Chapter 13
13
Terry’s Wedding
Nick
“ O kay, you guys. I know you ask me all the time if I’m dating. Answer, no. French men are…complicated. Or maybe they’re simple? I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s because I’m American, but I just don’t…get them. Like they come on strong. So strong, I’m sure it must be fake. No one can be immediately in love or in lust or intrigued with me at first sight. All those things take a while. Come on guys, back me up.”
In this video she was sitting on the edge of a fountain and she must have known how the sunlight would hit the water because she looked like she was surrounded by glitter. She wore a bright blue hat I’d never seen her wear and she looked…baffled.
When I did the math in my head, I realized she would have posted this video and these thoughts two weeks after meeting Rene.
Watching the video for the millionth time, I wished I could go back and warn her. I would tell her that her instincts would never steer her wrong, but they’d steered her up my steps the night of her 18 th birthday and that had been a mistake.
The woman on the edge of that fountain didn’t trust her gut.
And I’d been a part of that.
Realizing that had to be what was making me act so strangely around her. See her so differently.
Or maybe it was Wyatt’s bullshit advice.
Change it up. Do something different. Test the waters.
Pull Nora into me and see if my dick twitched.
I got out of the 2003 BMW 5 series I was driving for the night. It was my fancy car. The car I drove when I wanted to impress someone.
Which wasn’t Nora, obviously. But it was a wedding and she was used to nice stuff.
Walking up Roy and Vanessa’s driveway, it felt like I was picking her up for prom or some shit and it wasn’t just the suit I was wearing. I felt…nervous.
Roy was going to kick my ass if my dick twitched. Fuck, I might kick my own ass.
Maybe it wasn’t too late to pretend to be sick.
Before I even knocked on the door, Vanessa was pulling it open.
“Look at you!” She cried and clapped her hands together. “In a tie and everything.”
“Well,” I grumbled. “Isn’t that what you do for weddings?”
“Gosh, I don’t even know anymore,” Vanessa leaned against the doorway like we were settling in for a nice long chat about wedding etiquette. “Have you seen those weddings where the grooms wear shorts? A person can’t be married in shorts.”
“Sure they can, if it’s hot,” Roy said from the couch where he and Will were watching a ball game. Bethany had been reading something on her iPad. All was as it should be in the Barnes household.
“Come on in,” Vanessa said. “I don’t know what’s keeping Nora, but…”
“I’m here,” Nora said. She came down the stairs in a burgundy dress that hugged her waist and her chest and flared out at her knees in kind of a gauzy cloud. There were no straps and her shoulders and arms were so sweet and strong.
Her hair was up in one of those twists that makes every woman look like a movie star and she had freckles on her face. Her own, but also little silver sparkling freckles she’d put on with some kind of magic.
She took my breath away.
“Hey Nick,” she said, picking up a purse and a thin black wrap. “You ready?”
“Yeah,” I said and opened the door.
“Hey Nick,” Roy said from the couch. He was twisted around so he could look at me. “Remember our little conversation,” he said. He lifted his fingers, pointed to his eyes and pointed to me.
Break her heart and I’ll end you.
Yeah, kind of hard to forget.
“Dad,” Nora said. “Stop being…you.”
She opened her door and smiled at me, looking like my best friend and a goddess, all wrapped up into one.
Despite her father’s warning my dick twitched.
Well, shit.
A few hours later, everyone who was supposed to get married had said I do and everyone else was working real hard at getting drunk. Love Story was playing over the speakers and the dance floor was crowded with women crying out to Romeo to save her.
Please, I prayed for the hundredth time since dinner was over and the dancing had started. Please don’t play a slow song.
It had been a steady stream of dick twitches. Nora bent down to fix the tiny buckle on her shoe and I could see down her dress. In the church, she’d laughed louder than anyone else at a joke in the vows and buried her head in my shoulder. She took her first sip of white wine and did a happy little shimmy.
There had been enough dick twitching. I was dick twitched out.
Someone hip checked me, sending my beer sloshing over my hand. I held it away from me so it wouldn’t spill all over my only suit and looked down to find Nora with a glass of wine standing next to me. She wasn’t out there singing, which surprised me. She loved this song.
“You don’t look like you’re having fun,” she said with a scowl that probably matched mine.
“You don’t look like you’re having fun either.”
