Meeting Mr. Wright

by Cassie Cross

  “Morocco or Greece, those are your choices?” Gabby asks, looking at Jasmine like her potential vacation destinations are the worst places to visit in the entire world.

  “I know that’s not judgment I hear, Gabby Morgan.” Jasmine is using that voice she reserves for the times when she wants you to know that she’s just not going to take any of your shit anymore.

  “It’s just…why go alone? On a trip like that?” Gabby asks.

  “Because I want to go on a vacation, and I’m not going to sit around waiting for some man to take me.”

  “You sound like Callie,” Gabby says.

  “Hey,” I reply, with not entirely mock offense. “Leave me out of this.”

  “If Callie wants to be man-free, I support that,” Jasmine says, smiling at me. “I work hard. I’m married to my job. Healthiest relationship I’ve ever had, truthfully. I got a promotion, so I’m taking myself on a celebratory trip. My own personal honeymoon, if you will,” she says before taking a sip from the glass of wine she’s holding in her right hand. “And I won’t have to pick up after some slob.”

  “A honeymoon without the sex,” Shelby reminds her. Shelby’s level of pervertedness could put a man to shame.

  “Girl, I can get the sex without the commitment.” Jasmine smirks in Shelby’s direction. “I’ll meet some Greek hottie and get myself all taken care of. You two can marry off if you want to,” she says, waving her hand dismissively at Gabby and Shelby. “I’m happy by myself.”

  I sigh, wishing I could be that sure about my life of self-imposed solitude. I’m doing it more out of necessity than preference. I don’t want a broken heart; Jasmine doesn’t want a commitment. Jasmine comes and sits down next to me, and when I turn my head to smile at her, I catch a glimpse of Nate. Nate, Ben, and their father are over on the patio of the guest house, standing around the grill, beers in hand. Marco and Xavier, Ben’s groomsmen are there too, animatedly talking to Mr. Wright, probably discussing the proper torque in a ’67 Mustang or whatever it is that men talk about when they’re being all manly. Nate looks up at the same time I do, and our eyes meet. He smiles, nodding toward me, and I smile back, a warm rush of nerves tingling all the way down to my toes. Even standing all the way across the yard, he still knows how to get to me.

  “Ben’s brother’s testing your vow of celibacy, isn’t he?” Jasmine says softly, so that I’m the only one who can hear her. “I know that look, Callie. You’re in trouble already and you don’t even know it.”

  I grin, because she’s wrong, wrong, wrong. I’m in trouble, sure. But I definitely know it.

  “So, Emily,” Shelby says, and I feel this sense of dread creeping up inside of me, spreading its icy fingers across my belly. Gabby and I both told Shelby and Jasmine of the Ethan-slash-Emily situation and drilled into them that talk of my history with Ethan is forbidden, but they’ve both got some alcohol in them, so who knows what’ll happen? “How did you meet Ethan?”

  I give Shelby a dirty look, but she completely ignores me. I’m not really all that upset about it, because honestly, I want to hear Emily’s answer.

  Emily looks across the yard at Ethan, smiling before she answers. “We met at a karaoke bar.”

  Jasmine nearly spits out her drink.

  “A karaoke bar?” I ask, completely confused. Ethan loathes karaoke. Or, I guess, he used to.

  “Yeah. It was a friend’s birthday party. We bonded over the fact that we were the only two who refused to sing.”

  It’s ridiculous, but there’s a part of me that’s relieved to know that I was right about the karaoke.

  “How long have you been together?” I ask. Gabby glares at me, but I don’t care. She can be surprised all she wants. I’m going to break my own rules tonight, because I just have to know the answer.

  “A couple of months,” she says, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear. She’s such a pretty woman, and there’s something about her that’s so bright, like she just exudes light. I can see why Ethan would be drawn to her.

  “What do you do?” Jasmine asks.

  “I’m a speech therapist at an elementary school in Fort Worth.”

  “She also paints in her spare time,” Gabby says, chiming in. She says it with such enthusiasm that I wonder if she’s just been biding her time, hoping my curiosity would pique so that I’d start asking her questions like these.

