Chapter Twenty-Eight
Harrison
The joint bachelor and bachelorette party was…
boring. It’s not like I was expecting strippers or anything.
As best man, I’d hoped the maid of honor, AKA Sadie, and I would have to plan it together.
But Melinda and Drake had planned it forever ago, apparently.
The two of them had a huge love for board games of all kinds and were extremely competitive.
Drake had rented out an event space in Halliwell, not wanting to use the banquet hall in Indigo Falls yet again.
Everything was taken care of and set up for the night.
I knew it was being catered, there was an open bar, and there would be lots of space for the kinds of competitive games Melinda and Drake liked to play, like Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit, Scattergories, and so on.
It was a little strange to see everyone wearing dressy cocktail party attire to get ready to play charades and things like that, but whatever.
I stood off to the side, drinking a glass of whiskey and watching as teams were forming.
I wasn’t sure if they were being set up by Melinda and Drake, or if I needed to find my own partner.
I glanced around. I hadn’t seen Sadie yet.
I hoped she didn’t bring a date. I’d love to be her partner, but I wasn’t holding out much hope.
I smiled as I thought about how we’d used to dominate in certain games. We wiped the floor with everyone else in Pictionary and charades because we’d always seemed to be able to read each other’s minds.
“What are you smiling at?” I looked up to see one of the bartenders smiling at me. She was good looking, with dark hair and eyes, and a shirt that was way too tight for the size of her breasts.
I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
“I was just thinking about how good my ex-girlfriend and I were as teammates on game nights,” I said.
She blinked at me for a minute before her smile returned. “Oh. Ex-girlfriend, huh?” She leaned over so I could get a look at her extreme cleavage. I kept my eyes on her face.
“Unfortunately,” I said, sipping my drink and looking around the room.
The bartender’s smile froze, and I saw her looking around for another guy to hit on.
“What can I get you, ma’am?” a male bartender asked someone behind me.
“Chardonnay, please,” came an extremely familiar voice. I turned to see Sadie standing pretty close to me. She looked amazing in a sparkly red dress and sky-high heels. I couldn’t think for a second as I took her in.
She waited until she got her wine before she acknowledged me. “We were a good team on game nights, weren’t we?”
She’d heard me. I thought back over what I’d said, hoping it wasn’t too pathetically embarrassing. “We were.”
She grinned at me as we walked over to the head table where teams seemed to be forming. “That bartender was a sure thing, you know.”
I glanced at her. “Not interested.”
She sipped her wine while we stood in line. “Why not?”
I shrugged. “Just not looking for anything right now.”
“Anything serious, you mean? I remember you seemed to have an aversion to that after the end of our relationship.”
I winced. “I believe we’ve established my level of idiocy.” I shook my head. “I was a fucking moron.” I paused trying to think of how to put what I wanted to say. “But no, it’s not just that I’m not looking for anything serious. I’m not really looking for anything at all right now.”
“Why not?” She didn’t sound extremely interested. It was more like she was just making polite conversation. I wished she cared, but I could tell she didn’t. Not really.
“You really want to know?”
She looked at me, startled. “Yeah. Even more so now.”
“I tried to date for a while after… everything. But it was always disappointing. So, after a while, I stopped.”
“Stopped dating and just looked for casual hookups?”
I gave a wry smile. “Nah. I haven’t even done hookups in the last year or so.” It had been longer than that, but I didn’t want to admit it to her. Especially since I knew she was dating and almost certainly sleeping with guys.
Her eyes widened. “That’s surprising.”
A loud voice interrupted us. “No. Absolutely not!”
I turned to see Melinda pointing a finger between the two of us. “The only good thing about the two of you breaking up was that Drake and I have ruled game night for the past several years. You cannot be a team.”
“Honey,” Drake whispered in her ear, “you’re being a little intense…”
She speared him with a look. “Do you want to win or not?”
“Of course, but remember we do want everyone to have fun tonight.”
While they were arguing, I gave Sadie a look. “Well, now I think we have to be partners.”
She nodded, a determined look coming over her face. “Yep.”
We signed our names on the team list, grabbed our name tags, and headed for one of the empty tables.
The games were played in an elimination style tournament all night.
Both Melinda and Drake had a lot of family who’d flown in from out of town for the wedding.
And even though it was supposed to be a bachelor and bachelorette party, lots of parents had been invited.