“Everyone wants to hear my story,” she said as she sipped her wine. “It’s exhausting.”
“That sucks.”
“The only bright side is, this will be the same crowd for Julie’s wedding, so by then I’ll be old news and everyone will leave me alone.”
“You can always tell them to mind their own business,” I pointed out.
“Sure,” she looked at me out of the corners of her eyes, the lights from the dance floor playing across her skin and hair, reflecting in her eyes. I caught myself staring and quickly looked away. “If I were you, then all I would need is my snarly face to keep people away.”
“I don’t have a snarly face.”
She pulled a face that I guessed was supposed to mimic mine but looked more like an ogre.
“I don’t look like that.”
“You one hundred percent look like that.”
The music changed and Taylor was replaced by soaring violins and a romantic piano.
Oh shit.
Couples gravitated together. Arms wrapped around necks and waists.
I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants.
“Are you okay?” Nora asked me. “You look a little sick.”
“I’m fine,” I said and put my beer on the table behind me. “Do you want to dance?”
“You mean now?”
“Yes. To this song. Dancing. I hear people do it at weddings.”
“Uh…yeah. Sure. Why not? It’s just a dance.”
“Exactly. No big deal.” Then why did my voice sound like Kermit the Frog’s?
I took her wine glass and set it on the table. She stepped out onto the crowded dance floor and I followed her, my eyes on the gleam on her shoulders. The delicate hairs on the nape of her neck. Once she was in the middle of the floor she turned and faced me, and for a moment it was like neither one of us knew what to do. How to act.
She smiled, that crooked half smile. Nervous, but trying.
I guided her arms around my neck and focused on keeping my hands north of her ass. Her waist was so tiny, it felt like I could wrap my hands around her entirely.
Slowly, we moved. Her thigh touched mine. My knee brushed hers. I could feel the muscles in her waist and I couldn’t stop my fingers from squeezing, testing the strength of her body beneath this fairy tale of a dress.
I bent low, drawn to the scent of her hair.
Lemons.
Her fingers twitched along the back of my neck. If she were mine, she would know that I liked…yes, just that. Her nails scratching along the base of my hairline.
If she were mine, she’d fit her thigh between my legs. A tease. Just enough pressure to let me know she was close, tempting, but so far away at the same time. Because we were here in this room, at this wedding, with all these people around who knew us.
This is Nora, I told myself. And I forced myself to flash back on every moment I could remember. To playing dolls, to her patting my face and telling me she loved me, the first time I’d ever heard those words. To her crying when she fell and wanted to be carried only by me. When she was ten, and those kids stole her hat and she demanded I get it back. When she was fifteen and tried to get me to buy her and her friends White Claws – I didn’t. To when she was seventeen and showing off her dress for the prom.
All those memories. All of them buried so deep in my brain I couldn’t think about a time when she wasn’t…there.
Except for the last six years. There and not there.
“Nick?”
Her voice was soft. Uncertain. I looked down into her eyes. Gazed really. She seemed confused. When really there was nothing to be confused about. We were together and it felt good. So good.
“Oh no,” she said, shaking her head. “No.” Her face sharpened. She was angry? “You don’t get to…you don’t get to do this to me.” She jerked out of my arms, leaving me on the dance floor.
Like a fool, I stood there watching her push through the dancers, not certain what to do. People were staring, whispering.
I walked over to the table where I’d left my beer and took a seat, making sure I was covered by the table.
Because my dick hadn’t just twitched.
I was fully, and painfully, hard. And worse. She knew it.
“Nora, stop,” I called out to her. She was stomping through the parking lot with a lot of determination for someone who didn’t have the keys to the car. It had taken me a minute to get control over my body before I could follow her. “Nora!”
She turned mid stride and jabbed her finger at me. “I am so mad at you!”
“Why?” I said, flailing my arms wide.
“Why?” she shrieked. “Why?”
I reached for her upper arm to hold her in place and she smacked my hand away.
“Let’s calm down,” I said quietly. Holding my hands up like she was robbing me.
People weren’t exactly leaving the wedding in droves, but there were enough valet attendants nearby that I didn’t want to make a scene.
“Don’t you tell me to calm down,” she hissed at me. “You know what you did.”
“What did I do?” I mean, I knew what had happened, but it wasn’t like I had done anything on purpose.
