Chapter 10
C HAPTER 10
The Fourth Wedding
South Lake Tahoe
Eighteen Months Ago
The cease-fire Ryan and I had enjoyed after the great bear war was compromised after New Orleans. I’d seen him, of course. I’d gone out for drinks with Josh and we’d ended up with Ryan because we’d run into him at the bar. He’d come over to game a few times. I’d felt like he was firmly back in the category of Josh’s friend, and definitely not mine.
Which was fine.
And nothing I was worrying about as I drove to Lake Tahoe, because I had more pressing concerns.
This was a loaded location for me, and I’d been nervous leading up to it because I didn’t know if I’d have intense flashbacks to my childhood or anything. To the moment my mom had decided she was going to leave me with Gran so she could pursue her acting dreams without me hanging around.
I didn’t think I was sentimental about that moment in quite that way. I’d made peace with not spending my childhood with my mom, in the way that you could. I had issues from it, sure. But I wasn’t . . . sad about it. I loved Gran.
I was more worried about Gran memories feeling more heavy, more painful. The loss feeling more pronounced in this place where she’d first become my primary caregiver.
Josh was meeting me in Tahoe the day of the wedding – he couldn’t get time off to go early – and I decided to combat my road trip nerves with a loud playlist and my even louder singing, followed by a phone call to Josh once he was off work.
As soon as the clock rolled over to five, I pushed the phone button on my steering wheel and asked it to call him.
“Hey,” I said when he picked up.
“Hi. I miss you.”
That made my whole face warm. It didn’t matter how many years we were together, the way he needed me made me feel so . . .
Well, it made me feel good. Especially as I drove to the site of my parental abandonment for the first time as an adult.
“I miss you too,” I said, as I looked around the beautiful scenery, the last song on my personal playlist still lingering in my memory. The joy of solitude, I realized then. Choosing your own playlist.
“You doing okay? With the whole Tahoe thing?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I scrunched up my nose. “I’m just going to focus on the wedding. It isn’t like I have time to sightsee beforehand. But we can do a little of that in the couple days after the wedding.”
“I never get to travel with you. This will be fun.”
For some reason his words tangled up with a memory from New Orleans and it made my stomach go tight. It wasn’t a full memory. It was like a sensory feeling. A thunderstorm and heavy air and my breath being frozen in my lungs.
“Yeah,” I said, overly bright. “And this time I won’t be left alone with Ryan.” I hated myself for saying that. It was weird and not the kind of girlfriend energy I was trying to bring to the table. I did my best not to telegraph that Ryan and I had a weird and difficult relationship because why? He and Josh were friends. Best friends, even. Why would I make that weird?
There was a slight pause. “Yeah. I mean. I know it’s weird because he doesn’t like you.”
He. Didn’t. Like. Me.
You know that, why are you shocked?
Because it hadn’t felt like that. For a couple of years, it really hadn’t. I thought, for a while, that I’d won. That I’d convinced him I wasn’t so bad.
Even weirder, I’d assumed his dislike of me was so buried, so unspoken, that Josh – who was sweet but not an emotional mastermind – hadn’t noticed.
“Poppy?”
“Yes!” I said, smiling aggressively at my windshield.
“I’m sorry you know he doesn’t—”
“Totally,” I said, keeping the smile in place, because I would be damned if I sounded shocked or saddened by that statement.
“I just meant it must be weird having to work with him all the time.”
“Not weird,” I said. “He’s been not liking me since sixth grade.”
That was true. I let myself marinate on that. Sit with it. Let myself fully remember how – after obsessing about him when I’d first seen him in the restaurant – the first day he’d been at school, I’d bounded up to him with a bright smile and full of enthusiasm. He’d been so much taller than me, even then, and he’d looked at me with that same anger I’d seen the first time I’d encountered him.
But I was determined to blast through it with my cheerfulness.
Hi! You’re the new kid, Ryan, right? I’m Poppy.
He’d looked at me like I was a slug that had crawled out from under a rock and up onto his shoe, leaving a slime trail behind. Like I was a horror. Or worse, like he hated me.
Did you think I’d beg you to be my friend or something?
His question had shocked me.
No. I didn’t . . . I’m just saying hi. I’m being nice.
Oh, because it’s a nice thing to do? To talk to the foster kid?
N-no.
I’d wanted to tell him that I was like him. My mom didn’t want me either. But it was like he could see something in me I had always been afraid everyone would see someday. That my friendliness was fake. That it was just a desperate bid to get people to like me.
