by Talley, Liz
Marc ushered them toward the seating area. Melanie grabbed a wad of napkins and scrubbed at her face. She could still taste the sweetness on her lips, and hey, maybe the butter in the frosting might help with the bags under her eyes. The expensive cream she’d bought wasn’t doing a bit of good.
“I’m not one to fuss, but my job is to keep the bride happy. Our bride doesn’t look happy,” Marc said, looking at Emma, who had sat with her arms crossed, angry tears still glinting in her eyes. Andrew had sat next to her, but he’d wisely stopped trying to console her.
Melanie set the wadded napkins on the coffee table and crossed her legs. “What cake have you decided on, honey?”
“So you’re really going to pretend that this didn’t just happen?” Emma asked, her blue eyes flashing with annoyance.
“No, but we tasted all the cakes. Which one?” Melanie insisted, because she couldn’t undo what she had done. And that was what they were here for. Cake.
Emma looked at Marc. “The last one. Blackberry.” Then she looked back at Melanie. “And?”
“And what?”
“You aren’t going to address your behavior?” Emma said, looking more like Melanie’s mother than she ever had.
Melanie shrugged. “I don’t have to answer to you. I’m a grown-up.”
Tennyson’s lips twitched, but she remained silent.
“That’s your answer?” Emma turned from her and shook her head in what looked like disgust.
Donna came in and plonked down the tea tray a bit too hard. Marc winced, grabbed the brandy bottle, poured a decent amount into two cups, and handed one to Tennyson and one to Melanie. He seemed to think it over before pouring himself a double shot and tossing it back. Emma and Andrew seemed to be on their own.
Tennyson took the brandy and sipped it, making a face. Melanie picked hers up and tossed it back the way Marc had. It burned like a mother, but she needed the warmth and calm it might bring her. She’d never done anything this spontaneous. Or, well, she hadn’t since she was friends with Tennyson. This was what that woman drove her to—misbehaving.
“Damn, girl,” Tennyson said in admiration, eyeing her.
Emma poured a steaming cup of water and dropped a tea bag in. Silence reigned for a good minute before Melanie’s daughter folded her hands and cleared her throat. “You need to tell me and Andrew what is going on between you. We can’t continue planning the wedding with this disagreement still sitting between you. It’s too much stress, and we need to put . . . whatever it is behind us. Both of you are going to be our family.”
At that moment regret slammed into Melanie. Her daughter was right—the tension between her and Tennyson wasn’t fair to either of their children. Still, how did she tell Emma the truth about her own family? For so long she’d protected Emma and Noah from the truth because she wanted the image of her father to be pristine. She hadn’t told any mistruths—her father had been smart, talented, handsome, and so full of kindness. So, no, Melanie hadn’t misrepresented the man who had given her rides on his shoulders and helped her build a playhouse in the backyard, but she hadn’t told the whole truth, either. Like her mother, she’d wanted the scandal to stay where it belonged—in the past.
But she had to say something, give her daughter some reason why she and Tennyson were at odds.
After another period of silence, Emma narrowed her eyes. “Well?”
“Fine. We fought over a guy,” Tennyson said.
Both Emma and Andrew turned to her, their eyebrows raised. Emma blinked. “This is over a guy?”
“Mom, please tell me you and Em’s mom didn’t throw away your friendship over some random dude,” Andrew said, sounding very mature and millennial. Guys weren’t worth it. Dime a dozen. Girl power. And all that jazz.
Melanie squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them. “It wasn’t just a random dude. It was Kit.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Andrew kissed an emotional Emma on the forehead and jogged toward Tennyson’s car. He tapped on the driver’s side window, ensuring she couldn’t put it in reverse and get the hell out of Dodge.
“I’m riding with you,” he shouted through the glass.
“I’m fine,” Tennyson said with a wave. She didn’t want him to ride home with her, because she needed some time to decompress after what had happened inside Marc’s office. The whole afternoon was a colossal fail, not to mention she had frosting in her hair and her face was sticky from the blackberry compote. The only silver lining was that Emma had chosen a cake and marked the design she wanted for the wedding cake, which had been the whole reason for the appointment, so maybe it wasn’t a colossal fail. Just a messy . . . mess.
