3. Faith #2
He sets me down carefully just inside the bathroom and steadies me until I find my balance. I catch myself on the counter, and he eases the door mostly shut to give me privacy, leaving just a sliver of hallway light.
“There’s a first aid kit under the sink,” he says. “And towels in the cabinet above the toilet. I’ll find you something dry to wear.”
Something dry to wear. The very concept feels like a miracle.
“Dallas,” I say, fingers pressed to the cool tile wall. “I… thank you. I’m sorry, I just—”
“We’ll talk after you’re not turning blue,” he says. “Can you get out of that dress on your own?”
I glance down at the dress. It’s a strapless bodice with a line of hidden buttons and a zipper; I had two women maneuvering me into it earlier with the focus of surgeons. The idea of wrangling out of it alone in a small bathroom in front of my childhood best friend makes my brain short-circuit.
“I… eventually?” I say. “Maybe by New Year’s?”
“All right.” He cracks the door just enough to stick his hand back through. “Give me the zipper. I’ll undo it and then get out of your way.”
Heat floods my face so fast I think I might spontaneously combust, cold or no cold. Every nerve ending screams, absolutely not, but my body moves anyway, because I’m too exhausted and too frozen to argue with practical solutions.
I turn, gathering my hair over one shoulder with trembling fingers. The bodice creaks as I shift. With a deep breath I don’t quite manage to complete, I tug the top of the zipper tab into view.
His fingers are warm when they brush the bare skin of my spine.
My lungs forget how to work. We’ve touched a thousand times before.
Hands catching each other as we jumped off the dock, shoulders bumping in the back row of the school bus, his fingers wrapping around my wrist to pull me away from some stupid dare.
But this feels different. Intimate in a way that has nothing to do with the dress and everything to do with the years between now and then.
He works the zipper down in a smooth, slow line. The bodice loosens, the pressure around my ribs easing. I feel both exposed and relieved.
“All right,” he says quietly. His breath stirs the small hairs at the nape of my neck. “You’re good. Holler if you pass out.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” I manage.
He closes the door with a soft click.
I just stand there, palms flat against the cool bathroom counter, breathing. The overhead light flickers on when I hit the switch, bathing everything in harsh yellow. My reflection in the mirror nearly knocks me back a step.
“Wow,” I whisper.
I look insane.
My hair is half up, half down, curls frizzing where snow melted and refroze. My makeup, meticulously applied this afternoon, is smeared into muddy shadows under my eyes. There’s a streak of dirt across my cheek, a tiny cut on my lower lip where I must have bitten it in the skid.
And the dress… It’s still beautiful, technically. The bodice, now looser, is embroidered with tiny beads that catch the light. The skirt is a frothy sea of tulle and lace. The bottom six inches are gray with road slush, twigs and dead grass clinging to the delicate fabric.
I look like a runaway bride that tripped and face planted on the way out of the movie.
A laugh bubbles up in my chest, tangled with sharpness. I press my hand to my mouth, the locket cool against my palm.
“Gran,” I say, meeting my own wild eyes in the mirror. “You seeing this?”
It’s too much. The hotel. The aisle I didn’t walk down. My father’s voice on the other side of the door. The look that will be on Evan’s face when someone finally tells him I’m gone. The phone, tumbling into the snowbank by the highway. The endless stretch of road.
And now I’m here. In the McCoy bathroom. In my wedding dress. On Christmas Eve.
I grab the edge of the counter, knuckles whitening.
“One thing at a time,” I tell my reflection. “You can panic later. Right now, just… get out of the dress.”
It takes longer than it should. My fingers are numb and clumsy, fumbling with the tiny buttons and the built-in bra. When I finally manage to shove the bodice down and step out of the skirt, I feel like I’ve been wrestling a sea creature.
I strip off everything, dress, petticoat, the pretty white slip underneath, until I’m standing in my underwear, goosebumps racing across my skin.
The cold hits harder without the insulation of the dress, but it’s also freeing.
I fold the fabric as neatly as I can with shaking hands and drape it over the shower rod, watching the beads glimmer under the light like distant stars.
A soft knock sounds on the door. I jump.
“Faith?”
“Yeah?” My voice cracks.
“I left some stuff outside the door,” Dallas says. “Shirt, sweats. Socks. See if they’ll fit. There’s, uh, a robe on the hook too. My mom’s. She won’t mind.”
“Okay.” I swallow. “Thanks.”
I wrap one of the big pale blue towels around myself like a cocoon before cracking the door.
A folded pile of clothes sits on the floor just outside: an old gray Buckhorn Rodeo T-shirt, a pair of navy sweatpants, thick wool socks.
