Chapter 9
chapter
nine
Clover
Not looking at Heath is far more difficult than I anticipated.
He’s at the head table, which I knew he would be, and I am at the far end of the same table, which I did not anticipate and which the universe has clearly arranged specifically to test me.
I am between Juniper and a woman named Carol, who is somebody’s aunt and who has big feelings about floral arrangements that she is sharing at length and with great passion.
I am grateful for Carol.
Carol requires very little from me beyond the occasional nod, which means I can appear engaged while actually spending the entirety of dinner managing the very specific challenge of being aware of exactly where Heath is at all times without looking at him directly.
It’s like trying not to look at the sun. You know it’s there. You know what happens if you look directly at it. You look anyway.
I don’t look anyway. I am doing so well. I am having conversations and eating food and laughing at appropriate moments and Carol has moved on from florals to centerpieces, which is a rich topic with a lot of material, and I am nodding with genuine commitment.
Juniper leans over at one point and murmurs, “You okay?”
“Great,” I say, which is a lie that my face is probably broadcasting in large friendly letters.
Juniper is thankfully too focused on her wedding and her groom and the twelve thousand things that a bride has running through her head the night before her wedding that she allows me my little fib. Then she turns back to Leo.
Leo, who is right there. Who looks like Heath around the eyes.
Leo isn’t built like Heath though. Where Heath is thick and meaty, Leo is tall and muscular.
But they share some similar qualities. The same steadiness.
The same quality of attention. Leo is younger and lighter about it, easier in the way of someone who hasn’t had decades of life adding weight, but it’s there. It’s the same thing.
Frankly, I don’t know how I didn’t notice on the plane. But of course, on the plane, I’d been flirting with the hot silver fox. Not cataloging any would be similarities to my future brother-in-law.
I look down at my plate while Carol regales me with all the popular floral types that are toxic to her many cats.
Here is the inventory of things I do not look at during this dinner: Heath. Heath’s hands. Heath’s side of the table in general. The empty glass of water that the server keeps refilling in my peripheral vision over Heath’s left shoulder.
Here is the inventory of things I fail at: all of the above, once, for exactly two seconds, when there’s a lull in Carol’s monologue and I lose my concentration and my eyes go where they want to go.
He’s already looking at me.
Two seconds. Then I look away so fast I nearly give myself whiplash and I ask Carol a question about centerpieces with an enthusiasm that seems to startle her slightly.
When the dinner finally starts to wind down, I feel the knot in my chest loosen by exactly one degree.
I can leave soon. I can go back to my room and have the conversation with myself that I have been postponing all evening, the one where I decide what I actually want and what I am actually going to do about it.
And I’ll figure out whether the decision I made earlier, the sensible one, about keeping last night quiet and getting through the weekend like a grown adult, is one I can actually live with.
I have a feeling I already know the answer to that.
I make my excuses to Juniper, invent a headache that is not entirely fictional because my head does actually hurt from the effort of two hours of strategic non-looking, and hug her a little longer than necessary because she’s getting married tomorrow and she’s my person and I love her even when life is completely unhinged.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” she says into my shoulder.
“You’ll see me in the morning,” I confirm.
I walk back into the resort with the careful measured steps of a woman who is not fleeing. I am not fleeing. I am making a graceful and intentional exit.
I am a little bit fleeing.
Because this kind of shit would only happen to me.
I flop onto my bed, face first, and stay there for a moment with my cheek against the cool duvet and my arms at my sides like a person who has given up on the vertical dimension entirely.
The ceiling of my upgraded suite is probably beautiful.
I wouldn’t know. I am face down on the bed having a moment.
Heath is Leo’s dad.
I have had approximately two hours to sit with this information and it has not gotten more manageable with time, which is not how I expected the process to work.
Usually, if you give me two hours and a problem, I will have talked myself into at least three possible solutions and a backup plan.
