Worst Valentine's Day Ever: A Lonely Hearts Romance Anthology

by Kilby Blades

  “We want the dogs to be involved,” Nicholas said quickly.

  I nearly choked on my tea. “The dogs?” After so many years, I thought I’d heard it all.

  “We have nine of them,” Claire chimed in proudly. “That’s how we met. I didn’t know there was a hole in my fence and that my dog, Klaus, was getting out at night. His dog, Lulu, got pregnant, but he couldn’t figure out how. Then the puppies were born. Everyone knows I’m the only one in the neighborhood with a Pomeranian. One day, he showed up on my doorstep with a box of Pomskies.”

  “Pomskies?”

  “A mix between a Pomeranian and a Siberian Husky. They’re just about the cutest puppies you’ve ever seen.”

  Claire produced her phone from somewhere and tapped it on so that a screen saver popped up. It was a photo of she and Nicholas laughing in a field, lost in a sea of indeed-very-cute dogs. Despite each of them being jumped-on and licked and fawned-over by what seemed to be very eager puppies, their gazes were locked in a look so expressive that it was clear they were truly in love.

  “So cute,” I cooed, not really knowing whether I was talking about the dogs or talking about them. The romantic in me never got tired of this—never got tired of couples like this. “You kept them all?” I asked, hoping that I would like the answer and that this would go down as one of my all-time-favorite“how we met” stories.

  “Oh, no,” Nicholas interjected. “We have a lot of relatives. We gave all but two to family. We only have four.”

  Four dogs is still a lot, but okay.

  “How many people do you expect at the wedding?”

  “About a hundred.” Something in Claire’s voice changed when she said it and I didn’t miss the sad look she gave when she looked at her fiancé. “Each of us has so many siblings and nieces and nephews, that family-only is really all we can afford.”

  Nicholas covered his hands with hers before leaning in and looking up at me. “Your portfolio is gorgeous, but your website doesn’t list prices. Assuming you have availability, how much would you charge for an October wedding on a Sunday afternoon?”

  Couples like Claire and Nicholas were precisely why I didn’t post prices. My best-kept secret was that I charged on a sliding scale. The fact that the city folk practically threw money at me because paying top-dollar convinced them they were getting the best made it so that I could give at least a few couples a month a great deal. I liked Claire and Nicholas. They seemed like the real thing and I wanted to shoot their special day.

  “Don’t worry about that. I can work with you on the price.”

  Forty-five minutes later, I’d answered even more of their questions and shown them photos from weddings I’d shot at the venue they’d chosen. We set up a date to do a tour of the venue together so that we could solidify their plan. I was just promising to send over a contract before the end of the day and escorting them out the door when Claire lobbed a final question.

  “Your assistant’s name is Cal, right?”

  The question took away a piece of my contentment, which was unfortunate, because I’d made it half the morning without thinking about him.

  “He’s my former assistant, actually. He’s no longer doing weddings. He’s decided to focus on other things.”

  The words tasted bitter in my mouth, even though they had been his. He’d been quick to assure me that he had no plans whatsoever to hang up his own shingle or in any way compete with me. I hadn’t liked the connotations of the vague “other things” he’d left so abruptly to work on. It all felt very, “it’s not you—it’s me.”

  I’d asked him whether he wanted more money. I’d asked him whether he wanted more recognition—I already referred to him as my partner and I’d asked him whether he wanted to do something official, like take the job title of his choice. I’d even done what I hadn’t thought I’d ever do—offered him not-a-small-percentage of the business. But he’d been immoveable, turning down even that.

  “That’s a shame. So many people talk about how wonderful he is in the reviews. We were hoping we’d get you both.”

  “That’s sweet—I’ll let him know that people are asking for him.”

  I ushered them out the door then, mood killed and resentment creeping. Too many people lately had unintentionally insinuated I couldn’t do the job right without Cal. Locking the door behind them, as they were my only appointment of the day, I went back to my loft. To sulk.

