“Well, folks …” I say loudly, laughing instead of crying.
I hear Amilia say, “He’s losing his mind.”
I turn to her. “Might be just that. We have a runaway bride,” I announce. Some gasp in shock, and others look anywhere except for at me. “Please feel free to attend the reception as the Hickmores have already paid for everything.” I nod then turn around. “Someone get me the fuck out of here,” I say, ripping the top button off my tux. Walker and Brody both nod at me.
“You take him,” Darla says. “I’ll handle all this.”
Walker nods at her as Brody leans down to kiss her. “Thanks, babe,” he says as we walk out the side door we entered earlier. “We need a fucking ride,” Brody starts.
“You just swore in church,” I point out to him.
Brody shakes his head and smiles, “Dude, I can safely say I wasn’t the only one swearing in that church in the past five minutes. I’m sure the Hickmores said fuck when you invited everyone to stay for the reception.”
Seeing the limo that probably brought Bethany here. “You.” I point at the limo driver. “I’ll pay you double to get me the fuck out of here.” He nods his head as we all climb into the backseat. Brody reaches for the champagne, but I snatch it from him and toss it out the door. “Fuck that shit,” I say, and no one says a word. I lean my head back, the pounding becoming increasingly louder and louder. “I am never fucking getting married,” I say to the quiet of the car. “I need to get so shitfaced I don’t remember today.” I look out the window, thinking how fast my perfect day turned into a day of fucking hell.
Chapter Five
Crystal
“I don’t think she is going to eat any of this,” I say, looking around the kitchen at the fried chicken my aunt just made.
“She needs to eat,” Blake says from his chair. I turn to glare at him.
“I’m aware, but she just lost her husband and probably feels dead inside. You really think she is going to come down and eat fried chicken?” He doesn’t answer; instead, he looks down at the empty whiskey glass he’s spinning on the table.
“We have to make the arrangements,” I say, rubbing my forehead. “What a fucking clusterfuck. I can’t even imagine what she’s feeling right now.”
Blake opens a new bottle and pours himself another shot, swallowing it down, and I look at him. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t …” I remember when he had to bury his first love when cancer took her at nineteen. He has never been the same.
I don’t say anything to him because I hear the creaking of the stairs. Looking down the hallway, I see Hailey coming downstairs. Her hair tied on top of her head, the robe is still wrapped around her. Her eyes are swollen from the tears she has shed the whole day.
“Hey,” I whisper to her, “you hungry?” I ask her but she doesn’t even acknowledge me. She looks around the room at the table set, but as soon as her eyes land on the brown bag on the counter she is in a trance. She turns on her feet, heading straight to the brown bag. My eyes find Blake’s, and we both inhale deep.
The crinkling of the bag fills the silence of the room as the four of us stand, waiting for her to fall. Waiting to catch her.
Opening the bag, she takes out his watch first. When she looks at it, the sob rips out of her. She brings the watch to her nose and smells it, her other hand gripping the counter to hold on to it. I step forward but stop when she sets it down. I don’t see what she pulls out next because the tears block my vision.
“This isn’t his.” She turns to us, holding a black iPhone. “His phone was white.”
I walk over to her, this time to help her stand. “Maybe it was put in there by mistake. Here, let me plug it in, and we can see who the phone belongs to.” I grab it from her and walk over to the wall charger, plugging it in. The red dead battery sign lights up.
I look back at her as she runs her fingers over his phone, her eyes closing as tears drip off her chin, almost like you left the faucet on. “We took this picture last week after he got home. He was gone for a month this time. It was the longest he’d ever been away.” She looks up at us, the hollowness almost too much to bear. “How did this happen?” She looks at each of us separately as she waits for an answer. My aunt and I are brushing our own tears off our face when the buzzing on the counter starts.
Hailey walks over to the phone before I can get to it and presses the button. Her face goes white, whiter than it was, her lips almost turning ash. Her hands start shaking, shaking so much the phone slips out of her hand and lands right in front of her feet.