What I have instead is a pillow I am now pressing my face into and a hollow feeling in my chest that I don’t quite have a name for.
It’s not just that he’s Leo’s dad. It’s that I knew, last night, that whatever happened between us was real.
I knew it the way you know things that don’t have a logical explanation, the way you know a song is good in the first four seconds before you’ve even heard the melody properly.
I knew it and I felt it and then I woke up this morning and left anyway because this weekend was supposed to be about Juniper.
Now it’s about Juniper and also about the fact that I slept with her future father-in-law and didn’t know that until he caught me stumbling at the rehearsal and said four words in that rumbly voice of his that made my entire nervous system stand at attention.
I lay there and think about Heath standing at the altar tomorrow as his son gets married.
About how I will stand across from him for the duration of a wedding ceremony and hand Juniper her flowers at the right moment.
And how I will hold it together and not blubber all over my bridesmaid dress.
About how after tomorrow there will be family events and holidays and a whole future of occasions that put us in the same room.
About how none of that sounds as terrible as it should.
We’ll talk about everything later, baby girl.
Only me.
I’m still face-down when there’s a knock at my door.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling, which is, as suspected, beautiful. High and white with crown molding and a ceiling fan turning slowly in the warm air. It’s the kind of ceiling that belongs in a room where a person has their life together.
I am doing my best.
The knock at the door is so expected that I’ve already decided it’s Juniper before I’ve even stood up.
Of course, it’s Juniper. She clocked my fake headache the moment I invented it; I could see it in the way her eyes tracked my face with that particular sisterly radar that has been calibrated to my specific frequencies for our entire lives.
She’s come to check on me, which is very her, very exactly her, to be thinking about me the night before her own wedding.
I love her so much it makes my back teeth ache sometimes.
I pull the door open, already composing the reassurance I’m going to give her, already reaching for a version of fine that she might actually believe.
It’s not Juniper.
Heath fills the doorway in the way only a man his size can.
Which is to say completely and with a kind of unhurried authority that makes the space seem like it was designed around him.
He’s still wearing his rehearsal dinner clothes, except his tie hangs loose around his neck and the top two buttons on his shirt are undone.
My body reacts to his presence instantly. My heart pounds loudly, but the beat is steady as if it’s making itself known so his heart can get in sync. My tummy flutters and my lady bits go on high alert.
“How did you know where my room was?”
“Baby girl, I put you in this room.” He shoulders past me into the suite.
“I don’t see how that’s possible. You were asleep when I left.”
He turns to face me. “I own this resort.”
I stare at him.
Of course he does. Of course, the man I met on a plane and brought home, so to speak, owns the resort where my sister is getting married and has apparently been watching over my accommodation situation like some kind of large, handsome guardian.
Of course. This is my life. I have made my peace with the fact that my life has a flair for the dramatic.
“Of course you do,” I say.
He watches me with that steady patience that I am starting to understand is just how he is, how he moves through the world, not in a hurry, not rattled, just present and waiting for what comes next.
And here is the thing. Here is the thing I have been lying face down on a hotel bed trying to talk myself out of.
Standing here looking at him in the warm light of this beautiful room that he apparently arranged for me, I know exactly what I want.
I have known it all evening. I knew it at the rehearsal when his hand steadied my elbow and I knew it at the dinner when I looked at him for two seconds and felt it like a current and I knew it face down on the duvet five minutes ago.
I want him. Not just last night. Not just this weekend. I want all of his nights. For however long he’ll give me.
But wanting something and being allowed to have it are different things, and right now what I need is to be sensible. For Juniper. For Leo. For the family that is being built this weekend that will last the rest of all of our lives.
“Okay, well.” I wrap my arms around myself and look somewhere past his left shoulder. “Let’s get this over with. We can come up with a plan or whatever, and Juniper and Leo need never know we hooked up.” I pause. “Or whatever.”
The or whatever is doing a lot of work in that sentence and I am very aware of it.