  Two voicemails. One was from my album printer and one was from an unrecognized cell phone number in New York. I called the latter number back first. Unknown numbers from New York City were almost always brides wanting to know about availability and price.

  “Candace Burton, Photographer?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Riley Cooper, from The New York Times Magazine. I was wondering—“

  “Oh, no thank you. I’m already subscribed to the digital version. You can probably take me off of your calling li—“

  “Ms. Burton,” the impatient-sounding man said sharply. “Though I’m thrilled to learn that you’re a loyal subscriber, that’s not why I’m calling. I’m an editor for the Arts section of the magazine. We’d like to do a feature article on your studio—”

  “A feature?” I interrupted, because that’s what I did when I was nervous: interjected with echoing questions.

  “Your photography is extraordinary. We’d like to follow you as you work one day—to shoot your team as they shoot a wedding.”

  My mind was still racing. “We’d have to get permission from the bride and groom.”

  I could practically hear him smirk over the phone. “In our experience, many couples would jump at the chance to be featured.”

  I spent a dazed five minutes jotting down notes about how to arrange the logistics—they wanted it to be an intimate wedding and, ideally, the shoot would be in June so they could run it in September. I knew just the wedding: a forty-guest affair at the Kilroy House. The Ramirez wedding. On top of what magic I could do at that venue, the bride, Leah, had impeccable taste.

  For the first time in weeks, I felt optimistic, energetic, excited.

  See? I don’t need Cal.

  This was big news: the New York Times Magazine wanted me.

  Riley Cooper had promised to send out more information that afternoon. I wanted to celebrate. I pulled out champagne. I opened it and toasted to me. I stared at the details I’d e-mailed to myself. For ten minutes, I googled the magazine archives for previous features of weddings. I thought again of how floored I was.

  But the second glass of champagne wasn’t as sweet as the first. Suddenly, I felt silly for it being a Tuesday afternoon and me being here, drinking all alone. The third glass tasted neither bitter nor sweet nor sour—it tasted of sadness. Because there was only one person I wanted to call.

  NYT Magazine just called me and wants to feature the studio. So excited I’m day-drinking.

  After that, I googled what time it was in Sydney.

  Eek. 4:00AM. Slim chance he’d be up, and, if he was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what he was doing or with who. Cal was smoking hot, artistic, and he was on an aimless international vacation. And I had to stop thinking about him right-this-instant because I was more than a little drunk.

  There would be no fourth glass—only the champagne bottle going back into the fridge and me turning my monitor to let the loft fall into darkness. When I went to put my computer to sleep, I saw Riley Cooper’s name in the “From” field of my e-mail. His promised instructions had arrived.

  Dear Ms. Burton and Mr. Jameson,

  We’re thrilled to hear that you’re open to having us on your shoot and we look forward to interviewing you both…

  I didn’t read anything after that.

  More like, couldn’t read. Because my vision became blurry and I no longer had the motivation to put my computer to sleep. Instead, I sat on my bed and half-drunkenly cried.

  February 11th - Two Bombs

  Hey. If you have time af
ter the weekend, I really want to talk.

  I sent the text out into the ether. It had been brewing all week. I’d broken it to Cal in earlier texts that I’d declined the Times feature. But I had to face him—face someone—about why.

  Not that my courage was real courage—it was more like a sense of dread. Real talk was inevitable. Now it just had to happen. And since he was halfway around the world and I didn’t know whether or when he was coming back, no time was as good of a time as now.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin when, two minutes later, my phone buzzed. This was why I’d chosen a Friday morning to send the text. If I’d done it on a day off, I’d have spent the time obsessively checking my phone. Sending it off when I was walking out the door to get to a wedding would make me too busy to wait for—and overanalyze—his reply. He must have been right by his phone for as quickly as he’d answered. Was he alarmed by what I was asking? “We need to talk” is never good… Before I could speculate on what he might be thinking, I glanced down at the text. A text that wasn’t from Cal at all.

