Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Savannah
Asher’s here? I look around the room as discreetly as I can—just in time to see Barb call the party to attention. A mic materializes in her bony grip.
“Now that we’ve gotten a chance to get to know one another,” she says, “it’s time for us to salute the happy couple.” Music comes on—something slow and orchestral that I didn’t pick out. “Time for the first dance.”
Oh no. I expected kissing, maybe for us to hold hands and endure jokes about being newlyweds from partygoers. Not everyone watching us as we sway together. They’re gonna know we haven’t danced together before.
My father believed in my learning traditional skills: horseback riding, tennis, dancing.
Only my dance instructor had sniffed at my height—too tall—and body—too large—and told me I was better off marrying a man who would appreciate my other assets.
Namely, my father’s money. Of course now my inheritance is a few cancelled credit cards, a dozen unreturned phone calls, a wedding party invite marked return to sender, addressee no longer at residence.
So I can’t dance, not really. What kind of princess is useless at a ball? The crowd parts, forming an empty central space that can function as a dance floor. Brayden appears by my side. He looks steadier on his feet than he did—but it’s possible that’s just wishful thinking.
“Don’t step on her toes,” someone shouts, and the entire room laughs.
Then a smudge appears in my vision. An aura. Oh no. Not now, not now, not now. The aura flickers away. I could have anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours before my migraine arrives. Please just let me get through this song. If I can get through this song, things will be all right.
“May I have this dance?” Brayden asks, a parody of politeness.
I offer him my hand, feeling unwieldy on the points of my heels. The music is slow, dreamy. One of Brayden’s arms settles across my back, the other clasps his hand in mine. Instinctively, I place my palm on his shoulder.
We sway, gently at first, close enough that Brayden’s chin tucks right above my head.
If I bury myself in his chest, I won’t think about the room around me.
Classic Savannah, always relying on someone else to rescue me.
Brayden smells like cologne and hair pomade.
And whiskey. I try to ignore that last one.
His arm tightens at my waist, at that place he always seems to touch me.
I’m used to my shapewear, but right now, it really is hard to breathe.
Brayden doesn’t step on my toes. I shouldn’t be surprised.
He’s an athlete. He moves through the outfield with grace, which only makes the fact that he stumbles through the upstairs hallway—our upstairs hallway—that much worse.
Now he guides us fluidly through the room. The rest of the party fades as we move, voices reduced to a murmur. Distantly, as if from a hundred miles away, I hear someone say, aww.
I look up to find Brayden watching me, gray eyes clouded. He’s smiling—not that tiny real smile from after he kissed me—but something for the flash of phone cameras. His breath smells like whatever he’s been drinking. Reality sets in.
That’s enough to return the pencil smudge to my vision, an aura that says my headache will be here soon. That I really don’t have any time at all.
Finally, the song ends. People clap. Each noise is a spike to my skull. Nausea rises in a familiar wave. My job is to make Brayden look good—or at least stable. Throwing up at our own wedding party tends to have the opposite effect.
“Would you excuse me for a second?” I don’t wait for a response.
Fleeing probably isn’t screaming stability, but that’s what I do. My whole world boils down to the long hallway back to the bridal room. I lose a shoe along the way and stop only long enough to step out of the other, carrying it with me.
Fortunately, the space has its own single-stall bathroom tucked back in the corner of the room. I go in, flip on the fan, then kneel on the cold tiles.
I’m not sure how long I spend like that. Migraines always feel like sighting a storm from the shoreline, waiting for it to blow in. If I shut my eyes, the aura is replaced with a series of white flashes. If I keep them open, the world goes fuzzed.
Finally, my nausea passes. I pull myself up, flush the toilet on principle, and wash my hands. I find my bottle of migraine meds and down one along with two Excedrin tablets and half a bottle of water I extract from the minifridge.
There’s no way I can go back out to the party. At any other time, I’d just declare the whole thing a wash—retreat to my sweatpants in a dark quiet room, but I have to go back out there. The whole point of being Brayden’s wife is I have to be his wife.
So far, no one has come looking for me. I don’t even know where my other shoe is. I came in thong sandals. I contemplate putting those on with my evening dress and going back out there to explain, well, everything. I will. In just a second.
I’m about to put on my sandals when there’s a knock at the door. “Hey.” A male voice from the other side.
Did Brayden come to check up on me? I pad over to the door barefoot and open it.
Only it’s not Brayden on the other side.
It’s Asher, standing in the doorway, dangling my shoe by one of its skinny gold straps. “Lose something, princess?”
Like the rest of the team, he’s wearing a suit.
Unlike the rest of the team, who mostly look like overgrown frat boys or like they own an economy car dealership, his is a matte black-on-black pattern.
His shirt is open at the collar revealing the dark edge of a tattoo.
Somehow, I forgot how pretty he is: teasing eyes, sarcastic mouth.
“Thanks.” I reach for my shoe.
He doesn’t release it. Instead, he takes that as an invitation: he comes inside, settles on one of the couches.
“Sure, make yourself at home,” I say.
“You gonna evict me?”