The phone faces all of us, and I finally see what shocked her. The picture on the screen is Eric with another woman and kids. I don’t have time to let it sink in, I don’t have time to comprehend what this means, because the phone is now ringing with the word Baby on it.
The room stands here in shock, my aunt’s hand going to her mouth. My arms hang by my sides, heavy, so heavy I can’t reach out and grab the phone from Hailey before she bends down and presses the green button.
My heart is breaking, my inner voice yelling No. My breathing comes in spurts, almost as if I’ve just run a marathon. I don’t hear her voice when she answers because the whooshing of my heart fills my ears.
The four of us are rooted to the spot. The phone finally slips out of her hand, and we all spring into action. Blake rushes to grab Hailey before she falls, the phone stopping right in front of my feet. “Hello?” I hear being shouted from the phone. “Hello?” I finally bend down and pick up the phone, bringing it to my ear.
“Hello.” I finally find the words that have been lodged in my throat.
“Who is this?” whispers the female voice.
“This is Crystal,” I finally say, turning and walking out of the room. Stepping out the front door, I sit on the first step. “Who is this?”
“Samantha.” Her voice cracks. “Who are you guys, and why do you have Eric’s phone?” I can’t see her face, but from her voice, I can tell she’s just as terrified and broken as we are.
“Are you …?” I don’t even know what to ask. “Who are you to Eric?”
“I’m his wife.” My eyes close as I take in the implication of what she just said about that motherfucking bastard. “And I’m tired of answering questions without getting any answers of my own.”
“I,” I start, saying slowly, “where are you?”
“I’m at home,” she answers right away.
“I need you to sit down,” I tell her, knowing I am going to have to break the news to her that her scumbag husband is dead. “There has been an accident.”
“Oh my god,” she whispers, and I hear her sobbing right away. The screen door opens, and I feel Blake sit next to me. I put her on speakerphone.
“Is he okay?” she asks between sobs. I shed one single tear for this woman, and Blake takes the phone from me.
“He didn’t make it,” he says curtly, not even sugarcoating anything as the wails come through the phone. We hear a little girl’s voice in the background. “Mommy, Mommy, are you okay, Mommy?” And now I can’t stop the tears.
“Where …” She starts breathing heavily. “Where is he?”
“He’s at Mercy General hospital,” Blake says. “I’m sorry for your loss, but I have to know … who are you?”
“I’m his wife,” she says as Blake’s hand tightens around the phone, his knuckles going white. “We’ve been married for twelve years. We have two girls.” Her voice fades, and we hear shouting in the background.
“What the fuck is going on?” a male voice shouts. He must grab the phone from Samantha because now he’s on the phone. “Who the fuck is this?” His voice is almost identical to Eric’s.
“Where is Samantha?” Blake asks right away, his protector going to work.
“She’s right next to me. Now answer my fucking question.”
“There was an accident today. Eric didn’t make it.”
“Fuck,” the voice on the other end hisses. “Where is he, and who
is this?”
“He’s at Mercy General Hospital. My name is Blake. He was married to my sister.”
“That’s impossible,” the man’s voice whispers urgently. “He’s already married to Samantha.”
“Yeah,” Blake says, nodding his head. I lean my head on his shoulder, thinking that this just got more fucking fucked up than before. Now not only do we have to mourn Hailey’s husband, but we also have to come to terms with the fucker’s double life.
I didn’t think she would be able to survive losing him, but I know this last piece of information will fucking break her. I look straight ahead, not paying attention to the rest of Blake’s conversation. I close my eyes, my body almost numb.
He hangs up the phone and places it next to him gently, the phone already shattered from when it slipped out of Hailey’s hand. “I don’t even want to know how she is going to survive this. I can’t do it,” I say softly. “I can’t tell her. I just …” A sob finally breaks free, and I put my hand on my mouth to block the sound. Blake wraps his arm around my shoulders, bringing me even closer as I bury my face in his shoulder. My tears seeping into his shirt.
