by Kilby Blades
Outside, the weather cooperated. The wedding party was compliant and even kind of fun. I had underestimated the patience of two families with multiples, though halfway through, the realization clicked: they were accustomed to doing everything twice. They had asked for the traditional shots, and I’s got every permutation and combination of them all: the sisters, then the brothers, then both couples, then each couple with each set of in-laws, then flower girls and ring bearers, and then all of it in reverse. The family was all smiles—even the ones who waited on deck as I got different shots.
A week before, I would have been ecstatic about how unobtrusively Nellie had fallen in to get some of the candids, shepherding the wedding party only when she needed to and being invisible the rest of the time. But I wasn’t happy—not when I nailed the gorgeous fish-eye shot I’d wanted of both couples descending the staircase simultaneously. Not when I’d gotten the perspective right on the speech of the father of the brides as he’d tearfully addressed both of his daughters. Not when I’d gotten dozens of other shots that could have been a disaster—shots that had kept me up at night and made me rue the day I’d acquiesce to a double-wedding job. Because knowing he was there—feeling the electricity that had been ignited by his sheer presence—electricity that I hadn’t felt in weeks, confirmed my fear. Without Cal, my mojo still felt lost.
But it was even worse than that: because my game face worked only on strangers, and since he left, I’d been mostly getting by. Everyone else at this wedding—even vendors I’d been working with for years, and even Nellie who had seen me at less than my best…everyone else at this wedding would believe my facade of being in control. Everyone except for him.
It tapped my every insecurity, my every bit of rage, and my every oozing sore of hurt. Cal would watch me stumble and see clean through to what was wrong: I couldn’t do this without him.
The day was winding down—or, at least it was for me. After the big speeches and the big dances, the photogenic nature of pretty much everyone at a wedding was cut in half. People were tired. And drunk. Some of them were sweaty from dancing. The women’s makeup no longer looked fresh and brows furrowed from too-tight shoes and feet that hurt. This was the time of evening when I finally got to pee, when I started packing up the equipment I didn’t plan to use anymore, and waited around to get the final shots of brides and grooms driving away.
“You haven’t eaten all night,” came the deep baritone I’d been waiting to hear. He’d been invisible, steering a wide berth and giving me my space, but some part of me knew he hadn’t left.
I’d known this moment was coming, but I was afraid to turn around, certain that if I met his eyes, I’d never be able to look away. I’d seen everything in the dozen loaded gazes we’d shared throughout the night—the glue that had always held us together and proof that something I didn’t understand had torn us apart.
But I did turn around, because nothing real that we had to say to each other was going to be said here, and because, above all else, he was still my friend. I wasn’t stupid—I knew I was only so mad at him because he’d hurt me so much, but that didn’t mean I got to ignore him or hurt him back.
I was saved from having to think up a witty retort when the vision of him sent different words spilling, unbidden, from my mouth. He still wore his tuxedo jacket, but the bowtie had been undone, and in his hand was a steaming plate. Its held a steaming pile of beef goulash and a pile of noodles next to it.
“How is that even hot?”
He shrugged. “I know people.”
I’d been so busy with the double wedding—so preoccupied over Cal—that I hadn’t seen Wolfgang all night. Cal didn’t move to come farther into the room. I appraised him, looking him up and down in his tux with exaggerated scrutiny etched on my face because I was afraid to stay too long in his gaze.
“Guesting or crashing or…whatever you’re doing becomes you,” I complimented. “Though I’m surprised you interrupted your nomadic journey to fly 3,000 miles for a wedding.”
“I didn’t come back for the wedding. I came back because I wanted to talk to you.”
He stepped toward me then and the rate of my heartbeat tripled—because what the hell did that mean and why now? And why was he even telling me this? He knew that I wasn’t done.
“You can’t back out of the feature. It’s the New York Times Magazine.”
He set the plate, a cloth napkin, and cutlery down on an empty corner of my work space. Whatever appetite had arisen from the smell of the goulash was dampened by the thought.
“They didn’t want me. They wanted us.”
He was close now—close enough to smell and close enough for me to feel his body heat. He paused in front of me long enough to breathe him in.
“Here I am.”
I gritted my teeth. “You quit.”
“So hire me back for the feature.”
I felt my breath quiver as I let out a slow breath. “That’s not how this works.”
“Oh, good—there you are.” Nellie’s young voice interrupted our staring contest. Or, at least tried to, because I didn’t break our stare. From my peripheral vision, I could see her looking back and forth between Cal and me. “O-kay.” She backed away. “I’ll just shoot the final exit myself.”
“It works however you want it to.” Cal said it the second Nellie left. Now it was his turn to clench his teeth. “I’m not gonna be the reason why you throw away this opportunity.”
“You’re missing the point.”
“What am I missing?”
“That, with you gone, I have to rebrand. Because half of my brand has always been you.”
He frowned and took a step back.
“What do you even mean by that?”
“I mean, it’s not just the New York Times. Brides who want to book with me…vendors I run into on jobs…everyone who asks for me thinks they’re getting you.”