I don’t need a friend.
I’d left him alone that day, but it had been like a festering wound. A fear that if I couldn’t get that boy to like me, he’d eventually make everyone see I wasn’t likeable. That I didn’t belong.
So I’d tried. Over and over again.
Until the bowling ball.
Until I’d ruined it for good.
Until I’d started to accept that I couldn’t overcome a multi-generational feud.
And then it had been like freedom. Once there was a reason for him to dislike me, however stupid, I’d felt like it was okay. He could dislike me. And I never had to try to make him like me again.
So it had gone on for years.
Then I’d been stupid enough to think things had changed.
“He’s a good guy,” Josh said, suddenly sounding defensive. “It’s just . . . you know. His past kind of messed him up in some ways.”
So say we all.
An ironic conversation to have as I rolled into Tahoe, the site of much of my own childhood trauma.
Feeling all upset about a guy not liking me, when I didn’t need him to like me. Behold, my own messed up .
“You’re coming in at around three on Saturday?” I asked, eager to change the subject.
We finished the phone call right as I pulled up to the vacation block that had been rented out for the bridal party and wedding crew.
I made sure to bring all of my food ingredients into the cabin before anything else, because I did not truck with bears. And never would again.
Then I grabbed my overnight bag, and walked up the steps into the quaint little cabin. It was markedly different to the one I’d stayed at in Yellowstone. Newer, more modern. I liked both.
I did my best to not ruminate on the conversation I’d just had with Josh. I was a champion ruminator. My mind ping ponged to my mom, my grandma, as I explored the cabin and started organizing my baking supplies.
All those things were connected. Why it made me feel sick to my stomach that Ryan didn’t like me, and my mom taking me on vacation in Lake Tahoe to meet Gran, buying me ice cream, and telling me I wasn’t going home with her. I was going with Gran.
I stood in the middle of the kitchen for a moment, frozen in place.
I had been better off with Gran.
Gran had been a great maternal figure to me.
And my mom had been successful. Though only after she’d given me up.
Had she been wrong? If she’d needed to not have me to live her dreams, was that a worthy sacrifice?
It was just that it meant I didn’t have my mom. It was just that it meant my mom was better off without me, and I very likely was better off without her. It was a difficult pill to swallow and always had been.
Because everybody wanted to have a mom, I supposed. The kind that you are supposed to have. The kind that mine played on TV.
But never in real life.
And I’d been left to feel like there was something wrong with me. Something that had made me fundamentally not enough. Which was the full circle that brought me back to Ryan, and his instant dislike of me, and why it haunted me this many years later.
I let out a hard breath that sounded a lot like a dying wildebeest and decided to do something to stop the endless thought churn I was trapped in. I found a restaurant on UberEats and ordered myself a burger and fries and while I waited I started plotting out my baking plan.
I was excited because it was a pink cake, that was going to be strawberry flavored, and it was one of my favorite things to make. Because it was bursting with flavor, and provided all the natural pink color that you could want.
There. Just like that, I was back in the present where there were plenty of good things to focus on, and I didn’t have to wrestle with existential questions about my childhood.
My food arrived and when I poked my head out the door to grab the bag, I saw Ryan’s truck parked in the driveway next to mine.
How did this keep happening? I was haunted by this man and his disdain.
But then it was like New Orleans inside me again. Like a thunderstorm and nothing quite as simple as dislike.
I took a shower, and changed into sweats, because I was in for the night, and then started getting out all of the ingredients for my cake.
I began cutting the tops off the strawberries, putting them into a pot with sugar to mash and reduce them, so that they could flavor the cake without adding a surplus of extra liquid. I had always found baking to be therapeutic. Distracting.
I put the butter and sugar into the mixing bowl and turned it on, the whir of the motor steady. When I was a kid, I’d like to sneak a taste of the creamed butter and sugar. Better still if the eggs had been added. I laughed to myself as I added the eggs and vanilla.
It had horrified Gran that I’d liked to taste the batter at that stage. She’d told me off every time I sneaked a fingerful, tutting about e coli and other dangers.
I whisked together the dry ingredients. I knew cakes by heart. Cake flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder.
It grounded me in the moment.
The smell, the textures of everything, the opportunity to taste different stages of batter and frosting and filling.