I should. I should kick him out, summon Brayden, imply strongly that Asher is bothering me. I don’t do any of that. Instead, I collapse onto the couch opposite Asher’s and spend a minute watching him do something on his phone that produces tiny bell noises that make my head ache.
“Could you”—I gesture to his phone—“turn that down.”
Instantly, he presses the side of the phone until the noise disappears. “It was meditation app o’clock when I saw you run by.” He holds the screen up to illustrate.
Not exactly what I was expecting. “You spend a lot of your time at parties meditating?” I ask.
“You spend a lot of time at parties hiding from them?” he shoots back.
Though it’s not like he also isn’t avoiding people. “I was getting a migraine.” Above me, the lights pulse. This is the worst of it—after symptom onset but before my pills can kick in.
“You look green,” he says. “Metaphorically.”
My laugh gets lost in a slight wave of nausea. “I feel green. Metaphorically.”
That gets me the weight of Asher’s stare. “Where’s Forsyth?”
What good would it do if he was here? “Please tell him not to worry if he asks about me.”
“If?” Asher sniffs disapprovingly. “Fine.” He studies me.
I’m not sure what he’s seeing—a woman in a wrinkled evening dress. A woman whose new husband might not even come check on her. And who signed up for two more years of this. No, Brayden and I have been married for a bit more than a week. So only a hundred and three more weeks of this.
My shapewear suddenly tightens. I want out of this dress.
Out of this room. Possibly out of the entire state of Georgia.
I grope behind myself, trying to inch down my zipper.
If I can just get a little more air… My fingers land on the zipper pull.
I tug. It doesn’t move. I tug again, this time more forcefully. Nothing.
“You need a hand?” Asher asks, clearly watching me try and fail to loosen this dress.
“I should tell you to leave.” Somehow my voice is breathless. It’s the shapewear, the migraine. Definitely not anything else.
“You should tell me,” he says. “Or you are telling me?”
“What would you do if I did tell you to leave?”
“I’d leave.” Asher shrugs, easy as that. “Are you telling me to leave?”
Yes. “No.” The word slips out.
Asher nods but doesn’t quite ease back onto his sofa. “You want out of that dress?”
Desperately. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
He gives me a long look. “No, unzipping your dress isn’t too much trouble.”
Though this entire thing is trouble. That doesn’t stop me from getting up and turning around. I gather my hair up on the back of my neck, so it won’t get caught in my zipper. Cool air blows across my skin. Somehow, I’m overheating.
Asher comes up behind me, fabric from his suit rustling, shoes heavy against the floor.
Each step ratchets up my pulse. I should tell him to stop.
I should tell him to get out. I should tell him that I am married to a man who could come through that door at any moment and who, based on that on-field fight they had, might be looking for a reason to punch Asher in the face.
Finally, he pauses behind me, voice close to my ear. “I’m going to have to touch your dress,” he says.
“Of course.”
“And maybe your back.”
Oh. “That’s, uh, fine.” Though I don’t feel entirely fine. Light-headed in a way that has nothing to do with champagne.
Asher doesn’t ask again. One of his hands braces the fabric, the points of his fingers two light pressures against my back, impossible to ignore even through layers of dress and lining and shapewear. The other grasps the zipper, lowering it, tooth-by-tooth, the way Brayden had.
I crane my head to watch him. His eyes are trained on my back, hair falling in a scatter across his forehead.
What I’d taken for one scar—a jagged line cutting through one of his eyebrows—is actually a cluster of them, including a web of pale lines at his temple.
He catches me watching him. His lips twitch.
What passes for an Asher smile, apparently.
“That better?” he asks.
“Better than what?” Though maybe I should be asking, better than who?
He lowers the zipper by an inch and then another, readjusting his hand clearly trying to keep the zipper taut. His fingers brush the elasticized top of my shapewear. “You have red marks.”
“Yeah.” Because the shapewear often leaves dents, reminders that, for other people to think my body is acceptable, I have to mold it into a different shape.
“I can probably get it from here—” I begin, just as Asher says, “You don’t need to wear—"
We both stop short.
I spin around, clutching my dress shut from the back, just as Asher steps away, hands up as if he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t be.
I’m breathing as hard as my shapewear will allow me.
He isn’t, but there’s something in the rise and fall of his shoulders and the slow expansion of his ribs as if he’s purposefully modulating his breath.
“I should get undressed—changed, I mean.” Despite the blasting Atlanta air conditioning, my skin goes hot all over.
Asher blinks a few times. “Undressed. Right.”
“So you should…” I can’t bring myself to say leave. If he leaves, I’ll be here alone. My headache might come back at any moment, though my meds seem to be doing their job. There’s a reason you were willing to get married for the insurance.
And if anyone catches us here together, there won’t be any more marriage. Any more insurance. “You should go.”
Asher nods. “Okay.” For a moment, he doesn’t move. Then he sticks his hands in his pockets, knuckles rigid through the fabric. “Have a good night, Mrs. Forsyth.”
And he’s just about to leave when there’s a sound from the hallway—someone knocking at the door, demanding to be let in.