“Well, obviously,” Chloe’s voice came at them, “considering Alex’s sister Blake is…how to say this…how she is, Alex needs a fabulous plus one to shove in Blake’s face and to get Blake off her back during the wedding. And for that to work, you two are going to have to sell it.”
“I’m going with you to your sister’s wedding?” he asked the woman who was in the room with him.
“Oh dear,” Chloe murmured over the phone.
“I just…said that when she…asked because she was…well, she’s Blake,” Alex stammered in the room.
“And how is Blake?” he pressed.
“We’re not all that close.”
He watched her carefully as he turned fully to her and asked, “How huge of an understatement is that?”
“Um…colossal?” she asked back, like he could confirm her answer.
He kept watching her.
Chloe’s voice came back to them. “Have I put my foot in it?”
“We got it from here,” Rix said. “Later, Coco.”
“Okay, but wai—”
That’s all Chloe got out before he reached out and disconnected her.
He turned back to Alex.
She was staring at the door to the hall.
“Babe,” he growled.
Her attention bounced back to him.
“What’s going on?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“You got a situation with your sister?”
A one-shoulder shrug, a quick glance at the door again, then back to him, she said, “It’s just…she’s, well…we don’t get along. We’re very different. And when she asked if I was bringing someone to her wedding, she did it in a way she knew my answer. Because I’m not seeing anyone. But she’s getting married. And it was her usual catty. I kind of wanted to…you know, maybe let the wind out of her sails a little bit. You sprang to mind, I, uh…” her gaze coasted from his to rest on the floor, “I don’t know why. And um…when I told her I was bringing someone, she probably could tell I was lying, so she started quizzing me. I was kind of glad I picked someone I knew, instead of made someone up, so I didn’t have to make more up.” Her attention lifted, grazed his phone, and then came back to him. “I don’t know how Chloe found out, but it’s not a big deal. I just threw your name out there and then, later, I was going to explain you couldn’t make it.”
Rix stood there, staring at her.
“I’m maid of honor,” she blurted.
Rix continued to stare at her.
“She sent me my dress and shoes. Combined, they cost twenty-four hundred dollars. I need to PayPal her.”
“Holy fuck,” he muttered.
“Yeah,” she agreed.
“Why are you maid of honor if you two don’t get along?”
“Because that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
“According to who?”
“Mom. Dad. Blake.”
“I take it you declining isn’t an option.”
She shook her head.
“When’s this happening?”
“October,” she said slowly.
His brows knit. “Next month?”
She nodded.
“When’d you tell her I was coming with you?”
“The Friday before last.”
“So, it’s not like you told her that when she asked you to stand up for her and it’d be tough to get an out because by then, we’d have been seeing each other for a while, so two people together for a while, the sister’s boyfriend would make a point of showing at a family wedding.”
She swallowed, then shared, “She asked me to be her maid of honor then too.”
Hang on a second.
“She asked you last Friday?”
She nodded again, but clarified, “Not asked. She told me I’d be her maid of honor.”
“Is this a shotgun wedding?”
Another shake of her head. “No, that was just when she got around to telling me she was getting married. She’s already had her shower, and I’m…well, she said she wasn’t going to have one, but I get the sense I’m simply just not invited to her hen night.”
That constriction in his chest hadn’t lessened, but hearing this shit come out of her mouth, now there was a burning.
“Hen night?” he bit out.
“That means bachelorette party.”
“And you’re not invited.”
She bit her lip.
“But you are expected to show in New York on top of paying over two grand for wedding shit.”
She grimaced.
Yeah, his chest was burning.
Way down fucking deep.
“And she had her shower without you even knowing she was getting married?”
“I’m kinda glad, Rix. Like I said, we’re not close.” She swayed, like she was going to take a step his way and thought better of it, then went on quickly, “Listen, I don’t know how Chloe heard or what she thinks, but it isn’t that big of a deal. I wasn’t actually going to ask you to do it. I never expected you’d even know I brought you into it at all. But I’ll just say we broke up, and I’ll—”
“I’m going with you.”
Her head went back on a powerful twitch. “Sorry?”
“We’re gonna be fake boyfriend and girlfriend. I still have Peri’s ring. Peri being my ex-fiancée. She returned it when she dumped me. You can wear it. We’ll go whole hog, steal some of your sister’s thunder, you show there already engaged. You can call it off whenever you feel like it. Or we can send them fake pictures of us living it up in Arizona for the next three years, I don’t give a fuck.”
Her eyes got huge.
Her glossy lips parted.
That top.
That skirt.
Her ankles.
Her curves.
All those curls in her hair.
That look on her face.
He wanted to kiss her.
And he was going to kiss her.
Because no way he could sell the fact that they’d decided to spend the rest of their lives together without him knowing how she tasted.
So he was going to know how she tasted.
He was going to memorize it.
She pulled her shit together, regrettably, and said, “Rix, you really don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t. So, outside of behaving in bitchy ways, like cutting you out of her wedding shit, is she just a straight-out bitch to you, your sister?”
She pressed her lips together.
The sister was a bitch.
Alex that day, sitting with hard-faced, dead-eyed kids who’d been sent to the middle of nowhere to see if they could locate some thread of themselves to hold on to, unfazed, no fear, poised and attentive, eating shit from some woman who shared her blood.
There was “not close.”
And there was this horseshit.
“Then I really do have to do it,” he stated.
“My family is…they’re…well, it’s hard to explain.”
It wasn’t hard to explain. The look on her face, the fact she couldn’t put it into words, the knowledge that Alex worked at a nonprofit and her sister sent her a dress and goddamned shoes that cost that much said it all.