Comprehension dawned on his face and he looked at me with pity, but I didn’t want that. “And, believe me, Cal, I understand. You have been half of this operation, but if you’re not anymore, I have to own it. I don’t want to mislead the New York Times.”
He stepped closer to me and for a moment I thought we might actually touch. He looked almost like he wanted to hug me. Instead he stepped close into my space.
“I’m sorry. I know how bad you wanted it.”
I tamped down my tears.
“I’m sorry you flew halfway around the world just to hear that.”
February 15th - Best Valentine's Day Ever
Seeing his car in its regular spot made me want to abandon ship, or at least to pretend everything was normal until tomorrow. I’d taken for granted all those nights he’d beat me back to the studio, gotten food ready for us, and had the foresight to have already downloaded something entertaining for us to watch.
But our time had come, for what I didn’t know. But this wasn’t sustainable: flying around the world to escape, then get back to me, fighting about newspaper pieces…this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. At least we’d gotten half of it over with at the wedding. And at least Nellie had chosen the exact right moment to learn her personal sensitivity lesson. But now it was time—high time—to deal with the rest.
I climbed the stairs to the loft slowly. He stood facing my bed, his back to the showroom below, and his back to me. His jacket was still on. So were his shoes. His bowtie hung loose in his hand. I wanted him to take his shoes and socks off. Shoes on in the loft meant that you were about to leave.
Finally, he turned to me, as beautiful as ever. It wasn’t easy to stop my dismal thoughts. I wanted to hug him, to memorize him, to photograph him like this, in case things got weirder. In case this was the last time.
“I fucked up.”
He said it at the very same time as I asked, painfully, “Why’d you leave?”
He brought his hand to the back of his neck, but didn’t break my gaze.
“Because I fucked up.”
This wasn�
�t the Cal I knew. The Cal I knew was my rock—unmoving even in the fiercest of storms. Tonight, his dark eyes were stormy and his pain mirrored my own.
“Are you, like, in trouble with the law?” I didn’t understand. That might explain why he’d left the country. But if he was in real trouble, why would he come back? He’d always been a bit too sexy to be a photographer’s assistant, and uncommonly tech-savvy at that. Maybe this was where he was going to tell me he was an international spy.
“Something happened. At Kilroy. Do you really not remember?” He stepped toward me and his eyes searched mine. “Like, anything? Do you remember, literally, anything from Saturday night?”
Of course I remembered that night. Thinking of that weekend with him took me to my happy place.
“I remember the reception ending and me not wanting to call it a night. I remember us bringing a bottle of wine down to the lake. I remember we’d brought the wine glasses but we forgot to bring down an opener, so you did some trick to get it open with your pocket knife.”
I spoke softly, and even more softly then when I realized it was calming him down.
“I remember that we drank half the bottle and we talked about shooting at night. And you told me a story about your mom…”
I quieted then, thinking of the story, then thinking of afterward, as we’d sat with our arms linked and my head on his shoulder.
“And then we hiked back and we each went to bed and I woke up the next morning under a down comforter and 1,000 thread count sheets.”
“So you remember walking back?”
I blinked. “I think so.” I narrowed my eyes. What was to remember about a dark trail?
“Do you remember bumping into Satya and Siva?”
Satya and Siva were the bride and groom. And, no, I didn’t remember bumping into them.
“Do you remember holding hands on the way back to the cottage, and you tripping and me catching you right before you slid down that little hill?”
What was he talking about?
“What are you talking about?”
“But you do remember seeing Satya at Sunday Brunch, and thinking that something she said about seeing you the night before was weird.”
Shit. I did remember that. She’d asked me how I’d liked my walk. I’d answered politely that it had been lovely, but had wondered how she’d known.
I nodded confirmation. “I still don’t understand. What does this have to do with…anything?”
He winced a little. “You were drugged.”
“What? By who?”
He fisted his hand in his silky hair and tried to explain. “By no one. By yourself. By me.”
I shook my head, meaning to ask for a little more detail, but the words wouldn’t even come out.
“The pills were mine. You thought it was headache medicine. It wasn’t.”
“You had pills? What kind of pills?”
“Old pills I packed for sleeping. It’s always hit or miss for me, sleeping in hotels. And I’d already had some trouble that week ‘cause—”
“—it was near the anniversary of your mother’s death,” I interrupted
I sighed and looked toward the window, working it all out as it came together in my head. I’d had a headache and he’d told me to look for a bottle of aspirin in his bag. We’d stopped in his hotel room and he’d been in the bathroom, changing. I’d taken two pills and popped them into my mouth.
“You threw your sleeping pills in your bottle.”
He nodded, looking more ashamed than she’d ever seen him.
“I always packed yours in the camera bag. I never planned on you being in my stash.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me? We could have laughed about it…”
“‘Cause you don’t remember what we did.” He said it a bit forcefully.
“Alright, you’re scaring me. You’re making it sound like we killed somebody.”
He stepped closer and I did hold my breath then, because his eyes were blazing. “We kissed.” He seemed out of breath. “For awhile.”
