Other People’s Weddings

Chapter 12

C HAPTER 12

It snowed on the day of the wedding. It was perfectly beautiful, and perfectly terrifying to think I had to get the cake to Jack’s Retreat in the weather.

Luckily the rental cars had four-wheel drive and there was a gorgeous tent with heaters inside for the reception.

Nobody would freeze. The cake made it just fine. Everything was fine.

I was more nervous than usual, pulling double duty, and still feeling a little bit off kilter from the confrontation with Ryan, that shouldn’t have even been a confrontation. In a way he had been defending me. In another way . . . it hadn’t felt like defense. It had felt like he was calling me out. Attacking me by way of Josh.

I really didn’t need to be thinking about that right now. Today wasn’t about me. It was about Quinn and Noah. And luckily, I was very good at putting on an uncomplicated smile even when everything inside of me felt like a tangle. The forest green bridesmaid dresses that Quinn had chosen for us were beautiful and complemented the greenery on the cake.

This wasn’t a Christmas wedding, but it had wintry wonderland vibes. I hadn’t fully appreciated, though, the complication of getting our pictures taken beforehand with Ryan.

Quinn invited him into the room where we were getting ready, once everyone was dressed. She wanted some photos of us getting our makeup done.

Quinn had a makeup artist, the rest were doing our own. I leaned into the mirror and began to dab a berry color onto my lips, and I heard the sound of a camera shutter.

I turned and looked at him. I had smiled for his camera multiple times. I couldn’t find it in me to do it now.

He didn’t seem to mind.

But he was watching me in a way that felt weighted. Heavy.

That made me feel all the years, all the weddings, all the everything.

He was still handsome. Even though I was mad at him.

I had trouble tearing my eyes off of his. But I managed it.

Afterward, we went into a field adjacent to the building we had all been getting ready at and the mountains serving as a glorious backdrop. And when he took photos of Quinn and I together, I was less distracted.

Quinn looked beautiful. Her red hair hanging down in simple ringlets past her shoulders. Her white dress simple, with long lace sleeves, swishing with each step she took.

It wasn’t hard for me to smile when we stood together. And when the other bridesmaids joined us, it was even easier.

I forgot that I had made the cake. I forgot that I was feeling tortured about Ryan. I forgot everything but the fact that I was Quinn’s best friend, and she was the most beautiful bride I had ever seen.

“Off to get the groomsmen,” he said about a half-hour later.

That left us standing in a field, wearing beautiful dresses. I looked out at the mountains all around us.

“This is going to be amazing,” I said. “You’ve been waiting for this your whole life.”

Quinn squeezed my hand.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to ask my brides . . . did you ever have any doubts about this?”

“When?”

“At any point. You were engaged for such a short amount of time. You knew each other for an even shorter amount of time. Were you ever nervous? Did you ever question it?”

She smiled. “I used to question so many things before I met Noah. I questioned what I wanted, if I wanted to stay in Pineville. If I wanted to take over my dad’s accounting firm. If I wanted to get married, if I wanted to have children. Then I met him, and I knew that the answers to all of those questions were details. I wanted to be with him. I have questioned a lot of things, but never if he was the right choice. I still don’t know the answer to some of those questions. If I want to do accounting here. If I want to do something else. If I want to stay here forever. If I want to go back home. But I’m certain of Noah. And that’s enough.”

I let out a slow breath. “Well. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t understand that at first. But you guys are special. I get that now.”

“You thought we went too fast?”

“I thought you went too fast because I couldn’t quite understand it. You know, given me and Josh. We went so slow and . . .”

“You weren’t certain about him.”

“I was.”

“No, you weren’t, you were certain about how you wanted your life to look, and he was a really great set piece.”

I let out a hard breath. “I didn’t realize that everybody had such terrible opinions about my relationship.”

“It wasn’t a terrible opinion. I thought that you could be happy with him. But I don’t think I was terribly secretive about the fact that I didn’t think it was a great, sweeping romantic love. I also just figured we wanted different things.”