I had just gotten my cake layers into the oven when I looked up out the window of the cabin and saw Ryan. It was dark outside, and with the lights on over in his cabin, the view was a glorious beacon that I couldn’t ignore.
He was walking through the kitchen and living area of that cabin, shirtless. I felt my jaw go slack. I couldn’t look away. My heart started to beat faster, at first from the visual, but then from panic.
His chest was broad and well defined, with a smattering of dark hair over his pecs, going down his washboard abs, which I could see from the next cabin over, which meant they must be absolutely insane close up.
But the panic wasn’t from that. It was from the physical reaction that it created in my body that I could no longer ignore, mislabel or deny.
I was attracted to Ryan Clark.
It was why I was so angry about what had happened in New Orleans.
It was why I had stopped breathing when we were underneath that awning in the French Quarter.
It was why I felt betrayed.
By him kissing that other woman. By him acting like we hadn’t fought a bear war, or run in the rainy French Quarter streets every time we saw each other this part year.
I was stunned by this realization that couldn’t matter. How long had I felt like this?
It couldn’t matter because I had Josh.
I had Josh and I loved him, and he was the one I was planning on spending the rest of my life with.
But I was attracted to Ryan.
“No,” I said.
I said it out loud even, because it was just too much, as I stood there still, frozen and looking at his body.
Then he looked up, and his eyes met mine. Through the glass, across the expanse outside. I felt it. I felt it hit me straight in the chest like a freight train.
I turned away from the window, my heart pounding so hard I could barely breathe. My movements so obvious that there was no way he couldn’t know exactly why I’d turned so sharply.
I moved around the corner of the kitchen and leaned against the wall, my hand pressed to my rapidly beating heart.
And I worked to untangle the horror inside of me.
Of course, I lived in the world, I was realistic. There were other attractive men besides my boyfriend. Who I thought was cute. Thank you.
But it wasn’t this .
This had teeth. Teeth that had been sunk into me for I didn’t know how long.
Okay. This was the problem. I had accepted that there would be other men in this world that I would find attractive. But there was a line between attractive . . . and attracted to. Because of the incident in New Orleans I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t the latter.
And that was terrifying. Because that went against everything that I wanted, everything that I was.
It felt like danger.
Danger in the streets of my hometown. Danger here, away from everyone and everything.
Good thing he doesn’t like me.
Right.
He didn’t like me. He didn’t suffer from the same affliction. That much was clear. He had been up that bridesmaid’s skirt two hours after I had experienced a breathless meltdown in the streets of New Orleans. And every day since he’d acted like nothing had ever happened at all.
It didn’t have to mean anything.
It wasn’t going to mean anything.
I would never do anything, act on, linger on, these feelings.
It wasn’t healthy, it wasn’t sane.
And I was going to pretend that I hadn’t seen him like that, and that I hadn’t felt what I did.
I waited until I absolutely had to go check on my cake layers in the oven. And when I dashed out into the kitchen, I was relieved to see that his curtains were closed downstairs, and the lights were off.
But then I wondered if he was upstairs. If he was going to bed. If he had taken off any more clothes . . .
I stopped that train of thought. Hard.
I wasn’t going to think about Ryan Clark or what state of undress he might be in.
I had a cake to bake. I had a life back home.
I had never understood the concept of enemies to lovers. Because for me, a relationship had always come with feelings first. A sense of safety.
I had never been able to understand how animosity could be a thinly veiled cloak hiding attraction between two people. The worst thing was, I still didn’t understand it. I could only marinate in the realization that for me, it was apparently a thing. And I hadn’t known it until it had gotten obvious and half-dressed.
It explained the horrible, sick feeling that I’d had when I had seen him kissing that other woman. Because then I had known what he looked like when he was kissing. When he wanted somebody.
And it was in my head.
It wasn’t as simple as wanting to be in her place. I didn’t think I wanted to be in her place.
Even knowing that I was attracted to him, I didn’t think that’s what I had been responding to. Or why I had reacted that way.
It was . . .
It could never be jealousy. Because I wanted what I had. I didn’t want him.
Maybe that was part of the tangled, nuanced aspects of physical attraction that I had never had to parse before.
I was attracted to him. It was specific. Not theoretical. That was bad.
But I didn’t want him.
Because we didn’t mesh. Because he was the opposite of safe.
Because he was difficult.
That wasn’t what I wanted my life to be.
There was another sort of person who might blow up all of their safety, all of their security, for that level of intensity. But it wasn’t me.
