Page 19 of Give In

My brother puts a hand on my shoulder. “We’ve got you.” He squeezes once. “Go get your girl.”

chapter

nine

Clover

Not looking at Heath is far more difficult than I anticipated.

He’s at the head table, which I knew he would be, and I am at the far end of the same table, which I did not anticipate and which the universe has clearly arranged specifically to test me. I am between Juniper and a woman named Carol, who is somebody’s aunt and who has big feelings about floral arrangements that she is sharing at length and with great passion.

I am grateful for Carol.

Carol requires very little from me beyond the occasional nod, which means I can appear engaged while actually spending the entirety of dinner managing the very specific challenge of being aware of exactly where Heath is at all times without looking at him directly.

It’s like trying not to look at the sun. You know it’s there. You know what happens if you look directly at it. You look anyway.

I don’t look anyway. I am doing so well. I am having conversations and eating food and laughing at appropriate moments and Carol has moved on from florals to centerpieces, which is a rich topic with a lot of material, and I am nodding with genuine commitment.

Juniper leans over at one point and murmurs, “You okay?”

“Great,” I say, which is a lie that my face is probably broadcasting in large friendly letters. Juniper is thankfully too focused on her wedding and her groom and the twelve thousand things that a bride has running through her head the night before her wedding that she allows me my little fib. Then she turns back to Leo.

Leo, who is right there. Who looks like Heath around the eyes. Leo isn’t built like Heath though. Where Heath is thick and meaty, Leo is tall and muscular. But they share some similar qualities. The same steadiness. The same quality of attention. Leo is younger and lighter about it, easier in the way of someone who hasn’t had decades of life adding weight, but it’s there. It’s the same thing.

Frankly, I don’t know how I didn’t notice on the plane. But of course, on the plane, I’d been flirting with the hot silver fox. Not cataloging any would be similarities to my future brother-in-law.

I look down at my plate while Carol regales me with all the popular floral types that are toxic to her many cats.

Here is the inventory of things I do not look at during this dinner: Heath. Heath’s hands. Heath’s side of the table in general. The empty glass of water that the server keeps refilling in my peripheral vision over Heath’s left shoulder.

Here is the inventory of things I fail at: all of the above, once, for exactly two seconds, when there’s a lull in Carol’s monologue and I lose my concentration and my eyes go where they want to go.

He’s already looking at me.

Two seconds. Then I look away so fast I nearly give myself whiplash and I ask Carol a question about centerpieces with an enthusiasm that seems to startle her slightly.

When the dinner finally starts to wind down, I feel the knot in my chest loosen by exactly one degree. I can leave soon. I can go back to my room and have the conversation with myself that I have been postponing all evening, the one where I decide what I actually want and what I am actually going to do about it. And I’ll figure out whether the decision I made earlier, the sensible one, about keeping last night quiet and getting through the weekend like a grown adult, is one I can actually live with.

I have a feeling I already know the answer to that.

I make my excuses to Juniper, invent a headache that is not entirely fictional because my head does actually hurt from the effort of two hours of strategic non-looking, and hug her a little longer than necessary because she’s getting married tomorrow and she’s my person and I love her even when life is completely unhinged.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” she says into my shoulder.

“You’ll see me in the morning,” I confirm.

I walk back into the resort with the careful measured steps of a woman who is not fleeing. I am not fleeing. I am making a graceful and intentional exit.

I am a little bit fleeing.

Because this kind of shit would only happen to me.

I flop onto my bed, face first, and stay there for a moment with my cheek against the cool duvet and my arms at my sides like a person who has given up on the vertical dimension entirely. The ceiling of my upgraded suite is probably beautiful. I wouldn’t know. I am face down on the bed having a moment.

Heath is Leo’s dad.

I have had approximately two hours to sit with this information and it has not gotten more manageable with time, which is not how I expected the process to work. Usually, if you give me two hours and a problem, I will have talked myself into at least three possible solutions and a backup plan. What I have instead is a pillow I am now pressing my face into and a hollow feeling in my chest that I don’t quite have a name for.