For the Bride

Chapter Fourteen

Fourteen

I read Gin’s text on the bus home from work—my second shift back since the Cold Sweat session.

Aidan has yet to mention how things went with my former band, which is fine.

Preferable, actually. As is, I’m slapped with reminders of their upcoming Chicago show at every turn—the posters, the targeted ads.

But I have enough to worry about without agonizing over a band I’m no longer a part of.

For example: this massive, ultraspecific list of wedding requests.

I fear that our bride may have overcorrected, but Renee asked for specifics, and she certainly won’t be disappointed.

As promised, Gin sends links and reference pictures to guide us, then instructions for the terrarium project, which looks doable, albeit messy.

It’ll take up most of a Saturday, and…how many Saturdays do we even have left?

I swipe open my calendar and count off the weeks—six, seven…

eight. Eight weeks until Gin and Rishi walk down the aisle, and we have zero of the required vintage rugs to create said aisle.

On my second read of the list, I feel myself sinking into it, like I’m being lowered into a hot, bubbling cauldron of the feeling—that anything for the bride feeling I’ve been afflicted with since the engagement dinner.

But it’s different now. I’m more determined.

Beneath the obligation, there’s a thrilling undercurrent, a scavenger hunt–adjacent rush.

It can only mean one thing: I’ve being sucked into the wedding vortex, where everything else is irrelevant.

I don’t realize I’ve missed my bus stop until we’ve passed it, and it feels like divine timing that I look up just as we lurch to a stop at Village Thrift.

It’s like the list is in charge now, directing my steps off the bus and through the automatic doors into a cloud of thrift-store smell—a distant whiff of a musty basement shaded with ammonia.

I reach for a basket, then stagger back when I spot a familiar profile near the used books—a gently upsloped nose and full lips, blond hair twisted back with loose tendrils framing her face.

Renee leans against a bookshelf, eyes skating over the pages of a worn hardcover.

When I’m close enough to read the title of the book, a laugh fires out of me like a shot from a cannon.

Renee startles, eyes wide and wild at first, then softer when our gazes catch.

She tucks Controlling the Controllables: A Guide to Inner Peace beneath her arm and smooths her sleeveless linen blouse in her signature red.

A second laugh flies out of me when she glances down at her slingback kitten heels and, more notably, the shopping basket beside them piled high with green cloth napkins.

“Is something funny, Alice?” Renee arches a brow.

“Oh, nothing.” I nudge her basket with the toe of my sneaker. “Nice napkins. Are there thirty of them?”

I watch for Renee’s signature eye roll. Instead, a smirk toys with the corner of her lips, and a pleasant shiver rolls through me. I grab a basket of my own and try to match her pace as Renee patrols the fluorescent aisles of secondhand housewares.

“So the list,” I say.

“The list,” she echoes, then clicks her tongue once. “I told Gin to be specific, but who knew she’d take it so far?”

No sooner has she said it than Renee snaps her mouth shut in resignation. Because this is Gin we’re talking about. Going above and beyond is all that she knows. Now it’s on us to do the same.

With an hour until Village Thrift closes, Renee and I narrow our focus.

Tablecloths. Tonight, we are only looking for tablecloths.

We scour the racks of linens, discussing the subtle difference between eggshell and ivory.

Village Thrift has neither. In fact, they have no tablecloths at all, only bedsheets that fool us again and again.

“This store has given me a stick-on handlebar mustache, cowgirl boots, and a dozen neon swimsuits,” I list off. “But tablecloths? That’s where they’re drawing the line?”

“We could come back on Tuesday when they restock,” Renee suggests.

“Controlling the controllables. Did your book teach you that?”

This earns me that eye roll I was looking for, but she pairs it with a smile. “The joke will be on you,” she insists, “when I achieve inner peace. Just you wait.”

She certainly has a long way to go, though. When we file into the checkout line, Renee is visibly anxious about leaving with only the napkins. She spins her rings while perusing the list, which she’s already pasted into a note on her phone.

“We’re gonna be fine.” My hand instinctually floats to the space between her shoulder blades, but I pull it away. “This was just the first, super-spontaneous shopping trip. We’ll plan better for the next one.”

“We just don’t have a lot of time,” Renee mutters, and she’s right, but she’s forgetting something critical. Our secret weapon of connections.