“Romance would be nice,” I said. “I’ve just never been carried away like that .”

That was a lie. I had been. Once.

And I’d put a bowling ball through it.

“Why don’t you think you can have it?”

I looked around to see where the other bridesmaids had gone. I’d been abandoned. And my best friend was clearly determined to give me a talking to before we were separated.

“I don’t want to anymore. That was what I learned from the whole thing with Josh.”

“That’s a shitty lesson from a shitty guy.”

“He wasn’t. He was good. He was . . . do you think that he was insecure?”

Quinn looked like she had whiplash. “What?”

“It’s just . . . it’s something that Ryan said to me.”

“Is that why the two of you are acting weird?” Quinn squinted at me.

“No. He’s acting weird because he caught Trev and I skinny-dipping in the lake.”

Quinn snorted. “That’s a lie, because you would’ve gotten frostbite and died.” She paused for a moment. “I mean, it’s a lie for several reasons, but that’s one of them.”

“Yes. Josh was texting me, and he was mad, because Josh sent me a picture of him with some other girl. But I wasn’t mad about it. I was fine. But he told me that Josh was always jealous of me and other men. But he never acted like that to me.”

Quinn winced. “I think you didn’t notice. He was always right on top of you whenever you went out.”

“Well, he was . . . I don’t know, shy I guess.”

“Insecure,” Quinn said.

“Isn’t that kind of the same?”

Quinn shook her head. “No. Because it was . . . like he was afraid if he let go of you, you’d run away. Or some guy would steal you.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. I’d always felt like I had to worry about losing him, and then he’d broken up with me so it had felt founded. I’d always thought he needed me but right then I thought of the word needy and I wondered if that was more accurate.

I frowned. “Am I the only one that didn’t realize that? I just thought . . . I really thought that he and I were compatible. Like really compatible , because it seemed like he was happiest when we stayed at home and that was what I wanted.”

“I don’t think it makes him wholly an awful guy that he was worried about losing you. But I do think it sucks that he didn’t transfer it into making you feel like you were a queen. I think whether he meant to or not he felt that insecurity in a way that made him hold you back, instead of having the confidence to build you up.”

He had never been mean to me. But my own issues had left me feeling insecure, and combined with his . . .

We’d been a bad combination. And the worst thing was . . .

When I thought of missing him, I thought of missing my hope of security and certainty, not him .

He’d wanted me, and I’d wanted a relationship.

Of course, he felt like the right kind of relationship because in the beginning, especially, his brand of needing me had felt so good.

But it had never occurred to me to ask him to give us another try. I had been so upset it was over but I’d never wanted him back.

I hadn’t loved him.

“I just wanted to . . .” A realization crashed over me. “I wanted to fast forward the part of my life that felt precarious, and I wanted to get to a place where I was settled. Where I knew what was going to happen. Where I knew how the rest of my life was going to go. That was what I really hoped for. And maybe you’re right, I wanted that more than I wanted him.”

Maybe I hadn’t been devastated. Maybe my plans had just been thwarted.

Maybe I had been more broken about the loss of the future, than the loss of the man himself.

And I wanted some time, some time to excavate the truth about that relationship, but I didn’t have it, not right now.

Maybe I didn’t want it. Because I certainly hadn’t taken any time over the last nine months to do any digging into it. I had just assumed that I knew the truth of it.

After all, I had lived with him. But how could I be completely attuned to what he had been doing and thinking when I wasn’t even completely attuned to what I was feeling and thinking?

Right then, I was worried I had built up so many walls inside of myself, that I was never going to be able to get down to the truth.

“I’m glad that you found the sure thing,” I said. “And if I ever feel tempted to think I’m falling in love, I’m going to remember that.”

“I didn’t think you wanted love anymore.”

“If I found something I was that certain about, maybe I would.”

I didn’t think I would. I didn’t think I could ever be that certain about anything.

Apparently all those funfetti trust issues that were baked into my very core weren’t just limited to the people around me. But to myself.

