Chapter 7
chapter
seven
Clover
Okay… so. That just happened.
I need a minute. While the wedding planner answers Juniper’s questions, I sneak off to the restroom.
Instead of hiding in the bathroom though, I find a quiet corner of the resort’s lobby just off the beach exit. I stand there with my back against the cool wall, and I have what I can only describe as a controlled internal emergency.
Heath is Leo’s dad.
Heath. My Heath. The man whose suite I slept in. Whose lap I climbed into. Whose—okay, I’m going to stop that sentence right there because I need to be able to look Juniper in the eye at some point tonight and I need my brain to cooperate with me.
Heath is Leo’s dad.
I press the back of my head against the wall and stare at the ceiling, which is doing nothing helpful.
Ceilings never do. You’d think with all the times I have looked to them for guidance, they would develop some kind of response system, a sign, a flashing light, anything. They do not. They are just ceilings.
Here is what I know about this situation.
I know that last night was real. I know that the way he looked at me and talked to me and held me felt like something that doesn’t have a casual explanation.
I know that I have spent the better part of today in a spa chair trying very hard not to think about a man and failing completely at it.
Here is what else I know about this situation.
I know that Juniper is marrying Leo tomorrow.
I know that Leo’s dad is Heath. I know that our families are about to be permanently linked.
I know that my sister’s wedding is in less than twenty-four hours and the last thing she needs is her maid of honor creating some kind of interpersonal catastrophe with the father of the groom.
The father of the groom who, as it turns out, has a voice like distant thunder and laugh lines and enormous hands and—
I need to pull it together.
Someone walks past the end of the corridor and I arrange my face into an expression of casual normalcy, which probably looks insane but at least represents an attempt. They don’t look at me. Fine. Good.
We’ll talk about everything later, baby girl.
That’s what he’d said. Quietly, just for me, with his hand steadying my elbow and his eyes doing that thing where they looked at me like I was worth looking at. And then he’d walked back to his son and stood there as if he hadn’t just upturned my entire world.
I make my way back over to the rehearsal and do my best to look composed.
I am not, however, composed. I would like to note for the record that I have never been composed a day in my life and this particular situation is not helping.
The thing is, I know what I want him to say.
That’s the problem. I already know, with the kind of bone-deep certainty that usually takes me years to arrive at about anything, what I am hoping for.
And the wanting is terrifying. The wanting means there’s something to lose, and things I can lose have historically made me want to run away.
Case in point, literally calling 9-1-1 on vomiting children and then fleeing the scene.
But this is different. He is different. And I think I might be different, or at least I want to be, which is maybe the same thing.
I push off the wall and smooth down my dress and take a breath that is mostly steady.
The rehearsal dinner. I can do the rehearsal dinner.
I can sit at a table and eat food and make conversation and be a normal, functional adult human woman who did not spend last night in the arms of the father of the groom.
People do harder things than this every day.
People climb mountains. People do their own taxes. I can attend a rehearsal dinner.
I can avoid looking at him for approximately ninety minutes.