  I wait a few beats before I say something. “What do you paint?”

  “Landscapes, mostly.”

  “Show her,” Gabby says, nudging Emily’s shoulder.

  Reluctantly, Emily fishes her phone out of her back pocket and she scrolls through a few photos before she hands the phone to me.

  When I see the paintings, I’m stunned. They’re remarkably beautiful even with the cell phone’s awful picture quality. Breathtaking, really. It’s difficult for me to believe that someone I’ve actually met has painted them, which I know is ridiculous.

  “Emily,” I say, smiling at her. “These are gorgeous.”

  “Thank you,” she says. I can see her blush even under the dim lantern light.

  I return her phone to her, and for the first time all night, it seems like none of us have anything to say.

  “Can I ask you all a question that I’ve been wondering about all afternoon?” Emily asks, seeming kind of shy. She stands up and takes a seat next to Jasmine, then leans in. I don’t know who she thinks will overhear her, the guys are at least 30 yards away. “That guy over there,” she says, pointing towards the men gathered around the grill. “The one in the red shirt?”

  “That’s Marco,” Shelby says.

  “Yeah, him. Why does he have a tattoo of a Ring Pop?”

  We all bust out laughing, clutching our stomachs, gasping for air. Jasmine’s having the most difficulty catching her breath, because she’s been harassing Marco about that tattoo ever since he got it, and I know she’s got to feel validated right now.

  “Marco!” she shouts.

  Every single head turns in our direction and Marco yells, “What?”

  “Emily here wants to know all about your Ring Pop tattoo.”

  Marco’s shoulders slump as Xavier, Ethan and Ben all crack up.

  “It’s an ankh, you assholes!” he yells.

  Emily shakes her head, grinning. “It’s a Ring Pop,” she says under her breath.

  God help me, I like her.

  “THIS IS the best hamburger I think I’ve ever had,” Shelby says, tilting her head to lick a piece of melted cheese that’s dripping off of her thumb.

  I hum in agreement, remembering that my dad used to tell me that the messier the food, the better it tastes. The memory stirs up an unexpected warmth inside of me, and I tamp it down as soon as it rises up. Memories of my father are seldom good things, and when they are they usually leave as quickly as they came.

  “We bought it from just down the street,” Jessa says, and every single member of the Wright family groans, Gabby included.

  “I don’t want to think about my food having a face, Jess.” Nate looks warily down at his hamburger, but keeps eating it anyway.

  Jessa rolls her eyes. “You always were really sensitive about animals.”

  “Not to the point where he won’t eat them,” Marco replies. “He pounded down about fifty sliders at Ben’s bachelor party.”

  “What happens in Vegas,” Nate says before taking another bite.

  “You went veggie for a while when you were like, ten, right?” Jessa asks.

  “Please don’t tell that story right now.” Nate puts his burger down and wipes his hands on the crumpled-up paper towel in front of him.

  “What story?” I ask, figuring out that if Nate doesn’t want it told, it must definitely be worth hearing. He rolls his eyes at me, but follows it up with a cute grin.

  “Mom, you wanna take this one?” Jessa picks up her bottle of beer and swirls it before taking a sip.

  “Back before we built the patio onto the guest house,” Amy begins, smiling, �
��there was a huge tree back there, and we had a problem with baby birds and squirrels falling off of the branches. Nate always used to watch out for them, and when one of them would fall, he’d build them a little bed by filling a shoe box with old dishtowels. He’d feed them with ear droppers until they were big enough to go out on their own again.”

  Nate looks completely embarrassed, and a few of the guys at the table are doing their best not to laugh at him, which is probably in their own best interest, because Nate could definitely take all of them. At once, probably. I can tell that Ethan wants to make a crack, and there’s a part of me that wants to see what would no doubt be a smack down of epic proportions on Nate’s behalf. But Ethan decides not to take the bait. The women, well…every one of them but those in his immediate family is looking at him all starry eyed and I’m a little jealous about it, honestly. There’s a part of me that wants to walk over to where he’s sitting, stand in front of him and write MINE all over his plain grey t-shirt. But that’s crazy, isn’t it? Wanting to mark my territory when there’s no territory to mark? I can’t have Nate-ish territory.