Now it was me who didn’t breathe. I did manage to swallow. “How long is awhile?”
His eyes changed yet again, to something apologetic. Suddenly, he seemed tired. “Long enough, and sweet enough, and sexy enough for me to think that you wanted the same thing I did and that, come morning, things between us would change.”
Then I woke up.
And I didn’t remember any of it.
But he couldn’t handle that he did.
Or that we worked together.
That’s when things got weird.
That’s when he resigned, and he ran.
“You were my boss—“ he continued, but I cut him clean off.
“I missed our first kiss?” That it might have been the stupidest question that could ever have been asked in response to this fiasco didn’t faze me. My eyes still smarted with tears. For me, for him for this fucked up situation. “What was it like?”
I read the cautious hope in his eyes. He shook his head and said it on a sigh: “Epic.”
“Wrong answer.”
His eyes narrowed for a millisecond before widening in understanding. I wanted him to show me.
I was halfway to swooning in toward him when, in the least-expected of moves, he sidestepped to my bed, and snapped up my faux-fur blanket. He took me gently by the hand and turned off the floor lamp before walking me toward the window next to my bed. He settled me in front of him and draped the blanket around his shoulders until he’d buried both of us inside it, my back to his chest. He held me tightly, and it felt familiar—not like I’d merely day-dreamt of this—like I’d actually done it before.
“We’d gotten back to your room. Yours had a balcony and a view of the lake. We still had a third of a bottle of wine, so you invited me in.”
His cheek was against mine and my eyes were already closed and I was taking in his voice’s vibrations. He looked like sunshine but he smelled exactly like himself.
“The back of the sofa in your room had a thick fleece blanket. We grabbed it and went outside to look at the stars, just like this.”
Except I wasn’t looking at the stars. I wasn’t looking at anything. I was just taking in how I felt in his arms.
“And you smelled so delicious and your skin was so soft, and I’d waited so many years to do it that I just…”
His lips lowered down to graze my jaw.
I turned in his arms then, not caring anymore how it had happened that night—only caring how it would happen now—only caring that we didn’t wait another minute. Because he was here. He’d come back. And I couldn’t let him go. Not ever again.
His lips were as soft as they’d always looked, and his tongue every bit as deft, and his arms every bit as strong as they held me. His eyes had concealed every bit of passion, his breath every bit of need, and his pounding heart every bit of love that I’d ever dared to imagine.
And in that kiss, I saw it all: I saw more starry nights and more bottles of wine; and more snuggles in many more cozy blankets; I saw the wedding we’d have at the Kilroy and the photos we’d take together as we traveled the world; the little darkroom we’d build, and the pride we’d share when we taught our daughter her to develop her first picture. I saw our future together. And it was epic.
“A Wolf at the Wedding” by Erin St. Charles
Crazy in Love
Vanessa Miller braced her maroon dyed-to-match shoes on the floorboards of the golf cart as Bubba Cermak executed a sharp turn that almost had her spilling out of the open passenger side. She grabbed the bucket seat and the side of the cart with hands that were stiff from the cold.
"Can you please slow down?" She panted, glaring at Bubba.
"We don't have time to waste, City Mouse," he told her, his brows together as they navigated around the sand traps. He glanced over at her after he spoke, and had the same self-satisfied expression on his face that he sported most of the time.
The fact was that Bubba seemed t
o enjoy annoying the fuck out of her with liberal use of terms of endearment, when she’d repeatedly asked him to knock it off. But then, Bubba wasn’t the kind of guy who much respected boundaries.
"We’ll have even less time to waste if the best man or the matron of honor winds up in a hospital because of your insane driving,” she ground out from clenched teeth.
“Off-topic, but since you’ve never been married, are you sure you’re not the maid of honor? You’re too young to be a matron.”
Her lips twitched in an involuntary smile, which she covered up with another glare. “Why do you say things like that?”
He chuckled.
“It should be obvious. I’m flirting with you. Trying to make you laugh.” He said this with a silly grin plastered across his stupid, good-looking wolf face. She resisted the urge to melt at his attempts to impress her.
“Listen, just focus on your driving. Don’t waste time trying to impress me.”
As they drove, Vanessa scanned for anyone looking out of place at a golf course on a Saturday evening. Someone like, say, a preacher who should have been at the chapel at this very moment, instead of wherever the hell he was right now. The man was a Luddite and did not use an Omni. They had been trying to reach him for the last half hour, without success.
After an unconventional and somewhat roundabout courtship, Diana Miller and Mac Bodie were set to marry this fine Valentine’s Day evening. Unfortunately, the preacher was MIA, so of course Vanessa, as the matron of honor, had volunteered to find the wayward preacher and bring him to the chapel. Bubba immediately jumped in, claiming the best man should help. Now here they were, charging around on a golf cart. She should have stayed at the chapel.
Diana, her sister, a hard-charging career woman, had morphed into a bridezilla during the wedding preparations. When Diana and Mac finally announced a wedding date, fully a year after their twins were born, Vanessa had naïvely assumed her sister would want a low-key wedding.