Giving me the time to purge it from my system, he doesn’t say anything while I let my pain go. “You good?” he asks when I stop crying, and I just nod my head. “We need to go inside and let them know.” He gets up, holding his hand out to me. “Just let me do all the talking.”
“I wouldn’t be able to even if I wanted to,” I tell him as we walk inside and break the news to them that Eric—sweet, caring Eric—was, in fact, a two-timing asshole with a wife and family.
I sit down with my eyes on my hands. My mind blanks as I watch Hailey’s face while we tell her that her husband isn’t her husband but someone else’s. I sit here watching her as this information sinks in. I sit here empty and hollow with nothing left to give.
Cursing him in my head, I sit here wishing him all the pain in the world. I sit here wishing he was still alive—not for Hailey, but so I could inflict pain on him. I wish he was here, so he could face what he left behind. I wish … at the end of the day, we all have different wishes. I stop my thoughts when I hear Hailey yell, grabbing the picture of her and Eric from beside her and hugging it to her chest.
The doorbell makes us all look up, and if I thought it was bad before, well, let’s just say that we all went down that fucking rabbit hole.
Chapter Six
Gabe
“Is that banging?” I ask as my head comes off the couch, my tongue thick. “What is that?” I ask, looking around. Where the fuck am I? Looking down, I see I’m still wearing my wrinkled tux pants and white shirt.
And it all comes back to me. I was left at the altar. Coming to the home we didn’t even live in yet. Having only moved our stuff in, we were waiting for the wedding night to officially move in. I went to the kitchen and pulled out all the booze, all the fucking booze, and guzzled it down to stop the pain in my chest. I look over to see Walker walking into the room with coffee in his hand and Advil in the other. “You need to sober up just a bit.” He set the cup on the coffee table tray. “We need to do a couple of things.”
“I’m pretty sure me getting stood up at the altar wasn’t on the list of things to do, yet I did it.” I try to make a joke of it before I drink the scalding coffee, which burns all the way down my throat. “What the fuck could we possibly need to do?”
“We need to pack up Bethany’s things.” He looks over at me.
“Fuck that. I say we have a bonfire on the beach and burn all her shit.” I smile, thinking that the fire would probably be out of control for all the shit she has here. “Scratch that.” I shake my head, the pounding making me wince. I walk into the kitchen, open a drawer, and take out a pair of scissors. “Grab some boxes from the garage.”
I walk to the winding steps in the middle of the house, taking them two at a time on the way to our bedroom. I walk into our huge master bedroom with wooden beams across the ceiling.
Passing the king-size bed in the middle of the room, I head to her walk-in closet. It’s the size of an office, but I couldn’t say no to her. Her clothes are all hung by color; I guess she was planning a wardrobe change as well since everything looks to be here. Meaning she took fucking nothing with her. I rip piece by piece down, cutting each one right down the middle and then throwing it on the floor. The whole time, Walker leans against the doorjamb, letting me do my thing. I get to the pants, cutting off a leg from each of them. “Good luck trying to get that back in one piece.” I laugh at myself. I cut the skirts in half. “That isn’t going to be good to wear.” I look over at Walker, who just shakes his head. I pick up the shoes—oh, her perfect shoe collection. “Do you know she made me pay four thousand dollars for a pair of shoes for the wedding? Four fucking thousand dollars!”
I pick up a dainty pair of shoes with the red bottoms and snap off the heel. “That’s not going to work.” I go all through her shoe collection. “I must have spent twenty grand on shoes.” I look down at the dismantled shoes. “What the fuck was I thinking?”
“You just wanted to make her happy.” Walker finally speaks.
“A lot of good that did me.” I look around. “I’m stuck in a million-dollar home with cut up women’s clothes.”
“At least she didn’t leave you with a child who she decided wasn’t good enough for her.”