It was like I’d had a giant wall demolished at the center of myself, and I was standing there staring at a landscape I didn’t understand.

Yes, there were things about my relationship with Josh that hadn’t been great. He hadn’t always contributed to the housework in an equitable way. I could tell when he didn’t like certain outfits that I wore out. And gradually, I had started to adjust what I wore to avoid any pushback.

He had also told me that Ryan didn’t like me.

I sat with that.

I had felt like Ryan didn’t like me, it wasn’t as if it had been pulled out of thin air, but my boyfriend had been open about the fact that his best friend hadn’t liked me, and when I really went back and thought that over, I wondered if it was true.

If there was jealousy there. He had wanted me to keep my distance from Ryan for a reason.

I suddenly wanted to ask Ryan more about it. More about what he knew, about my own life that I didn’t seem to. That was galling. To realize that the people around me had made observations that I hadn’t.

And I didn’t have to ask Quinn why she hadn’t said anything. It was because I wouldn’t have listened. Because she was right; I was clinging so hard to what I had decided was safety, I wouldn’t have been able to view it objectively.

I didn’t have time to spiral about it, because it was almost ceremony time.

The chairs were set up facing the mountains, and the wedding party met behind a little rise on a hill. Ryan and I looked at each other. The best man and the maid of honor would be walking in together.

I linked arms with him. His suit jacket smooth beneath my hand. And he was hot beneath that. I could feel it.

I did my best to calm my fluttering heart, and when I couldn’t comment any further, I decided to attribute it to the nerves of the wedding itself.

The music cued our turn to go, and I walked forward with him, feeling like my insides were pressing against the walls of my being.

Like there were too many big emotions. Too much of everything.

Happiness, grief, and all the things he made me feel.

I remembered what Quinn had told me only moments before, about all of her certainty.

I realized that I had never once in my life felt that certain about anything. I had been raised to believe that life itself was precarious. How could I ever have that certainty?

So many people were given that certainty from the moment they were first placed in their mother’s arms, and I simply wasn’t.

I had been an inconvenient accessory. One that had been picked up, carted around, and then eventually abandoned when I got too heavy.

My whole life had been viewed through that same lens.

I felt hollow then. Because how would I ever . . .

It’s why you gave up on all this.

Maybe.

Maybe it was.

But maybe . . .

I shoved those thoughts aside. I hated that my friend getting married was creating such a landslide of peril inside of me. I wanted it to be about her. I wanted it to be uncomplicated. To just be happy. I get for me it was a loss, and also a strange confrontation with the immeasurable grief inside of me that I struggled to understand.

So I stared ahead at the mountains. Those mountains had been there for so long.

They had seen so many things.

So many different people. So many different stages of earth and time. I was small.

I tried to find comfort in that.

As I had done before.

We separated at the head of the aisle, with me on the bride’s side, and him on the groom’s.

I stood there, holding my bouquet of red flowers. I turned my thoughts off.

I watched Noah’s face as Quinn came down the aisle. Looking ethereal and beautiful. I could see tears in his eyes, and that was when I knew for sure that he was good enough for my friend. I hadn’t realized that part of me had still been held back. But, of course, it had.

He saw her. Everything that she was. All the value in her. That was what I wanted for her.

It would be a perilous thing to want for myself.

Because I struggled to figure out my own value.

I blinked seriously.

When Noah and Quinn joined hands, and said their vows to each other, I didn’t bother to stop the tears.

I wept. Because I was happy.

I wept. Because I was sad.

And then, just like that, this wedding that had been ahead of us for so long was behind us.

I took Ryan’s arm again, and we walked back up that aisle. I clung to him like I might fall this time, because I was afraid that I would. So, I let him hold me up, even though I probably didn’t deserve that. Not from him.

That thought was like a knife, twisting inside me, and slicing clean through parts of myself I tried not to examine honestly.

