Scott #2
Kendra swiveled back to face the front. “You always said you wanted something small,” she said, and for a second I wasn’t sure if she was still talking to Tess or if she was now making up a conversation we’d never had. “A bridal party that could fit around one table, you said.”
“Affordable that way,” Tess said, and I had one of those reckoning moments where I remembered that, despite all the bullshit I had to endure with the Sebastian name, I never had to worry about the cost of things.
Kendra probably didn’t have to either. Her parents were far from billionaires, but they had enough to put them in the upper one percent.
Her family would never allow her to have a small wedding, and her envy was evident.
To me, anyway. Because it was something I envied as well.
But did she also realize that the reasons she and I felt like we had no other choice were trivial compared to the fact that most people—people like Tess—actually didn’t have a choice?
I was going to spoil her, I decided right then. As long as Tess was in my world, I was going to give her all the things she’d never had access to. How had Kendra been in her world so long and not been driven to do the same?
She went on as though her privilege hadn’t just been checked. “Two bridesmaids, you always said. You just couldn’t decide who would be the maid of honor—me or Teyana.”
“It would be Teyana,” Tess said pointedly. “No other bridesmaids.”
Kendra deflated as the words had their intended effect.
“Of course. You two are so close.” She let a beat pass.
“I’m not really close to anyone. My mother will have a list of cousins and friends that we’ll have to include, but for my maid of honor, there’s no one I could think of asking besides you. ”
Oh. Well. That was unexpected.
Manipulative, too. Was Tess supposed to feel bad about that?
I didn’t have to look to know Tess hadn’t taken it well. “Is this your passive-aggressive way of asking me to be your maid of honor, K?”
“I...I...don’t...I—” Kendra stuttered.
Tess didn’t let her struggle long. “Earlier today you hinted that I might be on the brink of being fired, and you think I’m somehow cool enough with that to consider saying yes to being in your wedding party? Am I just your lap dog? Subject to your beck and call and your whims?”
Kendra whirled around to face the backseat.
“Why would I even think you still want to work for me? You’ve already basically accused me of taking you for granted, and then you went behind my back, Tess.
When I thought you were my friend. When I thought you were the one person in my life who would never take advantage of me.
Were you trying to hurt me? Do you want to be fired? ”
I kept my eyes pinned on the traffic, forcing myself to concentrate on the driving and ignoring the primitive instinct to defend my woman.
It wouldn’t be pretty if I did. Kendra would be shred into pieces.
After I’d spent all morning insisting we keep the status quo because I feared her retaliation, destroying her seemed counterproductive.
Tess didn’t need me to defend her anyway. She had her own back. “I honestly don’t know right now, Kendra.”
That seemed to hurt my bride-not-to-be more than anything I could have said.
“Okay. So.” Kendra turned to face the front, her voice thick with emotion. “We’ll get through this deal with SIC, and then we’ll reevaluate. Both of us.”
“Perfect,” Tess replied tightly.
After that, we rode in silence. That stretch of minutes felt endless. I kept looking at the time to destination on the dash, certain it was stuck. Eight minutes, it said. Eight minutes. Eight minutes.
Then, finally, seven minutes. It stayed seven minutes for a decade. Then it was six for another decade. Then five. Then four. Then three. Then two.
Then I was pulling up to the curb in front of her building. I popped the trunk as the doorman opened Kendra’s door. Then he opened the back door.
“Come on, Tess,” Kendra said.
Tess had avoided eye contact since the conversation had halted, but now she met my eyes, questioning.
“I’ll take you,” I assured her.
“She’s all the way in Jersey City,” Kendra said, already half out of the car.
“It’s fine. I’m taking her.”
“It’s really no big deal to take the train from here,” Tess offered.
“I said I’m taking you,” I snapped. Which I immediately felt shitty about since she wasn’t the one I wanted to be snapping at.
“That’s really nice of you. I must be marrying a saint.
” Kendra gave me a gritted-teeth smile, and I knew she felt this was another betrayal, this time from the man who was supposedly going to be her husband.
It had to seem like I’d taken a side. Had to be salt in her wound, but asshole that I was, I didn’t give a shit about her wound unless her pain ended up causing her to hurt Tess.
She slammed the door when she got out.
Tess didn’t move from her place in the back.
“You should come up here so I don’t feel like a chauffeur,” I said, when what I really wanted to say was, You should come up here so I can be near you, so I can be close enough to smell your shampoo, so I can forget that there is anyone in the world that exists but you.
Kendra was already out of earshot. I could have said it. I should have.
But I’d been too carefully guarding my words for the entire drive, and I’d forgotten momentarily how to let that guard down.
She didn’t respond. But she did climb out of the backseat and into the front. Without a word, she reached over to enter her address into the GPS then put her seatbelt on and huddled next to the door, making her seem just as far away now as she had when she’d been in the back.
I pulled into traffic in silence, wracking my brain trying to figure out what to say, how to fix this weird tension between us.
So much had happened over the course of the day, so much had been said, so much I wanted to explain and apologize for and make better, and fuck.
I didn’t know the first thing about how to do any of that.
I’d never had a non-related relationship that required work.
I’d never hung around long enough to ever get to that point.
Unless I counted my family, and those relationships were so laborious that I’d purposefully abstained from any other emotional intimacies.
With Tess, though, I wanted to try. Wanted to explore the possibility that love didn’t always have to be so hard.
Wanting to didn’t mean knowing how. And each silent minute that passed without making an attempt felt like another mile stretched between us.
Then, abruptly, she threw her head back against the seat rest. “Oh my God, that was terrible!” she groaned.
I pulled my eyes from the road to make sure I was reading her right, that she meant to commiserate and not to blame. The tense smile assured me it was the latter.
“So terrible!” I agreed. “So fucking terrible.”
“The absolute worst.”
We hit a red light, and I turned to her. “I’m already going to my parents for a family dinner tomorrow night. I’ll tell them this is over then. One more day, Tessa. Can you give me just one more day?”
She swung her head toward me. “As long as I don’t have to be in a room with her before then, yes. I can give you one more day.”
Sunlight had a way of making the world forget there could ever be a storm. Tess was sunlight right then. A bright light piercing through an otherwise dark day.
I leaned across the console and kissed her, kissed her hard, kissed her like we were in my bed and not on Columbus Avenue, and when the car behind us honked for us to get moving, I kissed her quickly once more before turning my eyes back to the road.