Chapter 7
C HAPTER 7
The Third Wedding
New Orleans
Three Years Ago
After the wedding in Yellowstone, there was something of an uneasy truce between Ryan and myself. A cease-fire, if you will. Nothing dramatic. It wasn’t like I stamped into the local coffee shop waving a white flag and marching around him in a circle while he tried to drink his latte, it was just that . . . things felt different. There was some ease there that I hadn’t experienced before. When he came over to play D I really was so excited to have that for my use, and then wandered out into the hotel lobby, where I encountered Ryan, and five members of the bridal party – the groom and his men – soaking wet and looking frantic.
“It’s gone,” the group was saying.
“What is?” Ryan pressed.
“Her ring,” the groom said. “And we are all supposed to meet soon. I am too fucking drunk to figure out where the fuck . . .”
“I’m sorry what?” I asked.
“He lost her ring,” Ryan said, looking at me.
“Where?”
“Somewhere on Bourbon Street.”
I imagined that Street, teeming with people, the ground sticky from hurricanes and vomit, and I couldn’t imagine a world where that ring hadn’t been either picked up, crushed, or kicked somewhere entirely off the beaten path.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked.
“No,” the group said, looking miserable. “She’s going to kill me. Because we went to—”
One of the groomsmen practically slapped his hand over his friend’s mouth.
“You guys are drunk,” Ryan said. “And if you want help finding it, you’re going to have to tell me where it was.”
“One of the strip clubs,” the groomsmen said.
“Are you fucking kidding me,” I said.
And then I felt bad, because they were drunk, and they needed help.
But I was shocked that Ryan was trying to offer help, because that didn’t seem in his wheelhouse. And anyway, he was the one that said he didn’t care about weddings.
But then, he had known the groom in high school, so maybe that was why it mattered.
They were friends, more or less.
And I had seen that Ryan could be loyal when things were upside down.
“You guys go sober up,” I said. “Ryan and I will go look. Give us a list of the places that you went to.” I shook my head. “Why the hell did you have the ring with you?”
“That was my fault,” said the best man. “I’ve been hanging onto it in my pocket, and then I let the stripper try it on . . .”
“Do not tell me that,” I said. “Don’t tell me that. Because I just can’t. I can’t know it.”
Thank God it wasn’t the groom who had done that, because that would’ve been instant divorce. Instant wedding cancellation. But still. There were things that I just needed to not have in my head, because if I did, I would never be able to look the bride in the face and not wear it right there in my expression.
“Why is there always a disaster?” I asked, as Ryan and I exited the revolving door of the hotel, and found ourselves out on the street.
“At least it isn’t a bear,” he said.
“I’m not sure if this is better.”
We stood under the awning for a second, rain sprinkling onto the canvas. It was dark out on the streets, other than the light from the gas lamps. On Bourbon Street, it would be brighter, even in this weather. Because while many of the revelers would have gone into the bars, they definitely wouldn’t have gone back to their rooms. People came to New Orleans to party.
I braced myself. “Are we really going out in that?”
It had clearly been raining harder earlier, but it was still sprinkling, and mist was rising up from the ground, adding to the soupy consistency of the air.
“I thought you were bound by honor to do anything for love?”
I looked up at him. “Yes, although, it is a little bit difficult to muster up enthusiasm for it when we have to do more than the groom.”
“Well, we could let the wedding fall apart.”
He sounded like he didn’t care either way.
“True,” I said. “We definitely could let the wedding fall apart. I also feel like perhaps that would be a poor showing for us.”
“After you,” he said.
I ran into the rain, bracing myself for the cold to hit me, even as the air around me remained warm and wet.
I heard Ryan’s footsteps moving quickly behind me, and we dashed around the corner, to Bourbon Street.
It was still filled with people, who didn’t seem to mind over much that it was sprinkling, or that they were now walking through puddles that were a cocktail of rainwater, alcohol and sick.
We stood there for a moment, and I laughed. Because it was just so absurd. Here I was, standing half a country away with Ryan Clark, in the damp.
“I’ll go across the street to the first bar they went to, you can go to that one.”
“Right. Where am I going to meet you?”
I looked around. “Over there,” I said, gesturing toward a street preacher. “Maybe he’ll save our souls.”
“Great. Meet you there for the sermon.”
I dashed over to the bar, and the first thing I did was ask at the counter if anyone had turned in a ring. The bartender laughed at me.
Then I began to search the floor, and didn’t see anything.
I had a feeling we were going to find it at the strip club. I just did. But it was best to check everywhere.
I walked out of the bar, and onto the busy street. There were people up on balconies above the bars, shouting and waving beads.
A woman next to me put her arm up, and some beads came sailing down toward her. I was under the impression that a person had to flash their tits to get beads. But if that wasn’t the case . . . I put my arm up and caught a bundle of red, green and gold beads myself.