  Candace. It’s Lacey. Can you call me? It’s kind of an emergency.

  Uh-oh. My Valentine’s Day bride, Lacey Dryer, was level-headed and laid back. Which meant that an emergency by her definition was really an emergency. I’d just pulled the car out of the garage and could have easily remained stopped in my fenced-in parking area to text her back. Instead, I gave her a call.

  “Lacey, honey? What’s going on?”

  I’d seen an emergency or ten. The ones that came a few days before the wedding were rarely good. Once or twice, a relative had died in the days leading up to the nuptial—the mother or father of the groom or the bride. Those circumstances were always the saddest. More often than not, the “emergency” a few days before the wedding was a break-up between the bride and the groom. With all the bachelor-party-gone-wrong and left-right-before-the-altar stories I’d seen firsthand over the years, it was a miracle I still believed in love.

  “I have a huge favor to ask.”

  It didn’t sound like she was crying, so that was a plus.

  “My sister just got engaged,” Lacey continued.

  “Which one?” She had two. Michelle was the eldest and Casey was her twin.

  “Casey. And you’re not gonna believe this. It’s to Daniel’s brother.”

  My aw dropped open. Daniel was also a twin.

  I was speechless as Casey launched into a rambling story—something about a joint bachelor and bachelorette party the week before in Jamaica and the two of them getting very close.

  “Do they need engagement pictures?”

  Please say yes. Please say yes. Please say yes.

  Because there was only one other place this story was going if this was the emergency and Lacey wanted a favor.

  “Well…yes. I mean, no. I mean, if you’re willing to photograph us all, we’re trying to pull together a double wedding!”

  I’d always imagined that the moment a photographer was asked to do a double wedding felt something like the moment when expectant moms and dads found out their babies were twins. This wedding would happen, but double weddings could add up to three times as much work.

  “We’d pay you more, of course. For if you needed an extra assistant or whatever. Or even if you didn’t. I mean, I know the wedding’s only three days away, and that something like this is a huge change.”

  I laughed, not out of excitement, but from a sheer feeling of crazy. Because this would be my busiest next-three days of the year.

  “We’ll make it work,” I said with a bit of giddiness. “Though we’ll have to go through a mini-version of our walk-through again. Oh yeah, and I’ll need a way to tell everyone apart.”

  Twenty minutes later, I’d hung up with Casey and was pulling up to the day’s first wedding. It was the most grueling Valentine’s Day weekend schedule I’d ever taken on. Due to the timing of everything, the 11th was a Friday, which made Valentine’s Day a Monday. It made for four wedding dates that were highly in demand.

  I rarely did two weddings in one single day, but for Valentine’s Day, I made an exception. It was a premium weekend, which meant it brought in a lot of money. The better I did on weekends like this, the better a position it put me in to accommodate couples who needed to pay on the lower end of the scale.

  I had two each on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and the Dryer wedding had always been the only one on Monday. Even though Monday was Valentine’s Day proper, it was less in demand and I’d thought that after the weekend, I’d be too exhausted for two. Looks like I was getting two out of that one anyway.

  Reflexively, I checked my phone before I got out of the car. Once wedding festivities swept me up, I’d be gone. There was only a text—from Cal—and it made my heart race.

  I want to talk, too, he replied.

  But I didn’t have time to think too hard.

  Tuesday? I shot back. I’d already told him that after the weekend would be best.

  Before Tuesday, he returned right away.

  You know what weekend this is, don’t you?

  He was lucky I hadn’t shouted it in all-caps.

  Of course I know. An I need to talk to you, C. This is important.

  I frowned at the screen, awash in all kinds of confusion and annoyance. Forty minutes ago, it had been me summoning him. Now it was him somehow summoning me? But I couldn’t do this now. Because I was working. And I couldn’t make promises.

  About to walk into a wedding. I’ll try to call you on the margins.

  And, with that, I turned my phone all the way off.

