Page 17 of Slapshot Bride

Maybe stepping out was a mistake. I should’ve stayed home.

An even bigger mistake is dragging Easton into this mess.

A million and one thoughts run through my head, and for a minute, I feel lightheaded.

The owner of the boutique, who introduces herself as Valentina with the kind of warm efficiency that suggests she has handled worse mornings than mine, takes one look at me and doesn't ask a single question. She just steers me into the main room of the boutique, which is small and beautifully lit and smells like jasmine and the faintest trace of perfume, and pours me a glass of cold water from a carafe before I have even sat down.

“Sit. Breathe.” She presses the glass into my hands. “Easton, water for you too?”

“I'm fine. Thank you, Valentina.” My eyes find his, and I realize he’s watching me with an intensity I haven’t seen from him before.

“You are not fine. You are tense. Sit.”

He sits. I almost laugh.

It's the first time I have watched him be told what to do, and the way he just absorbs it, no pushback, no negotiation, tells me Valentina is the kind of woman whose authority isn't up for debate.

She's in her fifties, dressed in soft gray linen, and she has the particular bearing of women who have made other women feel beautiful for a living and are very good at it.

“We’ll do this quickly, yes?” She's already moving, pulling rolling racks from somewhere along the back wall, eyeing me the way a tailor eyes a measurement. “Sizes?”

I tell her.

“Beautiful. Stay.”

She disappears.

For a second, the only sound is the soft hum of the air conditioning and my own slightly uneven breathing. I take a sip of the water. The glass is cold and steady in my hands. I look at Easton, sitting across from me on a small velvet bench, sleeves of his long-sleeve pushed up to his elbows, his forearms resting on his knees.

This is the first time I’ve actually looked at him in a good light.

The boutique’s lighting is the kind designed to flatter skin, soft and warm, and it catches on parts of him I hadn’t really noticed before.

The dark line of ink curling out from under the cuff of his pushed-up sleeve, more of it than I had clocked in the car last night, and in the living room this morning, when he’d emerged in a wife-beater. The dark lines run down the inside of his forearm in clean black geometric shapes that disappear under his palm. The shadow along his jaw that isn't quite stubble and not quite a beard, the way the soft light brings out the green in his eyes that, in the half-dark of the car, had only registered as hazel.

I’ve never been one to call a man beautiful. But Easton is.

“You okay?” He breaks the silence.

“Hm? Yes. Yeah. I'm fine.”

“Don’t lie to me, Riley,”

I smile because it’s the only way I can show him I’m fine. Well, not totally, but I’m going to be alright.

But he just tilts his head a fraction and lets it pass, which is becoming a pattern with him. He sees everything and is mindful with his words.

“We can go home, if it’ll make you feel better.”

“N-no. I’m fine. Really.”

Valentina comes back with an armful of fabric that, even from across the room, I can tell is going to be more beautiful than anything I’ve previously owned. She hangs it on a rack beside the fitting area, gestures at the curtain, says, “Take your time, querida,” and then sweeps off toward the front of the shop to give us privacy.

I stand up. The first pull I do on the rack is the most boring thing on it. A gray t-shirt. Soft cotton. I pull a second hanger. A pair of black trousers, simple cut.

A third. A navy sweater.

I'm building a uniform. Half of me hears Preston’s voice in my head telling me gray isn't a color, it's an absence of color, why would I want to walk around looking like an absence, and the other half of me feels the small calm of selecting clothes that no one will criticize and talk down on. Both halves are working at the same time and I don't bother arguing with either of them.