I put them on, and continued on down the street. Because the whole thing was just . . . absurd. It felt like I had stepped into another dimension. Another time.
I scurried back across the street, over to where I had told Ryan I would meet him, and he came jogging up at nearly the same moment. He looked at me, his eyebrow raised.
“Oh,” I said, gesturing to my beads. “You want to know how I got them?”
Suddenly, the look on his face changed. “The usual way, I suppose.”
Well, I had just learned that the usual way was actually a lot less costly than I had been led to believe, but I wondered what he thought.
There was an intensity to his gaze, and it made me feel . . . something that I wasn’t familiar with at all. It wasn’t domestic. And it wasn’t . . .
I turned away from him. “No. Sadly. I’m very boring.”
“You’re not,” he said.
That was strange. Because I couldn’t think of anyone else who could stand there and look at me seriously and say that I wasn’t boring.
I was out on Bourbon Street in a rainstorm, so that wasn’t all that boring.
“Let’s just go to the strip club,” I said. “I have a feeling . . .”
“Yeah,” he said, his expression grim.
“You don’t have to go in,” I said.
He lifted a brow. “I’m okay to go in.”
Something about that made me feel uncomfortable. This acknowledgment of him as a man. That he might have, like, a sex drive and things.
But then, I didn’t tend to think over much about my own sex drive, so I didn’t exactly go around pondering the sex drive of others.
I was fine with sex.
But I was more interested in the other trappings of a relationship. The sex was sort of an incidental. Something nice, that kept me feeling connected to my significant other, sure. But my sex drive wasn’t a free roaming, disconnected entity. It existed in context with Josh. And that was it.
I told myself that aggressively as we carried on toward the club. The club itself was spilling out into the streets, with male and female revelers alike lifting their tops up in the rain and dancing outside.
The party atmosphere was decidedly electric tonight, and it was a lot different to experience it standing there with him versus when I had been wandering around on the outskirts of it by myself, barely dipping in it at all, not . . . in the thick of it as we were trying to get into the club.
Ryan and I soon were inside a darkened room with the well-lit stage, where women were . . . well, it was naked. It was fully naked. I clamped my knees together reflexively, and stole a look at him out of the corner of my eye.
He wasn’t looking. He seemed at ease. It gave me follow-up questions.
I wasn’t going to ask them right then.
We paid a cover charge at the door and we walked in further, and Ryan approached a waitress who was dressed in a black bra and short shorts. “This is kind of a strange question, and I’m sure that you’ve had a lot of bachelor parties in here tonight, but there was a group of men in here earlier who apparently let one of the dancers try on a wedding ring.”
The woman laughed. “Oh. No, I know exactly who you’re talking about. Those guys were very drunk.”
“Yeah.”
She shook her head. “We put the ring behind the bar. They dropped it.”
“Oh. Great. We need that.”
She looked at us. “Well, you weren’t with the group.”
“No,” I said. “We weren’t. I made the wedding cake. He’s the photographer. They were so drunk they couldn’t figure it out by themselves.”
“Yeah. That tracks.” She shook her head. “Well. If they come back and complain because I let you guys steal it . . . nothing. They were the dumbasses that lost their ring on Bourbon Street.”
“That’s kind of my feeling,” said Ryan.
She went behind the bar and produced a ring with a glinting diamond on it.
“Lord,” I said, the deep horror the whole situation left in the pit of my stomach overwhelming me then.
The only good thing was that the bride never had to know. Well, at least not until it was safely in the rearview mirror. We had headed the disaster off.
“Let’s get this back,” he said.
I nodded.
“You don’t want to stay for a dance?” the woman asked.
“I’m good,” I said.
We stepped out of the club, and it was pouring rain again. Like the sky had opened up and decided to dump everything down right here. Ryan gripped my hand, and started to run, my stomach getting left behind somewhere back at the club, the feeling of his strong hand around mine, and the odd exhilaration of everything that had just happened making me feel dizzy and fizzy.
We reached an awning just off the main drag, where it was quieter. And I looked up at him, his face half lit by the streetlamps.
He was beautiful.
My breath stopped for a moment, then my heartrate sped up.
He was beautiful.
I hadn’t really noticed that before. Yes, that he was good-looking. In an objective sense. But not in a way that was personal to me. It was that compartmentalizing thing that I was so good at. That was a survival skill I was pretty sure.
Right then, it wasn’t functioning. And I didn’t know if it was New Orleans, and the magic of it, dark or otherwise. If it was that we had just been in a strip club, where sexuality was unapologetically on display. Or even worse, if it was me.
If it was me, that was terrifying. If it was me . . . I had no idea what I was supposed to do with that.