I look up at him. “Touché.” I sit on the bench she has in the closet, leaning my hands on my knees. “What the fuck do I do?”
“First, we clean this mess and dump all the shit at her parents’ house,” he says. “Then we go into town and have a bite to eat. You know the rumor mill is already going into overdrive.”
“So we go and pretend everything is okay?” I ask him as my chest gets tight.
“We pretend every single fucking day till one day it is okay, and no one will know but you.” He looks at me. “I mean, you get drunk as fuck the whole weekend, but Monday morning, you get up and go to work, and it’s business as usual.”
I agree with him. “I’m going to fake the fuck out of this,” I tell him as I get up. Unbuttoning my shirt, I peel it off my body, uncovering the ink on my arms. “She fucking hated my tats. Did I tell you that?”
He shakes his head while I continue undressing. “Oh, yeah, it’s not professional, she said. She actually looked up laser removal. It should have been my first clue she was not the woman for me.”
I scoff. “High and proper all the time. She didn’t even like to hold my hand in public.” I raise my hands while I rant. “And forget about kissing in public. Dude, she thought it was like we were shooting a porn.”
“But you loved her.”
“But I love her,” I repeat, not saying it in the past tense because I love her. I fucking love her.
“People do crazy things for love,” Walker points out as I nod my head, walking to my plain closet to pull out a pair of jeans and slide them on.
“Today, I love her, and tomorrow, I’ll love her a little less,” I tell myself. Walker nods and turns around. Walking out of the room, he leaves me looking around the bedroom at décor I didn’t even choose. The custom canvas headboard, the mirrored side tables I wasn’t even allowed to breathe on. I make a note to call the decorator tomorrow and have her change them. I thank fuck we never slept in the bed, or I would get rid of that, too. No way in fuck would I sleep in the bed after she fucked me over the way she did.
“Gabriel.” I hear Walker yell from downstairs. I walk out of the bedroom and look over the railing. “We have incoming,” he says right before the doorbell rings, and I hear voices coming into the house.
“Are we burning this shit down?” Brody asks. He’s followed by Darla, who puts her hands on her hips.
“We are most certainly not burning anything.” She looks up at me. “How are you doing, sweetie?”
“You will not fucking call him sweetie, Darla,” Brody growls from beside her five-foot body. His six-foot-five frame making him even bigger. She
walks over to him, reaching him mid-chest. “No,” he says, putting his hands around her waist and bending down in half, “not a fucking chance. He has a name, so use it.”
“I love only you.” She laughs into his chest. “Gabe”—she looks up—“are you doing okay?”
I don’t have a chance to answer her because more voices fill the room. This time, it’s Grandma and my mother. “Okay.” Grams puts her sunglasses on her head. “Let’s get everything that isn’t Gabriel’s and pack that shit up.”
I stand, looking down at my family, not saying a word. “We started in the bedroom,” Walker says. “Well, he started in the bedroom.” He points upstairs. “It’s a massacre.”
The women gasp and look up. “Did you touch the shoes?” Darla dares to ask, almost as if I told her I killed a puppy.
“All of them,” Walker confirms, and Darla puts her hand over her mouth. “Every single one destroyed.”
“You didn’t,” Darla asks in a whisper, and I think I see tears forming in her eyes. “Even the Manolo Mary Janes?”
“How the fuck am I even supposed to know what that is?” I ask, putting my hands on my hips.
“I would have bought those from you,” she says, and then Brody comes back with a roar.
“Over my dead body would you wear that woman’s shoes.”
“It’s a shoe,” Darla says.
“Then buy your own fucking shoes.” He crosses his arms over his chest, and the fact his beard is long and so is his hair makes him look almost like a barbarian.
“Those shoes are nine hundred dollars!” She puts her hands on her hips, and then Brody’s head whips up to look at me.
“You bought her nine-hundred-dollar shoes?”
Unexpected Love Story Page 3