Chapter 12 Spencer
TWELVE
SPENCER
I hate weddings.
The syrupy vows. The drunken toasts. The look in people’s eyes like they know something you don’t. Like love is a currency, and you’re just too broke to believe in it anymore.
Not that I haven’t tried.
My own wedding cost 1.5 million and ended before the first anniversary. A designer tux. Thirty-four thousand in florals. A dress flown in from Milan. And a woman who, less than a year later, was riding another man on the fur rug I never wanted to buy.
The first time . . . I just needed a breath of air.
I had a cold that week. Low fever, scratchy throat. We’d gone out with friends—drinks, dancing. My wife disappeared to the ladies’ room. I stepped out the side door of the venue, head spinning, lungs tight, and there they were.
At first, I didn’t realize what I was looking at. Just a couple—half in the shadows, lips locked, his hands pinning her arms above her head while she moaned into his mouth, one leg wrapped around his waist. Intense. Desperate. So intimate, I felt embarrassed just seeing it.
And then I saw her shoes.
The red patent stilettos she jokingly referred to, on the day she bought them, as her “Fuck me shoes.”
“Rachel?” I said quietly. Dazed.
She didn’t hear me. Neither of them did. They just kept going.
So I walked closer. Stepped right up behind the guy and said, “Get your fucking hands and mouth off my wife.”
That got their attention.
She gasped. He stumbled back. I took her arm and led her to the car.
She cried the whole way home.
“I had too much to drink, babe. I’m so sorry.”
And, “We danced and I thought he was just joking around about going outside, and I just didn’t know how to stop it.”
And she kept going, “Babe, you have to know that didn’t mean anything. It was like a joke.”
I stared at the windshield the whole time. “Please stop talking,” I said at last. “I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
And we never spoke of it again.
The next morning, she made coffee. I checked the markets. We carried on. Polished smiles at brunch, polished silence at night.
And then came the second time.
Snowstorm in January. My late evening flight got canceled, and instead of heading to Chicago, I caught a car home. Pulled into the driveway to find the fire already lit. Music playing—our song, the one she’d put on the first time we made love.
I remember thinking, 'She must have known I was coming.'
But she hadn’t. None of it was for me. It was him, again.
In our great room. On that goddamn white Mongolian fur rug she’d begged me to buy. She said it was art. I said it was impractical. She won.
And now she was fucking him on it.
Same man. Same everything.
She was straddling him, head thrown back, his hands gripping her breasts like she was his to claim. She was moaning his name like it was holy.
I didn’t yell. Didn’t lose my temper. I simply walked to the console, turned off the music, and said, “Please leave my home. Both of you.”
She froze. He looked up, grabbed a piece of clothing, and pulled it to her chest.
“Babe,” she started. God, I hated that name, Babe.
“You’ve got an hour to take what you need,” I told her. “You’ll hear from my attorney.”
And as much as I wanted to not waste a single word or breath on him, I turned to him and said, “You fucking piece of shit.”
He was white as a sheet, scrambling for his clothes, but still, he was the victor.
And I was the one leaving my house first, into the snowy night.
Didn’t take her calls. Didn’t read her emails. The press called it an amicable parting. They always do when money’s involved.
So yeah. Weddings?
Hard pass.
But here I am—on a plane to New Hampshire—because Carter fucking Ellison is getting married and apparently it would mean a lot to him if I showed up.
He doesn’t know half of what I’ve been through over the last couple of years. Why should he? That was my play: downplay the whole thing for the world.
Carter and I were college roommates at Princeton and golf partners off and on since. And now he wants me as part of the wedding party.
I’m to be matched up with his little sister—step-sister, half-sister, it was never quite clear. I’ve never met her. She and Carter weren’t close. Didn’t even live together for a chunk of their childhood. But ever since the invite came, something’s been gnawing at me.
Haverton, where the wedding will be, is just an hour or two from Maplewick. Where Rhea Sinclair was living when she applied for the Pixel and Paper Foundation grant.
And I find myself fighting the insane urge to drive out there.
To do what, exactly? I’m not sure.
Spy on the woman I shared one unforgettable night with?
God, I still remember the way she looked in that black dress. Her quiet confidence. Her laugh. The curve of her mouth when she said she was leaving for Europe.
But, thanks to Gina, there’s no chance of me acting on my impulses now.
Because I’m well-supervised by Isabelle, my fake date, an actress Gina hires to keep things manageable.
“You know the wedding gig, Spencer,” Gina had said. “It’s a minefield of lonely singles dreaming of their own day at the altar. And women—single, married, and otherwise—getting sloppy drunk and proposing who knows what on the dance floor.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Isabelle and I have done a handful of these events together. She’s stunning. Witty. Totally not my type—which is great, considering she’s gay and happily married to a chef named Jolene.
She’s my shield. My buffer. The perfect decoy.
And as we drive up the winding road toward the picturesque inn hosting the wedding, I brace myself for three days of small talk, polite lies, and the creeping realization that I might be the loneliest man in every room I walk into.
What could possibly go wrong?