Chapter 2
Six weeks before the wedding
Ella
I woke up wonderingabout that stupid pink toothbrush I’d left at Hailey’s house and sighed, irritated. It had been five years since I’d seen either of them. When were they going to stop haunting me?
Not today, my brain insisted. How long do you think it sat in that glass, next to Jack’s and Hailey’s, before they gave up hope you’d come back?
I groaned, pushing the pillow to my face, then did a few breathing exercises to lessen the pain.
“Morning,” my fiancé, Charlie, grumbled from his side of the bed.
I removed the pillow from my face and smiled pleasantly. “Morning.”
Nothing good ever came from thinking about the past.Charlie rolled out of bed and padded toward the shower. Focus on all the good you’ve got right in front of you.
Charles Edward Sticht III, tall and gangly but charmingly so. Three years older than me, he had a full head of thick brown hair and a tendency to over apologize when he got nervous. We’d met at the yacht club. Turned out, he attended the same business program I’d just been accepted to. Then it turned out his family owned a hotel chain in Miami. We’d immediately bonded over growing up as resort brats, swapping fast and furious stories. He understood the pressure, the loyalty, the requirement to put your best foot forward, knowing everything you did reflected on your whole family. He was getting a degree in hotel management so he could take over the family business.
“It’s my dream to go home and run Rolling Green!” I had confessed, happy for the first time in what seemed like years, immediately flushing with embarrassment to spill this secret, because back then, I wasn’t even allowed to return home. But Charlie didn’t know any of that, and his face had lit up.
“We’ll be resort moguls!” he had cheered me on. “We should combine forces to become a hospitality empire.”
On our third date, Charlie told me that being the third meant he was actually the fourth guy in his family with that name. “Most people don’t know it actually goes OG.” He wiggled his thick eyebrows to indicate the first Charles Edward Sticht, “then junior. Then the second.”
I kind of knew he was feeling me out, letting me know he had a strong family tradition, that I would have to become Mrs. Sticht, and our first kid was destined to be a junior to the fifth power. But I got that. I knew all about strict family rules and keeping up appearances.
Still, my favorite thing to do was call him anything but Charles: Charlie, Chuckles, Chip, and when I was drunk, Chazza. The truth is? I think he kind of liked it. That was the other thing we knew about each other; somewhere, deep under that coating of desperate willingness to pledge loyalty to our families, we liked to encourage each other to rebel in little, safe ways.
The reason I felt genuine affection for Charlie? When I started posting photos of us together on social media, Mom commented that we made a handsome couple. Six months later, Mom drove out to meet him over lunch and realized he was a Sticht from Sticht Resorts. When Charlie and I were still together the following fall, Mom had invited us to meet for Thanksgiving dinner. I had seen my dad. I had hugged my brother, Gabe. That was because of Charlie.
The image of a powder-pink toothbrush rose in my head, and my heart sank.
Thinking about Hailey and Jack as I lounged in these 800-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets made me feel like a terrible person. I had left it badly with them. I hadn’t answered their texts, just composed a short goodbye: I’ve decided to go back to school. I love you. I can’t see you anymore.
Then I’d blocked their numbers because I knew if I kept talking to them, I’d crack. I’d become a sleazy two-faced cheater who met up with Jack and Hailey every chance I could. And when my parents caught wind of it, I would lose college along with the hope of repairing all the damage I’d done to my family. I’d made my cowardly, selfish, practical choice, and I was determined to stick with it.
I stalked them on the internet for a while. Hailey was the first to unfriend me, which I totally got. I mean, posting photos of me back on campus was rude, but I had to prove to everyone else my life was right on track as part of the deal I’d made with my mother. Jack never blocked me, but all his accounts went silent as if he’d abandoned them. I got that too.
I’d barely scraped by with straight Cs that semester.
The noise of the water going through pipes shut off abruptly as Charlie finished his shower.
In the silence, his phone buzzed on the bedside table. I rolled across the bed, intent on grabbing it and walking into the bathroom now that he was finishing up in there. With the wedding in six weeks, our social obligations were really starting to crowd the calendar.
As I picked up his phone, I caught the last text in a string flash across the bottom of his locked screen.
Bob From Work: Call me.
The phone buzzed in my hand as another came in.
Bob From Work: Please. Don’t do this. I need you.
My stomach dropped.
“Chucklebutt!” I yelled through the closed door. “You got a text.”
He rushed out, towel wrapped around his hips, midmotion between shooting an arm into his terry-cloth robe and grabbing the phone from my hand. Charlie and I rarely had sex, and it seemed to suit us both just fine. Despite our mutual disinterest, he was a well-built guy. Square jaw. Lotsa hair. Dad would definitely approve of the wedding photos and genes for future grandchildren.
“I’ll uh...it’s work.” Charlie gestured toward the balcony doors and stepped outside, wrapping his robe tightly and closing the door behind him.