“We have something better than time,” I remind her. “We have Chrissy.”

Renee’s laugh is like the shake of a tambourine, and it shimmers through me, spilling goose bumps down my arms. It’s such a good laugh. Hard to earn, which makes it that much sweeter.

When the line shifts forward, she sidesteps closer to me, and I breathe in her clean scent. Eucalyptus, I think? It’s a delicious disruption from the musty thrift-store smell.

“I always thought you were funny, you know.” Renee bumps my thigh with the shopping basket. “I just didn’t know you could also be…” Her eyes slit as she searches for the word, and my brain butts in with a hundred dangerous suggestions. Sexy. Irresistible. “Thoughtful?” she says.

I clear my throat. “Interesting. I always thought you were both a total bitch and deeply unfunny.”

Renee snorts. “And now?”

“Now?”

“Yeah. What do you think now?” Her mouth quirks up, and there’s a glimmer in the crinkled corners of her cool blue eyes.

The longer I look at her, the higher the tide inside me rises.

What do I think now? I can’t tell her that.

I’m not even sure—it’s just an inkling. The early stages of a feeling I think I recognize, but it’s been so long.

Renee tucks back a stray blond tendril, and I follow her fingers, the way they brush against the shell of her ear. Gently. Intentionally. Something pulses inside me.

Finally, I say, “I’m still deciding.”

Outside, the dark has settled on a truly perfect Chicago summer night, the warm, breezy kind that should serve as a blueprint for the entire season. The rain has washed away so much of early summer; I can hardly believe it’s already July.

“I can take these.” Renee nods to the grocery bag of napkins in my grip.

Her apartment is just down the block, but she goes out of her way to walk me to the bus stop: A small gesture but it swells inside me, fueling the fire every time her arm brushes against mine.

It makes me wonder if I’m not the only one with an inkling.

I’m fighting for my life to combat the urge to say something like—hey, Renee, you’re walking pretty close to me.

Want to tell me what that’s about? But if I speak up, I’m sure she’ll stop, like this was all an accident she’ll take care to avoid from now on.

“So Tuesday,” Renee says, snapping me back to the world of logistics.

“Tuesday,” I repeat. “What time are you off work?”

Her stride breaks for half a pace. “It…kinda depends.”

“Oh…okay?” I look at her sideways. “Is it safe to plan for six o’clock?”

“Yeah, but…” Her face twists up. “I’ll just text you when I’m on the way home, okay?”

Renee finds her pace again, but I can’t get a read on her. She pins her focus across the street, toward home, and something spins inside me, a reversal. This is all backward. Shouldn’t Renee be trying to hammer down the details while I’m the one dodging specifics?

“You know, for such a planner, you don’t know your own schedule very well,” I tease, but Renee just rolls her eyes.

And then she hugs me goodbye.

Renee and I have never hugged. I’m not sure what moves her to do it now, but her arms fold around my neck, the bag of napkins rustling between my shoulder blades.

It’s a soft breeze compared to the thunder of my pulse.

My cheek presses to Renee’s soft shoulder, and I breathe her in—eucalyptus and clean cotton sheets, exactly the smell of our room in Palm Springs.

I had attributed it to the hotel, but I guess it was her.

That gentle, comforting scent was Renee all along.

By the end of the week, Chrissy has secured ten terrariums from a client, because of course she has.

I have to pick them up, though, along with the four rugs she gets from “her rug guy.” As the only bridesmaid who doesn’t work nine to five, I spend my days off from Gentle Giant zipping around the city in my truck-turned-mobile-storage-unit.

There’s no time to practice bass or work on my own projects or anything else these days—the wedding pulls every second of my free time.

At least that’s what I tell myself every time I swipe away a text from Mom like it’s a spam email.

I don’t have the energy to work through those feelings right now.

As planned, Renee and I return to Village Thrift to shop the restock—she texts me when she’s on her way, but she doesn’t arrive in work clothes. Her wine-red sports bra peeks out from beneath a half-zipped black hoodie, her bike shorts tight as a second skin.

“Gym?” I guess.

“What? Oh.” She toys with the zipper on her sweatshirt. “Sort of.” She tips her head toward the store. “Shall we?”

“Yes, and shall we discuss where you came from, or are you being vague for a reason?”