But there was something about this changing nature of a key relationship in my life, this last crumbling of a foundation that had built me when I had first come to Pineville, that had me scrambling, looking for something to hold onto. And as I looked at all the rocky spaces inside of me, as I tried to find something to cling to, it forced me to examine dark corners I normally left alone.

It was time to take photos of the bridal party altogether.

But, of course, Ryan wasn’t in the photos.

I smiled. I didn’t look right at him.

I watched as he took pictures of Noah and Quinn.

And then, when I made sure that everything with the bridal party was done, I went to begin making sure that everything with the cake was as it should be.

The tent was lit up gloriously inside, with heaters and string lights. With greenery and roses.

When Quinn and Noah came into the tent, the crowd of their friends and family cheered.

And I felt my whole soul lift.

At the same time, I felt like I understood something I hadn’t before.

I tried to picture myself on this day, with Josh.

I tried to honestly, truly, imagine it.

He would have left most of the planning to me. Not in a malicious way. But it would’ve been something that he’d have said he was having a hard time handling.

I went back over so many things with a fine-toothed comb, trying to see what Quinn and Ryan had told me they saw.

It wasn’t obvious.

It wasn’t like I had been living unhappily, without knowing it.

But when I looked at Quinn and Noah, I could see what we were missing.

We had been friends. But it hadn’t been a partnership.

He had needed me, but it had been about him and not me.

And I was no different. I’d needed stability and security and he’d been an emblem of that for me. He deserved to be a whole person to someone, though.

So did I.

I had learned to shrink certain parts of myself because his reactions to them weren’t favorable, and I was so in tune with other people’s emotions because of my childhood.

But I wasn’t the point of today. It was Quinn, and we were getting to the part of the reception where speeches would be given.

The pressure that I felt to make sure that I gave a fitting tribute to Quinn had been gnawing at me, and I felt like I had to make a whole new country understand why they should welcome her with open arms. Why they should be so lucky to have her.

Why Noah was so lucky to have her when I wouldn’t have her all the time anymore.

New Zealand, and Noah, better be adequately grateful.

I’d found it so hard to distill our friendship and what it meant to me into a single speech, but I’d done my best. I’d sourced memories from Caitlin, Sierra and Hannah, talking about our high school days, and laughing so hard that I forgot I was a little bit sad.

I looked at Quinn, sitting at the banquet table with Noah by her side, and I knew a moment of such pure, intense pride and happiness, I thought I’d burst.

Quinn had found the one she could be her whole self with. And she was radiant. My best friend was absolutely, gloriously radiant. A beautiful mermaid of a woman who’d found love and happiness and I genuinely couldn’t be more thrilled.

The reception dinner was a lovely, elegant affair, and the speeches were wonderful. Quinn’s parents spoke about her early years, and Noah’s family talked about his life, in a way that made me feel like I knew him, and made me feel even better about my best friend moving across the world to have a life with him. He did seem like a singular sort of guy. Which was exactly what my singular sort of friend needed.

But then it was the best man and maid of honor’s turn. We both moved from where we were, and our eyes met. I felt it like when he’d taken my arm.

He and I had already touched one another. We’d walked down the aisle together. But I was struck right then with how gorgeous he was. He’d taken his jacket off, the sleeves of his white shirt were pushed up to his elbows, revealing muscular forearms that made me weak.

I asked myself, was I actually attracted to Ryan, or was my attraction to him part of my obsessive need to make him like me?

You know it isn’t.

I winced.

But really, a blow job probably would make him like me more.

My mouth went dry. I shouldn’t be thinking about blow jobs and Ryan. Not now or ever, really.

I couldn’t untangle the tension between us just then. If it was the regular sort of tension we always had, or if it was sexual.

Or maybe the tension had always been sexual, and I had never called it what it was.

I was the antagonist of Taylor Swift’s ‘All Too Well’. The ten minute version.

That was unflattering.

I looked at him, and he stared back at me. Waiting for me to make the next move. So I did.