I headed for the bathroom to brush my teeth, knowing Charlie had probably forgotten he’d left the little slider window above the shower open to keep the bathroom from steaming.
I could hear every intimate thing; he was just on the other side of the wall. Mostly, my fiancé cooed into the phone and said he was sorry, that he hated putting Bob in this position and that, of course, he loved Bob, but he was still going to marry me. He sniffled at that last line, as if his heart was breaking too. He lowered his voice to a frantic whisper, saying he couldn’t talk. No, really, he couldn’t, don’t ask that. But they could be together soon, he promised.
Charlie’s cheating on me was an unfortunate aspect of our upcoming nuptials, one I had suspected for a while, having caught whiffs of feminine perfume on his collar and noticed the way he went directly for a shower as soon as he came home from a night out. But for some reason, I couldn’t bear to break up with him over it. I could lie and say something about loving him for all his flaws. But the truth was, it hardly seemed fair to punish Charlie for sharing his heart or his body with someone else when there had never been enough room in my heart for Charlie. That space had been and always would be filled by Jack and Hailey. If I still loved them most, I couldn’t begrudge Charlie the same.
Maybe we were well matched in that way. We wouldn’t have a traditional head-over-heels romance with a happily ever after, but we would have a good enough ever after, which in my experience actually seemed a lot more reasonable.
* * *
“Thank God you’re here.” Mom swung open the door to my childhood home and shooed me inside as though I’d never left. She smiled warmly at Charlie, phone pressed to her chest. Immediately, she put it back to her ear. “Well, who’s going to do a wedding cake for three hundred people at this late date? This is a nightmare. I don’t care—”
Memories flooded through me. I’d bounced past this front door a million times on my way to school or cheerleading practice. Here in the foyer, Jack had kissed me good night after our first date and every date after. Upstairs in my room, Hailey had spent the night, my parents treating her nicely because, back then, they’d thought she was one of my girl friends, not my girlfriend. One night Hailey slept over and Jack climbed the trellis, and all of us had been together in my bed, tangled and giggling, the window open to the dark summer night, the sound of the sprinklers kicking on at four a.m. and Jack cursing comically because that was always the reminder he had to go...and once it happened, he had to dart through the spray on his way. Hailey had curled up against me and purred like a cat, superior in the fact she got to stay for breakfast.
I exhaled, reveling in the bittersweet.
Charlie clutched my hand, not nervous himself, but as though he understood I was. I squeezed back. We went in together, following Mom as she berated someone about wedding cake.
We were officially here to send out the wedding invitations. Mom wanted them all postmarked from Rolling Green. She was so finicky about appearances and what people might read into them. Or maybe she wanted to review my work before sending them out. There were 164 invites for a party of possibly 300 when you factored in the plus-ones and a few families who might bring kids. Dad had practically invited everyone in town to be there, and Mom was using the event to showcase Rolling Green as the place to have a showstopper wedding.
Well, Dad wanted almost everyone to be there. Hailey and Jack were absolute no-gos for invitations. I hadn’t even bothered to ask. It hurt to think of asking. After all this time, I didn’t know where they were or who they loved now.
I pushed the thoughts away. Focus on the present, Ella. Like the fact you are getting married in mere weeks. Once those invitations went out, there was no going back.
Charlie dropped my hand and loped past the wall decorated with Mom’s collection of crucifixes and took the stairs two at a time—all legs, arms, and goofy grin. But it was the crosses that caught my eye. My parents had taken my brother, Gabe, to Rome last summer. Probably there was a cross from the Vatican on the wall as well now.
After I’d made straight Cs at school my sophomore year, my mother had required me to attend a Pray Away the Gay camp for both winter break and again for a summer retreat for her to continue paying my college tuition. I went without fuss. I was broken by then.
At camp, I met a lot of lesbians (this word came out in my mother’s voice now, even in my head). We’d gone to repentance therapy all day and at night engaged in a lot of remorseful lesbian sex. I was still sure to this day that PATG camp was actually just the in-person equivalent of Grindr for closeted gay Christians. But by sleeping with others, I’d crossed a line. It broke my hopes for Hailey and Jack ever taking me back.
My stomach clenched. All these years later, it still hurt.
“Wait up!” I called to Charlie and bolted up the stairs.
He stood at my bedroom door, peering in with overdramatized amazement. It was a total time capsule, the PRINCESS knocker my dad had thought so apt still affixed to the door. Mom had opened the windows to air it out, and the late spring breeze fluttered the curtains. Like déjà vu, I was hit with the last time Hailey, Jack, and I had been together in that bed, and my core pulsed, shocking me. Whoa, it had been a while since I’d felt anything below the belt. Remembering our bodies tangled on the bed, mine reacted, waking up in a shiver. I guess if my pussy were a fairy-tale princess, it would be Sleeping Beauty.
“I can’t believe you grew up in here,” Charlie said, as though I were a sea monkey or something. At my teasing scowl, he grinned. “I bet you were every guy’s teenage fantasy.”
