37. Blooming Apricot #3
I go still. It's such a simple question and it opens a trapdoor under me. I look at him for a long, honest minute, longer than the banter can hold, and then I hear myself say it, quiet and certain and truer than almost anything I've said all week.
"No."
He doesn't fill the silence. He just waits, giving me the room, the way he does.
"Truthfully? I never wanted a big wedding.
" The words come easier once they start.
"The huge affair, the four hundred guests, the family name spelled out in ten-foot letters — that was never mine.
That was my father's dream. His and my mother's.
A wedding to show the whole world exactly how important the Whitlocks are.
" My mouth twists. "I plan those weddings for a living.
I know precisely what they cost and precisely what they hide.
And after being left standing at one — humiliated in front of an entire town with a bouquet wilting in my hands — why on God's earth would I ever want to do the spectacle again?
" I shake my head. "If it were mine, really mine?
I'd want small. Private. Only the people who actually matter, in a room that actually means something.
I don't care about flash. I've never once cared about flash.
I'd just want to feel valued. Worthy. Intimate and intentional and real.
" My voice goes soft. "By the time the world found out, it'd already be done.
We'd be off on a honeymoon nobody could photograph, living wherever we chose, and the only people who'd know the address are the ones who earned it. "
I don't realize how long I've kept that particular wish underwater until it surfaces, dripping, in the middle of my own ransacked office.
I've never said it to a living soul. Not to the girls.
Not even to my own reflection. It felt too much like tempting fate — wanting a small, true thing after the big false one blew up in my face on a church lawn.
Saying it out loud to Sawyer, watching him take it in without a single flinch, feels dangerous in a way I don't have a name for.
Sawyer is quiet for a moment. When he nods, it's slow, and there's something reverent in it.
"That," he says, "sounds pretty damn nice, actually."
I feel the blush climb my neck and I latch onto the joke to survive it.
"You're future-bombing me. You realize that?
Ten minutes ago you had me pregnant, and now you've got me eloped.
What's next?" I poke his chest. "Are you at least going to let me visit a tarot reader before you plan my entire remaining life?
Let a woman with cards have a little input? "
He laughs, catches my poking hand, and kisses me — slow, warm, tasting faintly of the coffee I couldn't stomach this morning.
"I could be persuaded," he murmurs against my mouth.
"There's a reader coming with the fair, actually.
Sets up a little tent by the water. We should go.
Let her turn your cards over and tell you everything I already know. "
"Oh my God." I roll my eyes, delighted despite myself. "A knot in the cards. Get it? Knot." I waggle my eyebrows at my own joke like a lunatic. "Knot. Because we're—"
"Knot in the Wedding Cards," Sawyer finishes, deadpan, and I snort.
The joke's older than either of us. It's what Marlowe and Juniper started calling this whole circus of mine months back, when it was still a punchline instead of a life — a knot in the wedding cards, four alphas and one very tired omega and a deck that keeps dealing me the same impossible hand.
I never once thought I'd be the woman who found it funny.
Turns out I am. Then his smile turns wry, and he tucks a curl behind my ear.
"Though I'll say this. Right now, out of the whole hand you were dealt, there's exactly one alpha standing here actually proving that theory true.
" He lets it land gently, no venom in it, just fact.
"So I figure we run with the one who showed up. See where the cards fall."
My grin fades a little at the edges. He didn't say Cade. He didn't have to. The empty seat is loud even when nobody names it.
I glance at the seating chart on my desk, then back up at him, and I lower my voice like the walls might carry it. "Sawyer. Do you think — honestly — do you think he's the one letting things slip?"
He doesn't answer.
He just steps in and wraps both arms all the way around me and holds on, chin settling on top of my head, and the not-answering is its own kind of answer, one neither of us is brave enough to say in a room with this many windows. After a moment he squeezes once and lets me go.
"Let me go get you your award-winning pickle concoction," he says, "before you gnaw through a fabric swatch."
I laugh, wet and grateful, because he's giving me the exit again, brushing the ugly thing aside so I can breathe.
"Thank you, Sawyer," I say, and I mean it about more than the pickles.
I mean it about the way he keeps turning up as a light in the middle of all this chaos, a steady warm glow to read the path by when everything else has gone dark and loud.
He pauses at the door. Then he comes back — just to cup my face in both his big hands, tilt it up, and look at me like I'm something worth looking at.
"You're the blossoming tree, Amber," he says, low and certain. "The one that bears fruit — love and longing and every blessing this sorry town doesn't deserve. I just get to stand under it. That's the whole job. Be here to remind you what a stunning gift you are, every single time you bloom."
Heat floods my whole face. "That's disgustingly poetic," I manage.
"I contain multitudes." He kisses me once more, quick and sweet, and finally lets himself out, the little bell over the door jingling behind him.
Then it's just me, standing alone in the beautiful wreckage of my office, surrounded by seating charts and swatches and the ghost of magnolia, staring down at a week's worth of plans that are about to move very, very fast. My hand drifts, without my permission, to my stomach. Flat. Ordinary. Mine.
Pregnant. The word tries the door.
I let it knock. I even let myself picture it for one reckless second — a positive stick, four stunned alphas, a nursery painted the color of the roses I carry to other women's weddings.
The image is so warm it startles me. Then I set it down, gently, the way you set down a photograph that was never yours to keep.
I know better. I know the actual medicine of it — Dr. Greene sat me down years ago and walked me through my own body, the fertility numbers that run extremely low on a good day, the blockers she confirmed carry contraceptive weight on top of everything else.
Two locks on one door. There's no version of the math where this is real.
I've done a lot of math today. This one isn't close.
"Nah," I say out loud, to the eucalyptus and the RSVP cards and nobody at all. "Impossible."
I smirk, knowing this is just an amusing end to the week.