“Which is?”
“If you can be polite to me, I can be polite to you.”
It sounds perfectly reasonable. Perfectly normal.
All the same, her words feel like tree roots, growing into my cracks, slowly pulling me apart. Delilah takes a deep breath.
“No purposeful contact,” she goes on, her gaze hard on mine. “No calling, no texting, no going to your brewery or coming by my shop.”
“You want us to be strangers.”
“I want us to be acquaintances.”
I take a long moment just to study her, the way she looks right now under my porch light. She’s holding the fruit basket, her leather jacket open over a brightly colored shirt, something just barely peeking up through the neck. It looks like tape. Maybe gauze.
She sees me looking and frowns down.
“Oh, oops,” she says, and pulls the neck of her shirt up a fraction of an inch.
“What happened?”
“It’s nothing.”
Another pause. I wonder what’s on her chest. I wonder what it is I want from her, exactly. I wonder why the fuck she brought a fruit basket.
“Seriously, it’s nothing,” she says again.
“Okay.”
“Okay…?”
“Okay, we’re acquaintances.”
She holds my eyes for another pause in this conversation full of them, then takes a deep breath and looks down.
“Thanks,” she says, then holds out the fruit basket. “Um, here. I brought you this.”
I don’t want it, but I take it.
“It’s fruit,” she says. “You know, never go to someone’s house empty-handed and all. Impolite.”
I don’t tell her that it’s impolite to fuck someone and then tell them they’re unfit to stand next to you in public. I don’t tell her that it’s impolite to strand someone at a motel in the middle of nowhere.
“Thanks,” I say simply, to the point. “Anything else?”
“That was it,” she says, jamming her hands into her jacket pockets. “I guess I’ll see you around.”
“I guess,” I say.
Then I turn away and shut the door while she’s still on my porch, and it feels good. I put the fruit basket on my kitchen counter, collapse back onto the sofa, and start killing rival mafia members before I can start thinking.
The fruit basket stays there, slowly rotting, until one of my brothers throws the whole thing away weeks later.
Chapter Ten
Delilah
Present Day
I glance along the hallway at Monica, Ava’s wedding coordinator, but she seems busy, so I crouch and hold the end of my bouquet to the floor as requested.
“There’s a big tree,” says a two-inch-long blue plastic plesiosaur.
“I think we should eat it,” answers a green stegosaurus.
“Please don’t eat me,” I say, wiggling the bouquet slightly. “I’ve got a wedding to attend!”
Bree, my three-year-old niece, starts giggling. The dinosaurs advance.
“Nooooooo,” my bouquet says. “Not my flowers!”
The giggling intensifies, and she looks up at me, pure mischief in her blue eyes.
“CHOMP!” she giggle-shouts, as the plesiosaur somehow launches itself, face-first, into a lily. “Chomp chomp chomp!”
“Auuugh!”
“CHOMP.”
That’s the stegosaurus getting in on the action.
“My beautiful tree!” I bemoan.
“This one’s tasty,” one of the dinosaurs advises, though I can’t tell which one. “Mmmm.”
“Flower girl?” Monica calls, and my head snaps up. “We need the flower girl, please.”
“That’s you, kiddo,” I tell Bree.
“Chomp chomp,” she says, looking back at the bouquet.
“Places, please,” Monica says, striding toward us. She’s holding a clipboard and she has a Bluetooth receiver in her ear, so you know she means business.
“C’mon, you gotta throw flowers so your aunt Ava can get married,” I coax. “She can’t walk down a naked aisle, can she?”
Bree giggles again.
“The aisle is naked?” she asks, and I immediately regret my choice of words.
“Only if you don’t put flowers on it,” I say, and hold out one hand. “Here, I’ll keep the dinos safe, okay?”
“Bree, honey,” her mom Winona calls.
She deposits the plastic figurines into my hand, looking very serious. I nod, and then she’s off, running full-toddler-tilt to the front of the line.
“No running,” I hear her mom say as I stand, smooth my skirt, and put the dinos into my pocket.
Pockets: it’s the one saving grace this dress has. Not that there’s anything really wrong with this bridesmaid dress, but there’s nothing really right with it either. It’s long and dusky pink and lacy and isn’t at all what I’d pick out for myself.
Besides the pockets. Everyone loves pockets.
“All right, everyone,” Monica calls, holding up one hand to get our attention.
She’s standing in front of a massive double door, facing the neatly-lined-up wedding parties
“Are we ready to release the groomsmen?” she asks. “Let me know when it’s time to give the signal for the signal.”
All eyes turn to Thad, and for a quick second, he looks terrified.
Then he remembers to smile and overcompensates by smiling too much and giving the crowd a big double thumbs-up.
“Ready and willing!” he says, and there’s polite laughter.
No one asks Ava, because she’s in the bridal suite. She doesn’t want Thad to see her until she’s walking down the aisle, and even though I’ve told myself over and over again that she wants it that way for tradition’s sake, I can’t shake the quiet suspicion that it’s also so she can’t back out.
I look down at my bouquet of dusky pink roses and white lilies, at my bare fingers, and ignore my unease.
Thad isn’t Nolan. Ava isn’t me. My worries have nothing to do with them and everything to do with me.
The beginning strains of Canon in D float through the doors. I hold my breath, steeling myself for my least favorite part of every wedding.
The doors swing open.
Fuck me sideways, that’s a lot of people and they’re all looking in my direction.
I take the arm of Thad’s older brother Chad, my companion. I stand up straight. I hold my bouquet properly at about boob height, as instructed, and when it’s our turn, I fuckin’ promenade.
Nothing exciting happens. Thank God.
I smile nicely, don’t trip, find my spot in the front, and I’m done. That’s my entire job. This is almost certainly the last time I’ll be walking down an aisle at a wedding of this magnitude, and I’m not even a little bit sad about it.
After that, it’s a wedding. It’s lovely and meaningful and heartfelt, but I also admit that I spend much of the ceremony studying the ceiling, wondering if the decorations are original to the manor or re-created.
They exchange vows and rings. Thad kisses the bride, and everyone cheers, including me. We all walk back down the aisle and just as I’m thinking about how glad I am that I’ll never have to do this again, I swear to God I see Seth.