Because I had experienced too many explosions in my life when I was younger to ever willfully cause one as an adult.
I finished the cake, continually repeating these new truths in my head, because when I saw Orion tomorrow I couldn’t be stammering or blindsided. Because I needed to accept it so that I could process it and move on. Like this was a trauma I had experienced that I needed to apply therapy to it.
Well. It was a trauma that I had experienced.
But I could get over it.
It wasn’t maternal abandonment.
It wasn’t the death of my grandmother.
It was just an inconvenient heart flutter.
I slept fitfully, and when I got up in the morning, ready to get the cake loaded up and put into the car, I ended up stopping mid-motion.
I’m attracted to Ryan.
“Okay,” I said. “Get it out of your system, Poppy.”
I put it in the back of my car, and did not leave it unattended, as I drove to the wedding venue.
And I asked for a sign from my grandmother. To sort me out. To let me know that she was there. To make me feel something other than turmoil.
She had always told me that I could ask for a sign after she left.
I hadn’t done it, because I didn’t want to bother her. Because she said that, but I could also see her being as cranky in the afterlife as she had been in this one.
But I asked.
I pulled up to the wedding venue just as somebody picked up a long folding table and swung it around, moving it abruptly. My eye went straight to the table, and I continued to ease forward a few feet. Until I saw movement out the driver side window. And heard a harsh curse.
It was Ryan. Right there, next to my driver side window.
I rolled the window down in a panic. “Did I run over your foot?”
“No,” he said, his face like granite. “Just my camera lens.”
“ Oh .”
My first thought was Gran moved quickly.
Fuck this man and his abs , she’d said, and struck his camera lens dead.
I didn’t know why she had chosen to act in the form of re-creating the sixth-grade science fair, but it definitely seemed like a reminder.
Of who we were.
Of why it was never going to be anything but this.
“Why was it on the ground?” I asked. I practically wailed because I hadn’t wanted for things to go like this.
He leaned in just slightly, and I felt the air exit my lungs. “It wasn’t. It was on that table. Because I was changing lenses, and then they moved it. And it fell on the ground.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I said.
“Do you really think I’m immature enough to think that you did?”
I had thought that he had mangled my cake on purpose.
But I realize that’s what he was referring to.
That I was immature, and he wasn’t.
“No. Of course not.”
That was all the reminder I needed.
This was who we were. This mess of crushed camera lenses, ruined solar systems, and irritation.
We were not a rainy night in New Orleans. We were not whatever had happened to me last night.
“Do you need help with . . .?”
“No. I don’t need your help with anything.”
He picked up the shattered camera lens, and I rolled up my window.
“Thanks for the help, Gran.”
I meant it.
After that I set up, while trying to keep myself from having a breakdown about everything that had just happened. From last night to that moment. Josh was actually coming to this wedding because he knew the groom from high school. Quinn was in the wedding, and I needed to keep everything together.
I saw Quinn dash by at some point.
“How did everything go with the pictures?”
“Fine. Why?”
I shook my head. “As long as it was fine. It’s not important.”
Then I worked at getting everything set and ready for when it was time for me to cut the cake.
At that point, Josh appeared, while the bridal party was still off getting photos taken.
He kissed my cheek, and I felt my stomach twist with guilt.
I shouldn’t feel guilty. I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I had just . . . noticed Ryan when he was shirtless. And grappled with some unflattering truths about myself. But it was just . . . it was what it was.
“I’m excited that I finally get to see you do your thing,” he said.
I felt something in me soften. He was supportive. He was a good boyfriend. And feelings were just feelings. Looking at a man who was aesthetically pleasing was just that.
And so was running over his camera lens.
I had Josh. And that was what mattered.
Everything went smoothly after that. Serving the cake, the reception. Ryan was taking photos on the periphery, but I felt like he kept more of a distance during cake photography than normal.
He was mad at me.
I couldn’t really blame him.
I ended up sitting with Quinn, and some of the other bridesmaids, raising a glass to the bride and groom.
“Drinks are on me, Poppy,” she said, making her way toward the bar. “Because you did exquisite work today, and should I ever get married I’ll need you to make my cake.”
“Should you get married, I’ll be the last one standing.”
“You’ll probably get married before me,” Quinn said. “You and Josh have been together forever.”
Seven years. But I didn’t feel like we were any closer to marriage now than we had been the day we’d moved in together. Why change what wasn’t broken? Why do something as drastic as say wedding vows and linked taxes? It seemed excessive.
