Chapter 8
chapter
eight
Heath
The rehearsal itself takes about forty minutes.
I remember approximately none of it.
This is not ideal given that I am the best man and tomorrow I will need to know where to stand and when to move and what to do with the rings.
I will review the sequence with Jana in the morning.
What I am fully occupied with this afternoon is the peripheral awareness of Clover that occupies roughly eighty percent of my available attention.
She is good at not looking at me. I’ll give her that. She stands where she’s told to stand and she smiles at her sister and she speaks when spoken to and she does all of this without once allowing her eyes to drift in my direction.
I am less disciplined.
I watch her when I can do it without being obvious about it.
The way she tucks a curl behind her ear when Jana is talking.
The way she laughs at something Juniper says, genuine and unguarded, tipping her head back slightly.
There is a quality to her that I noticed the first moment I saw her at the airport and it has not diminished in the light of day.
If anything, it’s gotten worse. Better. Both.
When Jana walks the couple back up the aisle, Clover takes my arm with the careful stiffness of someone managing something.
“Clover,” I say her name, low.
“I can’t do this right now.” Her voice is tight. Full.
There are a hundred things I want to say and none of them are appropriate for a rehearsal walkthrough on a beach with our families twelve feet away. So I say nothing. I walk her up the aisle and release her arm at the top and tell myself that I will fix this at dinner.
The dinner is held on the resort’s main terrace, strung with twinkle lights. Round tables, candles, the perfect kind of evening breeze that reminds me why I bought this resort in the first place.
I am seated at the head table because I am best man and father of the groom.
My ex-wife and Leo’s mom finally shows up about twenty minutes into the dinner.
I see her before she sees me, which is always my preference.
She looks the same. Expensive and careful, the kind of beauty that requires a lot of maintenance.
She spots Leo first, and the performance of maternal warmth that crosses her face is something I have learned, over many years, not to comment on.
Leo handles her with practiced ease. My son made peace with exactly who his mother is years ago, and decided to love her.
It is one of the more impressive things about him.
She finds me next. Offers a smile that is mostly teeth. Makes her look as if she smells something rotten.
“Heath.”
“Kiki.”
This exchange contains everything that needs to be said between us. We have been having it, in one form or another, for twenty years.
She does make a small scene because she’s not seated at the head table. But Jana, somehow gets KiKi to calm down. I make a mental note to give Jana a raise.
Meanwhile, Clover is at the far end of the same table, between Juniper and a woman I don’t know. She is doing the thing again where she doesn’t look at me. She is doing it with real commitment. I watch her talk to Juniper, laugh at something, and reach for her water glass.
I can’t stop looking at her. Remembering the way she felt, the way she tasted. I’d really wanted to see what she looked like waking up in my bed this morning.
She left before I could say anything. And now she’s sitting fifteen feet away and she might as well be on the other side of the island.
I force my attention back to the table in front of me, the speech notes I’ve been pretending to review, and the glass of bourbon I’ve been pretending to drink slowly.
Across the table, Leo is talking, animated and happy. Juniper beside him has her hand on his arm in that. They look familiar, as if they’ve already built that private language that couples construct. I think about what I said to Clover on the plane. When you know, you know.
I meant it as a general observation. I didn’t know yet that I was about to live those very words.
The courses come and go. The conversation at the table is good, easy, threaded with the kind of laughter that comes from people who are genuinely glad to be in the same place. I participate when I should. I make the right noises. I am almost completely present.
Almost.
If it weren’t for the gorgeous redhead at the end of the table. My gaze keeps drifting to her. I’m so attuned to her, I hear each of her laughs. They feel simultaneously achingly familiar and temptingly fresh. Promising both comfort and adventure.
She is careful and consistent but once, just once, in a pause between conversations, she looks straight at me. It lasts maybe two seconds. Then she looks away.
It is enough to make me feel like I’ve touched a live wire.
When dinner ends and the tables begin to clear, I excuse myself with the intention of finding her before she can disappear. She is faster though. By the time I’ve extracted myself from a conversation with the wedding coordinator about tomorrow’s timeline, Clover is gone.
I stand at the edge of the emptying terrace and look out at the dark water and think about a woman with amber eyes who is somewhere in this building right now probably convincing herself that last night was a pleasant accident and nothing more.
She is wrong.
“Heath.” Graham’s voice comes from behind me.
I turn. He and Bram are at a table nearby, the remnants of the dinner crowd thinned out around them. They are wearing matching expressions of the sort that have historically preceded advice I didn’t ask for and needed anyway.
I walk over.
“What’s going on with you and the bride’s sister?” Graham asks.
I don’t ask him how he figured it out. Graham has always been able to read a room the way other people read text. It is occasionally useful and frequently irritating.
“I take it she’s who gave you that love bite?” Bram says.
“She is. We didn’t know we were here for the same wedding. We met on the plane.”
Graham lets out a low sound. “What are the fucking odds?”
“I’d rather not figure out the statistics on that.” I pull out a chair and sit.
I know my brother well enough to know that he’s not done talking to me about this. I might as well be comfortable.
“So what are you going to do?”
“My plan had been to catch her before she ran off so we could talk. But she’s already disappeared.”
“Don’t you own this place?” Bram asks.
“I do.”
“Seems like it could be pretty damn easy to find her.”
“Is it really that simple though?” I ask. “What the hell am I going to say?” I scrape a hand down my face. “And what the hell do I say to Leo?”
“If she wasn’t the bride’s sister, what would you say about her?” Graham asks.
“That she was not a one-night stand for me. She was so much more.”
Graham is quiet for a moment. He reaches for his glass, turns it once in his hand. “Sometimes you know when you know,” he says.
It’s not nothing, coming from him. My brother spent the better part of fifteen years being absolutely certain he would never be the kind of man who would fall head over ass in love.
But then Lizzie happened and rearranged everything he had constructed in his well-ordered life.
He says it like someone who has earned the knowledge.
“And sometimes even when you know, you’re a dumbass about it,” Bram says, elbowing him.
“You really want to go there, old man?” Graham asks. “We can call Emma over here and she can tell us all about your dumbassery.”
“That’s not even a word,” Bram says.
“Any advice?” I ask.
“Go with your gut and your heart,” Graham says. “Our brains are dumb as shit.”
I stand. “If Leo asks where I am—”
My brother puts a hand on my shoulder. “We’ve got you.” He squeezes once. “Go get your girl.”