A flannel shirt rests on top. It smells faintly of cedar and something undeniably him.
I pull everything inside and shut the door again, exhaling.
Getting dressed in borrowed clothes feels oddly intimate, too. The sweats are too long, so I roll the waistband twice. The T-shirt hangs loose on me, the soft cotton skimming mid-thigh. The flannel is blessedly warm when I pull it on, sleeves swallowing my hands until I fold them back.
I catch sight of myself in the mirror again and almost don’t recognize the woman looking back. No more bridal costume. Just messy hair, makeup mostly wiped to shadows, drowned in Dallas’s clothes.
Weirdly, I feel more like myself than I have in months.
I tuck my grandmother’s locket back under the T-shirt, the metal resting cool against my chest.
“Okay,” I tell the woman in the mirror. “Now go explain to your childhood best friend why you crashed a car in a blizzard in a wedding dress instead of getting married like a normal person.”
When I step back into the hall, the house seems even quieter than before. The ticking clock in the living room sounds louder. Somewhere overhead, floorboards creak. The familiar settling of an old house.
Dallas is in the kitchen when I pad in. He’s standing at the stove, back to me, holding a kettle over one of the burners.
Steam curls up, caught in the glow of the under-cabinet lights.
He reaches up to the shelf where Maggie keeps her mugs and grabs two, setting them on the counter with a soft clink.
He looks different in his home space. Less the gruff stranger who fished me out of a ditch and more the Dallas I remember. Faded flannel, worn jeans, the slope of his shoulders familiar. There’s a new heaviness to him, though.
“Hey,” I say softly.
He glances over his shoulder. For a heartbeat, his gaze travels from my wet curls to my borrowed clothes. Emotion flickers in his eyes before he looks away, flipping off the burner.
“Tea okay?” he asks. “We’ve got coffee too, but if I remember correctly, you don’t like it bitter and twisted.”
“Tea is perfect,” I say with a chuckle.
He nods toward the kitchen table. “Sit.”
The word isn’t sharp exactly, but it’s an order. A familiar one, in the sense that Dallas has always been better at directing action than making polite suggestions.
I sit.
The same old wooden table is scarred and scuffed, one leg shimmed with a folded piece of cardboard. The place where I carved my initials under the edge when I was thirteen, daring Clay to do the same, is still there. My fingers find it automatically, tracing the familiar grooves.
F.R. + ?
I smile, a bit sad, remembering the argument we had about what initial should follow the plus sign. Clay thought it was hysterical that I refused to pick.
“You can’t put D.M.,” he’d sing-songed. “That’d be too on the nose.”
“You didn’t change it,” I murmur now.
“What?” Dallas asks.
My voice must have carried, because he sets a mug down in front of me with a little more care than necessary.
“Nothing,” I say quickly. “Just… talking to the table.”
His mouth twitches. “You were always weird.”
The tea is chamomile; I recognize the slightly grassy scent. He sits across from me with his own mug, wrapping his hands around it as if he needs the warmth as much as I do.
“Well,” he says finally. “You wanna tell me why you were barreling down Old Mill Road in a snowstorm dressed like you lost a bet at David’s Bridal?”
A laugh bursts out of me, but it dies quickly. “It’s a long story.”
He lifts one shoulder. “Storm’s not letting up anytime soon.”
I stare into my tea. The surface trembles slightly with my shaky hands.
“I… I left my wedding,” I say. The words sound absurd out loud. “I mean, you probably guessed that part. It’s not like I dress like this for fun. No offense to the dress.”
“None taken,” he says. “You looked like you were about to pass out in it.”
“I was,” I admit. “I think I had an actual panic attack.”
“Sounds about right.” His tone is unreadable. “So you just… ran? In the middle of the ceremony?”
“Before,” I say quickly. My chest squeezes, guilt pulsing. “No one was at the altar yet. I was in the bridal suite. I just… couldn’t breathe. Everyone was fussing, and my dad was banging on the door, and Evan…”
I break off, throat closing around his name.
His eyes sharpen, picking up on the hitch.
“Evan,” he repeats. “The guy you were marrying?”
“Yeah.” I huff out a breath. “Evan Carter. He’s… well. He’s everything my dad ever wanted for me. Polished. Smart. Corporate. He says things like ‘leveraging our Q4 momentum’ in normal conversation.”
“That sounds exhausting,” Dallas says dryly.
“It is.” I wrap both hands around my mug, chasing warmth. “He’s not… bad. Or cruel or anything. He’s just… not mine.”
The words feel dangerous and relieving at the same time.
I tell him all of it.