9. Eric
Eric
Thankfully, the ceremony is short.
The less time I have to sit with my butt in a pew listening to a minister talk about the deeper meaning of love and marriage, the better.
The only good thing about the ceremony was watching Rebecca walk down the aisle clutching a bouquet of pink roses.
When she got to the front and took her place on the bride’s side of the wedding arch, she found me in the crowd and angled her bouquet so that I could see the back of it.
Tucked out of sight so that only she would be able to see it, was the red rose that I gave her.
I couldn’t take my eyes off of her for the rest of the ceremony. She made up for my lack of emotion, tearing up at the couple’s sentimental vows, crying again when they sealed their promise with a kiss.
Maybe I don’t enjoy weddings…but I enjoy watching Rebecca.
After the ceremony, the wedding party stays behind to take photos with the photographer.
I follow the rest of the guests as we’re herded from the sanctuary to the reception hall, where twinkling lights and flowers are spread from corner to corner. There’s music booming from the speakers, and the lights are low.
I wonder if Rebecca will want me to dance with her. Dancing wasn’t part of the deal and in truth, I’m not sure I can handle that. Not even for her.
“How do you know the bride?”
I look and see a woman in a blue dress smiling at me.
“I don’t know the bride,” I reply honestly. “I know her sister, Rebecca.”
“Rebecca,” she sighs. “Such a cute girl, right? She looked so adorable in that hairpiece. Bless her heart!”
I nod absentmindedly, looking around the room. When I feel a hand on my arm, I flinch.
“Want to get a drink?” she asks, jerking her head towards the bar in the corner.
“No, thanks.”
“Aw, come on,” she smiles, rubbing my arm with her hand and sidling closer to me. “What, don’t you drink?”
“I don’t,” I reply. I lean away from her, but this only makes her slide her chair closer to me.
“I love weddings, don’t you?”
“No.”
She looks at me.
“Well, what do you like?” She asks. “Tell me. What does Eric Stone enjoy?”
There it is.
My name, spoken by someone I never introduced myself to. Am I really this recognizable? Or was this woman told that I would be here by someone else?
The reception hall is filling up with more people and I see the wedding party finally returning, groomsmen and bridesmaids and finally, the lucky couple themselves, the groom and his blushing bride.
I knew this event would be challenging, but I’m feeling more claustrophobic than anticipated. I have to get out of here. But as I rise from my chair, so does the woman in the blue dress.
“I need to go,” I say, taking a step away from her. She hooks her hand around my elbow, closing the distance between us again.
The claustrophobia increases. My chest tightens.
My eyes scan the bridal party. I see a flurry of pink feathers standing tall above the heads of all the others and Rebecca peers around the crowd of groomsmen, searching.
Her eyes find mine. Then they drop to the woman’s hand on my arm.
She looks back at me with a frown. Turning back to her sister, she says something to her and then steps away from the crowd, walking to me with hurried footsteps.
“Eric,” she says. “I was wondering if you could help me with something in the sanctuary real quick. Apparently there’s a flower situation.”
“Sure.”
I peel the woman on my arm off of me and follow my pink date to the exit. We make the short walk to the empty sanctuary and close the doors, cutting off the distant sound of music and people.
“What’s this flower situation about?” I ask, looking around.
“What?” Rebecca asks, turning back to me. “Oh, that. That was just an excuse. You looked like you could use a breather.”
I drop into a nearby pew and sigh in relief. The tightness in my chest is still present, but improving already. It actually began to loosen as soon as we got out of that dark and crowded reception hall.
Rebecca takes a seat next to me, careful not to brush against me in the process.
“We can stay here for as long as you need to,” she says quietly.
I nod, breathing slowly, feeling the clenching of my chest loosen more with every exhale.
One thing I’ve always appreciated about Rebecca is that she doesn’t mind silence. Some people feel the need to fill silence with endless talking, seeing silence as something wrong, something to be fixed. An absence of something that should be there.
For me, silence is like water, essential and sometimes too scarce for comfort.
With Rebecca, it’s never scarce. She gives it freely and easily, never seeing it as a sign that something is wrong. Never making me feel like something is wrong with me for it, either.
“Don’t you need to be in there?” I ask after a few minutes go by. “To make a speech, or something?”
“Alyssa and her fiancé decided against wedding speeches,” she replies with a smile. “She’s afraid my mom will say something stupid. Honestly, my mom will probably say something stupid no matter what. Already did, in fact.”
“What did she say?”
She shakes her head.
“Just that you’re only dating me for sex,” she says. “She thinks guys only want one thing from girls like me.”
“What do you mean by girls like you?” I ask with a frown.
“You know...” she says, giving me a knowing look.
“I don’t know,” I reply.
“Heavy girls,” she replies, looking away from me. “God, it sounds so dumb just repeating it. I told you, she says stupid stuff. No wonder Alyssa doesn’t want to hand her a microphone tonight. Wise choice.”
I’m turning this information over in my mind.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “Why would your body impact the things that I want from you?”
“Because you’re like…out of my league,” she laughs.
“I mean, look at you. And then you’re rich, too.