  Right?

  What is wrong with me?

  Thankfully, Nate seems to be oblivious to his adoring female audience. “Can we talk about anything other than my wildlife rescue hospital?”

  Amy sighs when she looks at her son, her hands clasped in front of her. In no time at all she’s turned her attention to Xavier.

  “How’s your mama?” she asks. Xavier’s mom was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago. She’s doing well now, but for a while there…

  “She’s great, thank you for asking,” he says, his mouth half-full. He smiles at her, and this cute dimple makes a dent in his cheek. It makes me remember why I had a slight crush on him when I first met him all those years ago.

  “She’d smack you if she saw you talking with food in your mouth,” Jasmine says in a half-biting, half-sweet kind of tone. She and Xavier dated in high school, back before any of us knew them. They broke up the summer before college, but Jasmine teases him a little too much, and Xavier always looks at her a beat longer than he probably should. There’s something there still, but I don’t think they’ll ever act on it, and what kind of hypocrite would I be if I called either one of them out?

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Ben says.

  Amy rolls her eyes at her son, but she smiles in spite of herself. “Marco, how’s everything with you?”

  “Well, thank you.” He’s always so polite.

  “Since we’ve got a wedding coming up and I’ve got brides on my mind, I have to ask. Have you proposed to that girlfriend of yours yet?”

  Marco’s mid-swallow, and he nearly chokes on his food. Ben gives him a light pat on the back, but it doesn’t take Marco long to recover.

  “No, ma’am. I haven’t.”

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Amy asks.

  Marco shrugs, and his face gets serious all of a sudden as he looks around the table, like he doesn’t know how to answer her. “I’m not sure if she’s the one.”

  “Ah,” Amy sighs. “It’s best to wait then.”

  “How do you know?” Shelby asks. “When somebody’s ‘the one?’”

  “I knew when Jack flew across the Atlantic from Paris to Philly while he was still studying abroad, just so that we could be together on Christmas,” Amy says, and unlike the other night at dinner, not a single one of her children playfully groan at this story.

  Jack chimes in, taking hold of Amy’s hand. “And I knew when she spent her entire Christmas break trying to mend me back to health.”

  This sweet, almost bashful smile pulls at Jessa’s lips. “I knew when Ryan was the first person I wanted to call whenever something good happened. Or when I just wanted to tell someone about my day.”

  I look over at Ethan, and his eyes meet mine. There’s a sadness behind them, and I’m wondering if he’s thinking the same thing that I am. He was never—not once during the course of our relationship—that person for me. I always called Gabby with good news, or whenever I wanted to talk.

  Gabby’s got this distant look in her eyes. “Ben and I went away for a long weekend in Austin,” she says, looking over at him. “We had tickets for this play that I’d been wanting to see forever.” What she doesn’t say is that she’d had an aversion to going to the theater ever since her parents died, and that weekend was a big step for her. But she doesn’t need to tell the people at this table that, everyone who she cares about knowing the story already knows it. “It was really important to me that I wear this bracelet that belonged to my mother. But I was so nervous that somehow I managed to leave it behind. It seems so trivial, this piece of jewelry, but there was a story behind it, and I just…I needed to wear it that night.” She smiles at Ben with unshed tears in her eyes, and he’s watching her like she’s the most precious thing in his world. “Ben drove all the way back to Dallas to get it, just so I could wear it. That’s when I knew.”

  She touches Ben’s cheek and leans in for a kiss.

  “Usually Ben’s the forgetful one,” Amy says.

  “Like how he forgot the wedding rings.” Jessa’s eyes widen, and she slams her palm against her mouth when she realizes she let something slip that she shouldn’t have.

  “Relax,” Ben says, stroking the back of Gabby’s hand. “Nate picked them up on his way out here.”

  “And then he missed his flight because he stopped to get barbecue and got stuck in traffic,” Jessa says, and my stomach just…drops.

