Chapter 13
Quinn
I'd been to a hundred of these. The same string quartet, the same white flowers, the same crowd rearranging itself into the same conversations it had been having for a decade. I could have walked one of these rooms blindfolded.
But I'd never once walked into one with Naomi Cross on my arm.
She wore an emerald green dress that highlighted all the perfect parts of her. It covered just enough to be classy, but showed just enough to remind anyone who saw her that she was a red blooded woman through and through.
It was almost enough to make me forget how she’d run out of my home the other night. Almost. I’d been thinking of her since. Hell, it was impossible not to.
I felt the room turn. Not all at once — a wedding is too well-mannered for that — but in the small ripple of attention that moved like a bow wave. Heads found her, then found me beside her, then made the same quiet connection.
"They're staring," she murmured, through a smile, entirely unbothered.
"If their heads turned anymore they might pop off," I said.
She laughed, low, and I felt it more than heard it, her hand light in the crook of my arm, and I thought — not for the first time and not for the last — that I would have walked into a burning building with more composure than I felt walking into that ballroom with her, and that no one watching would ever have known it.
We found our names on the board as we’d expected, we were both at table eleven. The singles table. Next to each other in fact.
The invitations had gone out last year, back when the seating charts still had Naomi filed under Aaron and Naomi Vance, a matched set.
Then the divorce had blown a hole in someone's careful diagram, and rather than redraw the whole thing, they'd done what people do and swept the loose pieces under the table. A quick reshuffle had Tia in Naomi’s old spot next to Aaron, and Naomi demoted to the singles.
Except she didn't arrive at table eleven single.
She arrived on my arm, and we took our two chairs together, and I watched the other people figure out immediately that whatever this table was supposed to be, we weren't it.
The way she turned her chair a few degrees toward mine.
You can seat two people wherever you like. You can't make them look single.
"The singles table," she said, delighted, snapping her napkin open. "Well. I suppose I earned it."
"I like it here," I said. "Best view of the room."
I pulled her close and kissed her on the cheek, and the look she gave me have my heart beating so hard in my chest I wondered if all the other guests could hear it.
Isaw them before she did.
Across the floor, sat Aaron Vance. And beside him, sat Tia.
Naomi's ex-husband. Naomi's best friend. Together, at a table, in the seats meant for a married couple, while the woman who connected them both sat exiled to the singles table looking like the best thing in the room.
I felt something go cold and still in me. Their duplicity might have freed Naomi up for me, but I knew how much it must’ve hurt her when she found out. And that had me furious. I didn't let it reach my face. I've had a lot of practice keeping things off my face.
Then Aaron looked up and saw me.
I'd spent the better part of eight years being quietly kept at arm's length by this man.
I'd watched him steer a hundred conversations toward his own scoreboard, measuring himself against me, against everyone really, for reasons I never fully understood and had long since stopped trying to.
I knew that face well. I watched it now do something I'd never seen it do.
He saw me. Then he saw her — beside me, radiant in a way he had clearly not prepared himself to witness — and I watched the whole story he'd told himself come down at once.
He'd left her. In his version, surely, she was the one who'd shrunk, who'd folded up small and gone dark like a house with the drapes drawn.
And here she was, lit from the inside, on the arm of the one man he'd never been able to beat without even trying.
He didn't have a face for it. He just went pale and looked back down at his plate.
Tia was harder.
She'd found us too by then — found me, specifically, and I understood, watching her, that she was envious. Perhaps she’d always been envious of Naomi, and perhaps that was why she’d stolen her husband. But she was practically green now.
There was a stricken quality to it, a slow terrible dawning, the look of someone who’s been shown an answer they didn’t want to see.
I didn't know the whole of it. I didn't need to.
I could read enough: that she'd wanted something, for a long time, and that the something was sitting at the singles table with his hand resting over her best friend's on the tablecloth.
And Naomi was solid as a rock through it all. Smiling, gracious. Untouchable.
She was warm, she was laughing, she was the most alive thing in that whole tired ballroom.
But beyond reach. Beyond theirs, anyway.
They'd each thrown something away and told themselves it wouldn't matter, and now they had to sit and watch it not matter to her, which was worse than any scene she could have made.
She didn't make a scene. She didn't have to. Her happiness was the scene.
We danced, and we laughed, and we kissed. And it all looked real. Because it was. At least to me. And I was beginning to think for her too. The unspoken reservation that had plagued her features when I picked her up early was gone, and she was truly enjoying herself.
Across the room, Aaron said something to Tia and Tia didn't answer. They’d expected to be the power couple of the hour — aside from the bride and groom — and yet, everyone was looking at me and Naomi.
"You've gone quiet," Naomi said, tilting her head at me.
"Just enjoying the view," I said, and turned my chair the last few degrees toward hers, and forgot about the people who really didn’t matter anymore.