I moved forward and took the microphone from its stand so that I could face the wedding guests. “I’m Poppy Love. I’m Quinn’s . . . maid of honor.” I cleared my throat. “I met Quinn when I was seven years old. And I think she might’ve saved me. At that point in my life so many things had changed, so many people had disappeared from my life. I moved in with my grandmother, I moved away from the school that I had been going to, from the state that I had always called home. And I met Quinn.” I looked at Quinn, who was smiling with tears in her eyes. “That was when I knew everything was going to be okay. Because all I have to say about Quinn is . . . take care of her and let her take care of you. Because when I let Quinn take care of me, my life became exponentially better. Because she makes everything better. She’ll make you better too.” I raised a glass. “To Quinn and Noah.”

Quinn stood up and walked to me, wrapping her arms around my neck and I didn’t bother with not crying because . . . I was going to cry.

But I wanted Quinn to be a whole person. And I had to figure out how to be a whole person too. Suddenly it felt okay to let go.

So I did. And when I did, I smiled. And I really, really meant it.

Then I looked at Ryan, and handed the microphone to him.

He didn’t look overwrought or sad or nervous. He was just . . . himself. Always. “I’m not a big believer in fate.” For some reason right then, his eyes connected with mine and I felt it all the way down to my toes. “But if anything could make me believe in it, it would be this. Meeting Noah was great. It made me feel at home in a country I had never been to before. It made me feel I got a great gift when I met Noah. I got a great gift when I met Quinn too. I was twelve and I had just moved to town. Quinn is one of those people that just makes you feel welcomed. She and Noah are both that way. They give me too much credit for introducing them, when the truth is, they did this. They made friends with a guy who didn’t have many, at different times, in different countries, and that’s what brought them together. Maybe that’s fate, I don’t know. I do know that theirs is the kind of love that challenges even cynics like me to see the world a little bit differently.”

I was lost in the beauty of that statement, of the speech. Of the way it painted their relationship as something they’d built with their own kindness.

But the way he talked about Quinn . . . about her being nice to him. She had been, but so had I. I’d tried so hard and he’d been mean to me. But, somehow, he’d managed to see that Quinn was trying to be his friend.

He vexed me.

He always had.

Why did I specifically offend him? I thought about that as the reception moved on to dancing, as it was time to cut the cake. I thought about it and I felt . . .

Wounded. Maybe I had no right to be wounded where Ryan was concerned but I really felt it.

I was serving up the last piece of cake when he took a photo near me. Our eyes met.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

You could say nothing, Poppy.

I could. But where had it ever gotten me with him? He didn’t like me no matter what I did, so there was no point in not calling this out.

“Oh. I thought maybe you were going to comment on the fact that apparently you and Quinn have been besties since you were twelve. When . . . I don’t know. Why did you immediately think that I was an awful person, Ryan? When you were able to see that Quinn was being nice to you.”

His jaw went tight. “You’re not Quinn.”

That made me feel like I’d been stabbed. I wasn’t Quinn. I was Poppy. Did that mean I was inherently wrong?

“No. I’m not. But all I ever was, was nice to you, and you were mean to me immediately, and you tried to hold the science fair thing against me, but the very first thing you said to me when I met you was . . . unfriendly. And dismissive. Admit it .”

I needed him to at least say it. To acknowledge that for some reason he didn’t like me. That it was me personally. Me who offended him, long before . . .

“Well, I was warned about the Love family. Because of the feud,” he said.

Lies .

“The feud is bullshit. It’s something that happened years ago, and you just said that you don’t even believe in fate. I think you would basically have to believe in fate to believe that because some people . . . fucked each other back in the 1800s and our families have had beef ever since, you were destined to have beef with me.”

“But it seems to be true, doesn’t it?”

“ Why? ”

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice rough. “I can’t explain it to you. But you have to admit we can’t seem to get rid of each other. And it never ends well.”

I tried not to think about the fifth wedding. I tried hardest of all now.

But with his eyes; glittering, intense and blue right there, it made me think of that night. Of how he’d looked at me then.

And I knew he was thinking of it too.