Mamá!’

The argument was cut short by the arrival of Oscar, sweeping in through the automatic doors at the front of the foyer. Adrián hadn’t even realised the boy had run off and his stomach swooped with guilt. Today of all days, he needed to be there for Oscar and try to put Jo out of his thoughts.

Oscar ran to Mónica, burying his face in her tummy. ‘He visto— ?He-he visto!’

Adrián dropped to his haunches and peered into his son’s face. ‘What did you see, cari?o? Whatever it is, we can sort it out.’

The boy hiccoughed through a sniffy nod and opened his mouth, his breath choppy. ‘At the rainbow dragon, I saw Jo and Ben!’

Adrián’s mouth snapped shut and he felt Mónica’s frantic gaze, but didn’t meet it.

‘They were hugging, abrazando, like he and Mamá do – like you and Mamá used to. Y tambien se besaban. Kissing too!’ he blurted out, mixing his languages.

‘?Santísima Madre de Dios y espiritu santo!’ María Dolores was muttering.

‘I’m sure there’s a reasonable?—’

Rita and Ford Watters chose that moment to emerge from the breakfast room, Ford with a restraining hand on his wife’s forearm. ‘Well, I saw Mónica coming out of Adrián’s room last night! The night before her own wedding!’

Adrián shot to his feet. ‘Nothing happened!’ he was quick to insist. ‘If you’d kept watching a little longer, you would have seen Jo come out afterward!’

‘Jo was right there in your room last night?’ Mónica squealed. ‘When I was trying to get you to kiss me!’

‘I knew something had happened!’ Rita said, her voice low and quaking with outrage.

‘Well, Ben is out there “hugging” his ex right now!’ Mónica hurled back.

‘I never liked you. I don’t know what Ben even sees in an immature, melodramatic?—’

Adrián clapped his hands over Oscar’s ears. ‘There’s no need to be rude to the bride!’ he snapped. ‘You don’t have to like her.’

‘Well, thanks,’ Mónica said.

‘If she’s even a bride any more!’ Rita said, causing a collective gasp from the family members who could understand English; María Dolores stood by in barely contained suspense as though she could will the words to become Spanish. ‘And you—’ Rita pointed at Adrián. ‘It will be all your fault! Keeping something going with both of them, ruining Ben’s happiness twice over!’

He knew her words stemmed from prejudice and her own affront and bore no resemblance to the truth, but they still hurt. He’d never been enough for anyone. He’d tried to make Mónica happy and it had had the opposite effect. He was only at this wedding for Oscar and he kept losing track of his son. And Dios, he’d been angry and unfiltered with Jo and it was a miracle she was even talking to him any more, let alone that something had developed between them – something that he still couldn’t shake off.

‘No one’s ruining anyone’s happiness,’ he responded evenly. ‘Mónica only wanted to talk last night – as Ben obviously needed to do with Jo.’ Unless they really were kissing, which the panic centre of his brain insisted they might be doing. ‘Yes, something happened between me and Jo while we were stuck together trying to get to this wedding.’ He hoped they couldn’t hear the ‘fucking’ he’d left out before ‘wedding’ with a superhuman dose of self-discipline. ‘But it didn’t mean anything – to anyone. It just happened in the moment, the pressures of an unexpected road trip, heatwave madness – something like that. It doesn’t have any impact on Mónica and Ben’s enduring love!’

His declaration was met by silence and it felt as though he should have had a drink in his hand to round out the moment with a toast. But he slowly realised that the gathered wedding guests were staring over his shoulder and he felt a distinct breeze at his back.

With a sinking sense of doom, he turned slowly to see exactly the person he most wanted and didn’t want to see right then – as well as Ben, with his hand at her back. He needed to kick something – preferably himself.

‘Um, good morning?’ Ben tried. ‘You’re all up early.’