Because there were so many people there besides the wedding party, there were eight groups of teams each with six teams competing.
The winner of each small group advanced to the next stage of the tournament, and so on.
Almost every game came down to two final competing teams—Sadie and me versus Melinda and Drake.
The party had gone from being boring to being the best time I’d had in months, if not years.
Sadie and I wiped the floor with them in several games, and they bested us in others.
It came right down to the wire as to who would be declared winners of the night.
I had taken my tie off long ago. Sadie’s shoes had disappeared sometime during the Pictionary round.
People were cheering and choosing sides.
Even the bartenders and waitstaff were watching intently as we faced off in the final round.
We were playing Trivial Pursuit and were basically tied.
Whoever rolled the die to the right number and landed in the middle would be asked one last question that would either keep the game going or decide the entire night’s competition.
I held the die for Sadie to blow on and then rolled. She jumped up and down when it landed on the exact right number for us to move our game piece to the middle of the board.
Melinda and Drake were looking nervous. Drake had tied his tie around his forehead so he would ‘look more like a warrior,’ and Melinda looked a little sweaty from jumping around and cheering. “What’s their worst category?” I heard Drake whisper to Melinda.
“History,” Melinda said. “They’re still good at that one, but not as good.”
“We can do this,” I said to Sadie.
She grinned up at me. “You bet your ass we can.”
It was just like old times, and my heart swelled at how normal everything was between us. How we could fall back into who we used to be together even after all these years.
“Okay, here’s the question,” Drake intoned.
His voice started out strong and loud but faded as he realized what the question was about.
By the time he reached the end of the question, he looked a little pale and couldn’t look us in the eyes.
“Who did Prince Charles of Great Britain have an affair with while married to Princess Diana?”
Damn. Neither of us wanted to be reminded of affairs or people cheating on each other. For obvious reasons. I looked quickly at Sadie. The smile had fallen from her beautiful face, and I watched as she swallowed hard. “Camilla Parker Bowles,” she answered flatly, not looking at me.
Many of the people in the room went wild, not realizing the history between Sadie and me. Everyone else grew quiet as the levity and fun seemed to be sucked from the event hall.
Melinda recovered first. “We lost fair and square,” she announced with a big, forced smile.
“The winners, Sadie and Harrison, have won this incredible gift basket full of all kinds of goodies. Thank you for coming tonight, everyone! There’s still plenty of food, and the bar will remain open for another hour.
Enjoy yourselves and be sure to pick up a smaller gift basket on your way out this evening. ”
When I turned to look at Sadie, it was as if all the noise in the room stopped and it was just the two of us. I didn’t know what to say and neither did she. So, we found ourselves just staring at each other in the center of the room.
“Affairs are so awful,” I heard an older woman say behind us as she picked up a gift basket. “They have such long reaching consequences and affect so many more people than just the people involved. A person has to be incredibly selfish to have an affair,” she concluded.
“Among other things,” her husband agreed.
I thought about what my cheating on Sadie had done to our friend group and our families. Hell, even our small town. Everyone had picked sides, and nothing had ever been the same.
The familiar feeling of shame caused my cheeks to darken and my stomach to roil. I would never escape the fallout from what I’d done. Never. I swallowed hard and met Sadie’s eyes. I thought I saw moisture there, and I worried that she was trying not to cry.
I opened my mouth to say something, but she held up her hand to stop me. “Tonight was fun. You can have the gift basket.”
Then she hurried away from me and out the building just as one of my old teachers grabbed my arm to speak to me. “Harrison! It’s so good to see you and Sadie back together. I always did think the two of you were perfect as a couple.”
“Thank you,” I said, distracted. I tried to keep my eye on Sadie, hoping I could catch her before she left. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to grab her real quick before she leaves.”
I didn’t wait for a response, just started jogging for the door. I made it out to the parking lot, looking right and left. By the time I saw her car, it was too late. It was pulling out of the lot. For a brief second, I thought about getting in my car and following her, making her talk this out.
But then I thought of what my therapist would say.
He would insist that she needed me to respect any space or distance she put between us.
I’d hurt her terribly, and I had to remember that it was her decision whether she wanted to have anything to do with me or not.
I sighed and massaged my temples. I could feel a migraine coming on, probably brought on by the intense competition.
Or maybe it was just a side effect of heartbreak.