“Oh no, don’t you try and gaslight me. You were all, let’s dance. Look into my eyes. I compel you. You can’t vampire me.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense. You can’t charm me, Nick. You can’t lure me. Let’s remember our history. You. Rejected. Me.”
The words were a weapon she aimed and fired.
“We aren’t supposed to talk about that night, remember?”
“I’m changing the rules!” She snapped.
Fine. “I didn’t reject you. You didn’t know what was in your head.”
“No, Nick, you didn’t know what was in your heart.”
Another direct hit. I pressed a hand to my chest like there might be blood.
“Hey guys, leaving the wedding so soon?” Both of us whirled to catch Peter exiting his car, surrounded by smoke. The guy was hotboxing his car at a wedding? Was he in high school?
“No,” Nora said quickly, a fake smile on her face. “It was just…getting crowded in there. Thought we would get some air.”
Peter wandered over to us, surrounded by a cloud of whatever he’d been smoking.
“Great time, huh?” he said.
“Sure. If you’re high,” I muttered. I don’t know why this guy bothered me so much, but he did. Inserting himself into Nora’s trauma, insisting he could tell her story when Nora was the best storyteller I’d ever known. The way he looked at her…I especially didn’t like that.
“Helps me socialize,” Peter said with a shrug, brushing aside my judgement. Which. Fair. “Nora, I would love to get some time with you to discuss this book.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m not sure…”
“Preliminarily. I understand you’re not committing, just yet. What I’m really hoping, is you might know how I could reach Rene.”
“The fuck?” I asked. What was this guy smoking?
Nora grabbed my hand and squeezed it, telling me to stand down. “Why would you want to talk to him?”
“I have to get his side of things, if I’m going to tell this story accurately.”
“He’s a criminal. And a liar.” she said tightly. “There is no accurately when it comes to him. If you want accuracy, talk to the dozens of women he’s destroyed.”
“No doubt,” Peter agreed, a little too casually for my taste. No doubt? “I’d like that information too. I don’t want to interview you two together or anything. But everyone has a story to tell. I just want to be the narrator.”
“Narrate this, Pete,” I said firmly. “Nora isn’t going to have anything to do with that asshole. And you don’t mention him around Nora. Ever.”
“Dude, you’re being really extra right now.” He looked at our hands, still clasped in the folds of her skirt, his eyes got wide. “Wait? So you two are a thing?”
“No!” Nora pulled her hand away and I had to let it go.
Nora tucked her hair behind her ear, even though there was no hair to tuck there. It was a nervous gesture, one she’d had her whole life. “Look,” she said, making her point clear. “The only thing I care about when it comes to Rene is that he gets what is coming to him. I don’t want to talk to him. Or about him. I want him to go to jail. So, I’m sorry Peter, but I really don’t think working on this book with you is a good idea.”
Yeah. That’s right. Nora could fight her own battles. But Peter stepped closer.
“The demand for this story is huge. This is a major seven figure advance. Of course, you’d be entitled to a percent of that. We’re talking serious money, Nora. Life changing money.”
“She said she’s not interested,” I stepped forward, putting myself between Peter and Nora.
“I’m not letting this go yet,” Peter said, backing away from us. “Real money, Nor. Think about it.”
He turned, shoved his hands into his suit pant pockets and headed back to the barn where the reception was being held.
“That guy’s an asshole,” I said.
“He’s just chasing down a good story.”
“You tempted by the money?” I asked her. Real money. Life changing money. Money so that she didn’t have to work in my garage anymore. “I did give you that raise.”
She laughed and I could feel the tension between us ebbing. She shook her head. “I’ve had money. Life changing money. It’s not all that. Sometimes it just gets you into trouble.”
“You want to go back in there?” I motioned with my thumb back toward where the music was pumping out of the old barn. She looked at me, with narrowed eyes. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten I’m still mad at you.”
Right, that moment on the dance floor. Her being irresistible and my body reacting like an over-eager dog.
I’d almost kissed her.
She blinked, utterly unreadable in the moonlight. Was she offended? Was she complimented? Was she considering a friends with benefits situation? Was I?
There was only one way to put things right with us.
“Do you want to be mad at me here, or would you rather be mad at me over a milkshake at Pappas?”
She stared at me like I’d suggested we trade heads.
“I think maybe you should just take me home,” she said.