  But there was a weather delay that night. He told me he couldn’t get a flight out until the next morning.

  Nate looks over at me, his eyes wide and uncertain. The words his sister just said replay on a loop in my brain.

  IT’S WELL past one in the morning when everyone finally begins to shuffle off to their rooms, tired from a long night of eating and laughter and fun between friends. Even though I haven’t known most of the Wright family for long, and I haven’t spent any quality time with my friends in the bridal party for a while, there was something very homey and familiar about this evening that makes the end of it bittersweet.

  I’m not very tired, and it seems that Nate’s still wide awake, too. I have a feeling that he’s just waiting to get me alone so that he can explain the whole airport story that Jessa let slip. I can admit to wanting to know the reason for it probably as much as he wants to tell me, which is much more than I should.

  We told Amy and Jack that we’d take over the clean-up duties so that they could take the rest of the night off. They’ve done so much for this wedding that it only seems right, and it gives Nate and me a nice neutral ground on which to talk things over. Neutral ground is good; with Nate it’s the least dangerous. Nate’s standing on one side of the long picnic table, and I’m on the other. We’re both holding huge black plastic bags: one for trash, the other for recycling.

  Nate dumps paper plates with uneaten bits of food on them into his bag, and I toss remnants of wine into the grass before throwing the plastic cups into the bag to be recycled. The crickets are chirping, and there’s a soft breeze in the air. It’s light enough to cool our skin, but not strong enough to make a mess of what’s left on the picnic table.

  The two of us are quiet, a silence that’s not altogether comfortable. I think he’s waiting for me to ask him why his sister thinks that he missed his flight from Dallas when he’d told me that it was delayed until the next morning. He seems kind of uneasy about it, and because I always think the worst, I assume that it’s because he had me pegged as an easy target for airport sex and he isn’t quite ready to own up to that yet. I mean, I was an easy target for airport sex; I was looking for it, for crying out loud. But knowing that would ruin the whimsy of the flirting, the magnetism that I felt when we were together. I want him to tell me the truth, but at the same time I don’t want to know it at all.

  “Nate,” I begin. His eyes snap up to meet mine like he’s been waiting for just that one signal to
confess. So, he does.

  “I lied to you that night,” he says, his eyes searching mine. “My flight was canceled because of the storm, but I booked one for later that evening. I was just killing time in the bar; I wanted to catch the end of a game. And then you walked in.” He takes a deep breath and sighs, and there isn’t anything in the world that could make me look away. “I was glued to the seat, Callie. I couldn’t get up, I couldn’t leave. I had to keep talking to you, I can’t explain it. It was…as necessary to me as breathing.”

  “Then why did you lie?” My voice cracks as the words come out.

  “Strangely enough, because I didn’t want you to think I was using you. I can see now that wasn’t the best plan. My mom, she tracks my flights, and I didn’t want to have to explain why-”

  “Why you skipped your flight to have sex with some woman you met in a bar?” I try to sound lighthearted about it all, but it falls flat.

  “No,” he says, closing the distance between us. Without even realizing it, I’ve walked a few steps towards him. Nate drops the bag, then reaches out for my hand. He holds just my fingers, lightly skimming the pad of his thumb across my nails. “I didn’t ask you to leave the bar to have sex with you. I mean, I wanted to have sex with you. I want to have sex with you.” He lets out a breathy laugh as he shakes his head, and the frustrated smile makes a warmth blossom in my chest. It’s cute, the way he stumbles over the words, and he looks at our entwined fingers as he continues. “If you had just wanted to talk that night? I would’ve sat there and talked to until the sun came up. I would’ve missed ten flights if I had to.”

  He squeezes my hand, looking down at me, and the soft light from the lanterns makes his perfect face seem almost ethereal. My breath catches, right in my throat. I want to ask him why, why he wanted to talk to me so badly. Me, the girl whose father left and whose boyfriend turned to another woman for comfort. The girl who’s never been quite good enough to make people want to stick around. But somehow, he wanted to.