I don’t mean to come right out with it, and when Renee’s eyes dart away, I feel the blood drain from my face.

“Sorry. Ignore that. That was an inside thought that just flew out.”

Inside, Renee bends to grab a shopping basket, then turns to me, visibly perplexed. “What do you mean flew out?”

“Just what it sounds like. I’m not always making a conscious decision to say something. Sometimes it’s…sort of like a sneeze? It has to come out.”

Her nose scrunches. “That sounds…made up,” she admits.

“I know. I wish it was. Instead, I get to feel bad about this shit forever. Like in Palm Springs when I made that comment to Chrissy about her filler melting in the heat? That was mean.”

“That was…funny,” Renee admits.

“And that’s the problem,” I say. “Because sometimes, people laugh. It’s funny—ha ha, Alice says what everyone else is thinking. And then other times, I’m annoying or I’m rude. Like when we were dress shopping and I kept blurting stuff out and pissing you off.”

Renee purses her lips and opens them with a pop. “I…may have been a bit hard on you,” she admits. “I was mad that you had offered me a ride and then slept through my calls and—”

“And I still feel awful,” I interrupt.

“But,” Renee cuts back in. “I slept through my alarms in Palm Springs, so I suppose it happens to the best of us.”

“I’d still be happy to pay you back for that Uber,” I remind her.

“And I’d still be happy to pay you back for the expenses you covered in Palm Springs,” she counters. “Also the napkins. Maybe we should work out a system for who’s paying for what on this shopping list?”

“Maybe,” I murmur, but I know once we get to the counter, I’ll be quick on the draw to put my credit card down.

Dad’s drinking budget might have put a sizable dent in my inheritance, but Renee worries about money in a way I never have, and it’s worth the expense just to keep that worrying to a minimum. For her and for me.

On the hunt for water glasses, Renee and I sort through shelf after freshly cluttered shelf, but it’s a minefield of vases—some tall, some squat, all plain and likely left over from gifted floral arrangements.

I must’ve donated a dozen just like these after Dad passed.

I turn over a squat square vase in my hands, wondering if it could somehow be one of mine—if we shared an apartment at one point, this vase and I.

My chest hollows and slowly refills with pressure, familiar and unwelcome.

That’s the funny thing about grief. You run into her everywhere, even in thrift-store aisles.

I’m mentally slipping into inky black quicksand when whatever tune is playing through the store speakers fades into the start of a new song.

A guitar strums its bright, twangy opening chords, and my chest lifts. It feels like a welcome visitor.

“Do you know this song?” I tilt my chin toward the sound.

Renee shakes her head. “I didn’t even realize there was music playing.”

We’re quiet for a few bars, and my insides tense as the first verse sets in. “Willin’ ” by Little Feat.

“I was named after this song,” I whisper.

I press a finger to my lips, then point up toward the speakers on the lyric about “Dallas Alice.” Renee hears it, and her eyes crinkle, but she doesn’t say anything.

She just listens—both to me and the music.

“Dad always called me that,” I tell her.

“Dallas Alice. Even though neither of us had any connection to Texas. But this was his lullaby for me. Well, this and all the songs off Songs for Alice.”

A small smile plays across Renee’s lips. “I love that.”

“It’s also like…” I scratch my neck. “Maybe it’s not the best lullaby. It’s a song about long-haul truck drivers doing drugs to make it through a shift.”

She shrugs. “That’s what most music is about, though. Right?”

“Drugs?” I ask skeptically.

“Making it through.”

Renee holds my gaze with a gentle intensity, and I feel like I might fall if she drops it, like the floor will split open and swallow us both.

As the second chorus kicks in, Renee hooks her pinkie around mine, like a link in a chain, and I feel rooted by something larger and stronger than I’ve felt in a very long time.

A sense of belonging. We stand, interlocked, just as still as any two dusty figurines on the shelf, until the last chord rings out and my eyes well up with tears.

Not happy tears but not sad ones either.

I don’t really know what this feeling is, but Renee doesn’t let me feel it alone.

She doesn’t let go, not even when the next song starts.

Not even when an employee swings by to ask if we need any help.

“We’re okay, thanks,” Renee says in a voice so sweet I could crumble. But I think she’s right. We’re okay. With her, I’m okay.

Dad—how did you know you were falling for Mom?

Love,

Your Dallas Alice