I gave a noncommittal humph.
Charlie reached out and tickled my ribs.
“Char-leeeeee!” I squealed, pushing him off as I laughed even though I felt dead inside. I didn’t want him to touch me in this room that held precious memories of Jack and Hailey. It felt like cheating. But I couldn’t tell him that, so I did what I always did. I faked it, hoping that, as the saying went, eventually I’d make it.
Mom hurried to the doorway. “Charlie, you’re downstairs. I have the guest room all set up.”
Charlie and I dropped our hands, properly chastened. This was Mom warning us not to sleep in the same room under Dad’s roof.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said soberly. “I’ll go get our things from the car.”
“Do that,” Mom replied, arching a stern but somehow almost flirtatious brow at him.
As soon as she turned to me, her face was all worry. She closed my bedroom door for privacy and then gestured for me to sit. “That was King”s Bakery.” She gave a dramatic pause, leaning in. “They canceled our order!”
Mom had been planning the wedding for the past six months as her gift to us. This actually was a gift since I was still in the thick of business school. Plus, since she insisted we hold all the events in town, it was a million times easier for her to organize them locally. She knew exactly who she wanted to hire. It helped she was undoubtedly getting preferential treatment and discounts out the yang due to her long-standing position as events manager at Rolling Green.
Still, if memory served from when I’d helped schedule events as a teenager at the club, wedding cakes were typically ordered six months in advance. We were six weeks away.
“They can’t do that!” I gasped. King”s was the ritziest wedding cake bakery around and the most expensive. With their reputation, I couldn’t believe they would do something so shoddy. Because there had to be a reason, I narrowed my eyes. “What excuse did they give?”
Mom brushed away my question with an exhausted wave of her manicured hand. “It doesn’t matter, does it? The issue is we need to find you a cake.”
“Mom?” I pressed.
“After what...you did”—Mom swallowed—“some people didn’t appreciate your father’s reaction.”
What?I was afraid to ask. The topic of what I did, even all these years later, remained a constant low-level hum in the air, static electricity waiting to zap us.
Mom rounded her huge blue eyes to clownish proportions, indicating those people were genuine pains in her ass. Then, as if telling me a secret she was supposed to have kept, she lowered her voice. “Your father would never want you to carry the burden of this, but... The club never regained the financial peak it hit just before your little...before you left.”
Her words hit me like a sack of doorknobs to my guts. Possibly worse than hurting my parents was the idea I’d hurt Rolling Green.
“But that was a long...a long time ago.” It came out like a plea. Maybe King’s was one of those places that wouldn’t sell a cake to gay couples, much less a girl who’d been in a threesome. I’d seen bakeries like that in the news. I mean, we all had. “Did you tell them I was marrying a man? Like a...completely hetero situation?”
Mom flinched.
“Sorry,” I whispered. All these years of trying to patch things up, and here I was hurting her all over again.
She grimaced as though accepting my apology was a bitter pill to swallow. “This isn’t about you, Ella. The opposite, in fact. Joanna and Stan King’s son came out last year. He’s some sort of advocate or something now. Well, he remembered how your father reacted over what you...over the Pops incident, and... Well, long story short, King”s Bakery has taken Rolling Green off their list of preferred venues. They said”—she blinked back tears—“they didn’t want their name associated with that sort of thing.”
Now it was my turn to flinch. On one hand, I was immediately protective of the club and my family, and therefore angry at the Kings. On the other, I had believed only bad things had happened to my reputation since I’d left town. It never occurred to me I had support.
“So I guess you were right all along,” Mom brayed. “And your father was wrong. Times have changed and now everyone remembers your father as a bigot who won’t speak his daughter’s name.”
My face tingled with sharp prickles and waves of hot and cold. I hated to hear Rolling Green’s reputation had been tarnished. It hurt to hear my father had suffered. I mean, I’d suffered too, but I’d always known how my dad felt. It was me who’d lied about who I was.
“But you signed a contract, right? I mean, couldn’t you threaten to sue?”
Mom cut her eyes my way, disgusted. Of course. That would only draw attention to the fact the best bakery in the area didn’t want to do business with us. Still, I suspected once Mom found her way back to the top of the social ladder, King”s Bakery was going to pay.
The curtains fluttered and a breeze swirled through my childhood bedroom, warm and inviting, reminding me again of the best summer of my life. Downstairs, I had over a hundred and fifty invitations in my bag, envelopes meticulously addressed, ready to go. If we didn’t have a cake, we couldn’t have a wedding, right?
My heart leaped at the idea of even a temporary delay. But I was used to that kind of feeling and pushed it away. Stupid heart had never learned it didn’t call the shots for me anymore. I was going to marry Charlie. It was the smart thing to do.
“Well, what’s done is done,” Mom declared. “What we need now is someone who can produce the most beautiful wedding cake this town has ever seen and who has availability for your date. So drop whatever you planned to do today and help me find them.”