  February 14th - The Dryer Wedding

  Friday night I’d forgotten to call, had been exhausted from the two weddings, and I hadn’t gotten home until one. Saturday, Nellie’s car had broken down. Since I had no plans to hear whatever Cal had to say to me on Bluetooth in front of her, I didn’t have a chance to call him again until Saturday night. No answer, of course. Only texts here and there. Mixed calls from him, too. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I might have laughed at our failed exchanges. Two-and-a-half months had passed with nothing more than texts, e-mails and calls, and, all-of-a-sudden, each of us was clamoring to talk.

  If I made it out of this Dryer wedding alive—and that was a big if—I would wait until tomorrow afternoon to try him again. Some part of me was glad we hadn’t caught each other any of the times we’d called. I should be rested and coherent to say what I had to say. And it wasn’t just that I was angry. I owed it to him to say that I’d been wrong—that I should have offered everything I did at the end without it coming to this.

  I wasn’t quite sure how Casey and Lacey had pulled off identical wedding gowns at such short notice, but it was helpful that each had a different-colored sash tied at the waist. Casey’s was a brownish-green and Lacey’s was a bluish-gray and I was thrilled to pieces that they hadn’t taken the Valentine’s Day thing too far with pinks and reds.

  Nellie was getting better at handling the processional and was poised to get shots of the wedding party as they took their places. I stood in a strategic spot off to the sides. My job, for the moment, was to take shots of guest as they shuffled in and to eventually get the frontal view of brides walking down the aisle. Raising my camera into position, I did a practiced sweep. Slowly and methodically, I scanned for moments among the guests. If I was patient, I always found a few worth taking.

  First was a stately older woman wearing a hat so exquisite she may as well have been attending a royal wedding. I smiled as I snapped a few shots of a drooling toddler falling apart with laughter every time a middle-aged man pulled funny faces. Next was Cal.

  Wait…what?

  Cal was at this wedding. Cal was somewhere in Asia Pacific.

  No. It can’t be him.

  Except it was. Because I’d know him from any angle and in any light. From far away or close up, no matter the filter or lens. It had been ten weeks but I’d know Cal in ten years. I knew every last one of his lines.

  I f
roze, unable, somehow, to stop staring at him through the view finder. My finger slackened, as if unwilling to shoot. Was I so relieved to see him—so furious with him—so hurt by him that I couldn’t even snap his picture? Did the mere sight of him make me so unhinged that I couldn’t even do my job?

  His image went blurry. Muscle memory sent my finger back to the shutter release, commanding it to refocus with a light tap. I tapped again. I wanted to see him, but my lens didn’t correct. That’s when I realized—the blurriness that had clouded my vision was my own tears.

  Muscle memory kicked in again a few moments later when the first notes of Pachelbel’s Canon in D came from the direction of the string quartet. The unmistakable cue signaled that the bridal party was ready to march. I kept my camera in position as I swiveled my torso to get a clear shot of the aisle. That the movement of bodies and the creaking of chairs could be heard as guests turned to watch. By the time the guests were on their feet for the brides and Wagner was playing, I was shooting again, tears wiped, and game face securely on.

  Of course he was bound to show up for some local weddings. He'd been invited to at least a dozen that the studio had been hired to do. He’d always stood by my side—always chosen his job as my partner. Since he didn't work with me anymore, that meant he'd start going to weddings like a normal guest.

  But, why this one?

  Or, why not? It seemed there was much I didn’t know about Cal Jameson. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that he'd grown up in this town.

  The only thing that got me through the next forty minutes—through the vows and the passage readings, through the crowd’s delighted laughter as the brides and grooms spoke their “I dos” in unison, through the soloist and her song—was the shield of my camera covering my face. I’d planned every shot meticulously, but I knew in the back of my mind that, if they had to, my instincts alone could get me halfway through. By the time the recessional had been played, Cal had disappeared. Had it been my imagination, to have felt his eyes on me the entire time?