People are looking at us tonight and wondering why the hell you’re with me.
And then their mind starts searching for explanations.
It’s a classic cliche, an older man banging his younger assistant.
Except with a twist: his assistant is fat. ”
“I’m not even sleeping with you,” I say.
“People don’t know that,” she replies.
Oh. Right.
We fall silent again for a few minutes. Rebecca takes the fluffy feathered hair piece from her head, turning it in her fingers.
“I like that,” I say, nodding to it.
She smiles, turning to me.
“You can keep it,” she says. She leans forward, tucking the pink burst of feathers into my jacket pocket. “There.”
“How do I look?” I ask.
“Very handsome,” she says. Her eyes rise from the hair piece to my face. “But then, you always look handsome.”
She begins to pull her hand away from my chest. I grab it, and then pull her along the pew so that she’s sitting right next to me.
“I didn’t get to finish what I started earlier,” I say to her.
“I know,” she says softly.
She rests her hand on my thigh. Just like the night of the company party, her touch doesn’t seem to bother me.
I look down at her hand on my leg and wonder what the hell is different about her, what she’s got that others don’t, how the fuck she manages to get past my barriers, without me even realizing she’s doing it.
My cock is hard. It wouldn’t be difficult, fucking her. She wouldn’t even have to take the dress off. I’d pull it up, bend her over the back of this pew, and take her from behind.
“I want you,” I say. “But once we cross that line, there’s no going back to how things were before. We work together. We see each other every day, Monday through Friday. This changes things.”
Her eyes tell me she knows what I’m talking about. And her body tells me she doesn’t care, that she wants me just as much as I want her right now.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” she says. “We both want the same thing. It’s like you said. We’re both lonely. We both want love. I know we’re not in love and I know that you can’t promise me love. But we could have…something else. We could have this.”
She squeezes my thigh gently, and then her hand wanders up to my groin, brushing against my cock.
She’s too perfect to be real. How can this be? How can she look at me with so much acceptance? No expectations. No judgment.
She looks at me like it’s not a problem for her. Like she can deal with me and all of my idiosyncrasies, in the way that I can’t give her the things that women need. But I’ve been through this enough to know that even if she can do that for a while, she can’t do it forever. Nobody can.
The scene plays out in front of me like a movie. Three months from now, the resentment boils over and she’s walking out on me. Telling me she needs more, that I’m too distant, too disconnected. Telling me that it’s not enough. That I’m not enough. Saying she needs more than I can give.
I can provide for her.
I can even protect her as I did last week when I saw that fucker put his hands on her.
But these things are not enough. And Rebecca is too sweet, too kind to tie herself down to a guy like me. To waste her time, waste her years with me knowing that we’re incompatible.
I know all of this, and yet I still want her. Is that selfish?
Maybe.
My skin is heated, burning for her, demanding to brush against hers.
She’s right here, looking up at me like I’m some kind of fucking hero, like I’m the Prince Charming she’s been waiting for all her life, and I know I should correct her.
I know I should tell her that she’s got the wrong guy, remind her of what we talked about at my house, about how I can’t be what she needs me to be.
This would be the right thing to do, but dammit, I don’t want to do what’s right.
Not now. Not with her pressed against me, her hand cupping me, looking up at me with this please fuck me expression on her beautiful face.
“Once we cross this line…” I begin.
“We can’t undo it,” she says.
“Right.”
“Is it bad that I don’t care?” she asks.
“Yes. But I don’t care either, and that’s worse,” I say. “I’m your boss. I should know better.”
“But you don’t care,” she says, her hand gripping my cock, now solidly hard, through my pants.
“I don’t care about anything right now,” I say quietly. “Nothing but you.”
“That seems impossible,” she replies. “But I know you better than to accuse you of exaggerating.”
“I don’t exaggerate.”
“I know,” she says.
She squeezes my cock.
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever fucking seen,” I say. “And I’ve had to work with you for years. Years .”
“You’re telling me you thought I was beautiful this entire time?”
“Yes,” I say. “Beautiful. I’m not blind. At the end of the day I’m still a guy. And some of the things you wear to the office…once or twice I’ve considered asking you not to wear that blue skirt. That blue skirt fucks up my concentration.”
Her eyes widen.
“Now I wonder if you are exaggerating,” she says. “You don’t notice anything that’s not right in front of your face. Nothing that’s not relevant to work, especially. You’re so focused at work, always so serious and business-like.”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t notice your ass in that skirt,” I grunt.
Her hand strokes me through my pants and I lean my head back, closing my eyes.
“You’re very good at pretending to be indifferent, then,” she replies. “You always seem indifferent to anything that isn’t one of your obsessions.”
She drops to the floor, kneeling in front of me as her fingers undo my fly. Pulling my cock out, she strokes the length of the shaft in her hand while taking the tip into her mouth, her tongue flicking the underside of my cock while she sucks gently.
“What if you’re my new obsession?” I ask, the words leaving my mouth against my better judgment.
She stops what she’s doing for a moment and looks up at me.
“Then the feeling is mutual.”