“I’m not in a hurry. Besides, I go to more weddings a year than anyone I know. I’ve had my fill of weddings.”
“I’m sure he goes to as many as you do. If not more.”
He.
“Sure,” I said.
Then, it was like her statement conjured him up. Out of thin air.
Because there he was, striding toward the bar – and maybe us – with intent and intensity. A hallmark of his entire . . . thing. It irritated me. We were at a wedding. Well, the afterparty. It wouldn’t kill him to smile.
Except then he did, and I’d never be able to explain the reaction I had to it.
It shifted his whole face.
I’d known him since sixth grade. It wasn’t like I’d never seen him smile.
But on his thirty-year-old face, it seemed new.
And I found myself smiling back.
Only to realize he hadn’t been smiling at me. Or heading my way at all.
He stopped at the bar and clapped a man sitting there on the back, who stood and greeted him like they were long lost brothers.
“Who is that?”
Quinn was looking over at Ryan and his friend with very intense interest.
I wanted to say something cutting and clever about the fact that he was clearly someone important because he’d made Ryan, of all people, smile, like an actual human man and not a robot; or maybe something about how I couldn’t possibly know if Quinn didn’t know.
Instead, I managed a shrug.
And Quinn marched right over there as I shrugged, so I had to hurry and follow along.
“Hi, Ryan,” she said.
This time, Ryan did look at me. And then back at Quinn. “Hi, Quinn.” He looked at me again. Then at the man sitting at the bar. “Quinn,” he paused for a beat, “this is Noah.”
And Quinn looked lit up. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Josh joined us then, beer in hand. “This must be Noah!”
Why did he know who Noah was? Oh right, because he and Ryan were friends. And Ryan didn’t like me.
“Yeah that’s me,” said Noah, who everyone now knew but me.
“Josh,” said Josh.
“Ah, good to meet you, mate!”
Ryan looked at me. “Noah was my roommate in college. In New Zealand. Noah, this is . . . Poppy.”
No explanation of me and Noah didn’t have that same spark of recognition he’d had when Josh had introduced himself. Because Ryan didn’t like me.
“Nice to meet you.” I looked around the group and I could see that Quinn was completely felled by the beauty of that man, and he was gorgeous, so I couldn’t blame her.
But I had Josh.
And I was attracted to Ryan.
Who didn’t like me.
Oh God, I was going to have to scoop my brain out and put it in rice or something because it was short circuiting.
“I’m going to go get a round of drinks,” I said. “Who wants a drink?” I looked around the group. “Drinks?”
A few hands went up and I nodded in the affirmative and migrated to the other end of the bar. The bartender came over and I smiled. “Can I get a round of whatever you have on draft for the group down there?” I gestured toward the knot of people at the other end of the bar.
“I can help you carry drinks back.”
I turned around and Ryan was standing far too close. I hadn’t expected it. Or him. “Go visit with your friend,” I said.
“It’s fine.”
“No. No. I . . .” I bit the inside of my cheek.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Why hold back now?” he said. “You usually have no trouble speaking your mind with me.”
Wasn’t that a weird truth. I had a lot of trouble with it with most people, but not him. Because the damage was done already with him. Because there was no saving us.
“Fine. I don’t get why you are helping me when you don’t like me.”
He paused. “What?”
“Yeah, I hear you don’t like me.”
His dark blue eyes shone with that same hardness I’d seen all those years ago. When we were kids and he’d hated me on sight, but for some reason it felt different now.
And then he took a step toward me, and I couldn’t breathe. It was too much like New Orleans, and too much like the realization I’d had in the kitchen earlier today and I wanted to run away.
Because I had Josh. Because he was wonderful and safe and he liked me, and Ryan didn’t, so why did he get to make me feel this way?
But I didn’t step back.
“Here you go.”
The bartender slid five glasses down the bar in front of us and Ryan reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet, putting his card on the bar top.
“I offered to get the drinks,” I said.
“I got it,” he said.
Then he picked up three of the glasses, balancing them like an alcoholic triangle in his hands, his forearm brushing mine and sending a sharp shock through my body.
He turned away and walked back to the group.
He didn’t like me. But Josh did. Quinn did. Hell, maybe Noah would. There was no point in wasting my time worrying about Ryan.
Josh looked up, and his eyes caught mine.
It was a reminder that I had what I needed already.