He looked at me. But it was different. Different than every other way he’d ever looked at me before.
And I felt like I was standing suspended at the edge of something.
Time slowed. My body felt electric.
He moved, just slightly.
“Let’s go,” I said.
And I ran.
From underneath the awning, into the rain. I didn’t hold onto him anymore. I ran straight to the hotel. I didn’t look back.
I couldn’t.
We returned the ring. I hoped that I had imagined the tension that had just swelled up between us in the humid air. In the thunderstorm.
Because none of this was my life. Our lives. This was . . .
We had walked into a portal. That was all. I had let my guard down, and had found myself in a different reality.
But it wasn’t my world. It wasn’t us.
I repeated that to myself as I walked back to my room. We intersected each other in the hallway. We had come up in different elevators.
“Thank you,” I said. “For helping with that.” I was determined to be friendly. I was determined to keep us both on neutral ground.
“No problem,” he said.
“I just have to go call Josh,” I said.
It was a reminder. To him, and to me. And I was angry at myself for making it so clear that I wanted that reminder. That I needed it. Because maybe he hadn’t been in the same portal that I was in. Maybe I was experiencing all this alone.
It was possible.
He was back to being unreadable, and so I just went into my room and closed the door behind me.
I didn’t even call Josh. I just changed and went to bed.
The next morning, I pushed everything aside. Nothing had happened. And it didn’t mean anything.
I simply set to work on the cake, and then enjoyed the beautiful wedding, where none of the aftereffects of what happened the night before were on display. Where the bride and groom could pretend to be sober and chaste for her grandmother. Where there were rings for all, and no one had to know how fraught the night before had been. And I certainly didn’t have to think about it.
It was a genuinely beautiful wedding. And the cake had turned out amazing.
I watched Ryan take pictures, we were closer together in this indoor venue than we had been in some of the other weddings. I wondered how he had ended up neck deep in weddings when he just didn’t like them.
I was curious what pictures he had taken on his swamp trip. Did he photograph wildlife? Or scenery. Did he do all of it?
I had never really thought much about it. I knew he had traveled around. Of course I knew about the exhibition in Pineville, and had seen it, because everybody had.
Yet again, it had me asking myself whether or not I was the one who was the problem when it came to interactions between the two of us.
I wanted to thank him. I was weird last night, and that was really my issue. He didn’t need to suffer because I was being a head case about realizing he was handsome.
He didn’t deserve my standoffishness, or to be on the receiving end of weirdness when he hadn’t done anything.
So I just felt like I needed to thank him for the last two weddings.
For the fact that even though this wasn’t his thing, he was . . . he was the kind of guy that you really wanted to have on your side.
That was just true.
I watched him work with all the other people, and I saw an ease that I just never saw when he was with me. I wasn’t even sure that I saw that ease when he was with Josh.
I felt . . . strange about it. But again, I wasn’t going to project my weird feelings onto him. Or at least, I was going to do my best not to.
I finished serving the cake, and noticed that Ryan had slipped out of the reception hall.
I went out, and wandered through a couple of the other event rooms, which were empty.
And then I pushed open one of the doors, and there was Ryan. With one of the bridesmaids, pinned up against the wall. He was kissing her, and she had her leg up over his hip.
I had definitely never seen him in a moment like this before. And it scalded me.
I felt like somebody had reached inside of me and grabbed a hold of my guts and flung them out onto the ground.
I felt burned by it. I couldn’t even say why. But I couldn’t quite define the sensation that I was experiencing. Just rampant discomfort over watching my boyfriend’s best friend, who I had known since middle school in a sexual moment, or was it . . . was it about last night?
Suddenly, the bridesmaid realized that I was standing there.
“Oh,” she said.
And I turned and ran. As quickly as I possibly could. I didn’t want to see him see me, I didn’t want to make eye contact with him in that moment.
I . . . he was hooking up with the bridesmaid at a wedding. He was so condescending of all of this, and he was using it to get laid. And how many weddings had that been true of?
It just . . . it made me angry. And it made me feel like maybe my feelings about him had been right on the whole time.
I felt justified then. For judging him a long time ago, because I’d known.
A tragic backstory didn’t make him sympathetic.
He was just . . . the kind of man who was so cynical about love and life that with few exceptions every connection was about satisfying himself.
It’s why he was so bitter at me all the damned time.
I wasn’t a woman he could fuck so why bother to be nice? I wasn’t useful.
The words made my stomach ache, they made my ears ring, even though they’d only been in my head and no one had said them out loud.
I didn’t say good night to anyone. My job was done and I slipped out, went back to my room.
I took a shower and tried to wash the night off. But it clung to my skin like the humidity.
I slept like shit. When I got up in the morning, I didn’t see Ryan.
I didn’t want to see him anyway.