Andrew had already jogged around her car. She pressed unlock so he could climb inside.
He closed the door, his knees nearly up to his chin. He moved the seat back as far as it would go and then looked at her. “Well, that was a real shit show.”
Tennyson lifted a shoulder. “It all had to come out sooner or later.”
“Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”
When he and Emma had first started dating, she’d almost casually said, I used to date your father and be BFFs with your mom, but hadn’t because it felt awkward to lead with something like that. She’d figured she’d hold off because it was likely Emma and Andrew would date a few months and then go their separate ways, as seemed to be Andrew’s MO with most girls. But then this one stuck, and it seemed harder and harder to blurt out the background she had with Emma’s parents. She’d gone with “We used to know each other” and left it at that. She figured one day she’d find a segue into a conversation about what had really happened between her and Emma’s parents, but it never came. Or, if she were going to be truthful, she had avoided talking about the past because she worried that if Emma knew the truth, she would hate Tennyson as much as Melanie did.
Of course, Emma still didn’t know what Tennyson had done at the wedding. Melanie was kind enough to refer to their behavior as “bad reactionary choices” and leave it at that.
“I don’t know, Andrew. It’s hard to talk about,” she said, passing Emma and Melanie as they got into Melanie’s Lexus. They seemed to be in a spirited conversation. No doubt the same one she and Andrew were having but with more emotion. Having a son had spared her theatrics . . . except her own, of course.
“Why is it hard to talk about? Your past with Em’s parents would have been nice to know. Could have saved us a lot of awkward moments.”
Tennyson turned. “You want to know why? ’Cause Kit broke my heart.”
“But you said you broke up with him.”
She pulled out onto Line Avenue, nearly sideswiping a Tahoe. Andrew grabbed the seat and made a sound, but she ignored it. “I did.”
“So how were you heartbroken?”
Tennyson sucked in a breath. “Jared’s your best friend, right? Well, imagine if you had to break up with Emma, and he started dating her. Then he proposed. Then they got engaged and sent you an invitation to the wedding.”
“I wouldn’t break up with Emma. Why did you ‘have to’ break up?” He seemed very smug for someone who didn’t really know how hard life was. What did her son know about struggling? About being invisible in the world? About having to cash in a savings bond to buy a prom dress or taking out huge college loans or eating Ramen noodles just so a gal could afford to chase her dream?
Her son had never known suffering. Andrew wore his white pretty-boy image like most—denying he had it, guilty for it having served him so well, but not willing to hand back that monthly check he received from his father’s estate in order to stand on his own two feet. Hey, she didn’t blame him, but he couldn’t understand who she used to be and how her successes had depended solely on her ability to hustle, sacrifice, and constantly search for opportunity.
“I had a scholarship, a very tiny one, to the New York Academy and a job working as an assistant for a director who did summer theatre the June after I graduated high school. Sounds cr
azy, but I thought the world was very big. I decided I couldn’t continue to be the Tennyson I had always been. I was starting over and needed room to come into my own. I loved Kit, and truly thought we would probably get back together. He was a marketing major and wanted to work in advertising. We’d always joked that he would come up to NYC and we’d live there together. We agreed to break up because we both needed to experience the worlds we were about to enter. You have to understand that there was no Skype or Snapchat. The only way to communicate was with letters and long-distance phone calls that made for an astronomical phone bill. It was a different world, and very tough to maintain a relationship if you weren’t in the same area.”
Andrew nodded. “Yeah, I guess I can see that. I can’t imagine that world, but it seems logical.”
“When I came home for the holidays that first year, we hung out and picked up where we left off. Things were normal, until they weren’t. Kit and Melanie went to school together, and they gravitated toward one another. I suppose things just happened between them.”
What she didn’t say was that she had blamed Melanie and not Kit. From the very first glimpse of Kit, Melanie had fallen helplessly in love. She could still remember the exact moment they’d both laid eyes on the hot new sophomore. Melanie’s parents had just bought her the cutest convertible Volkswagen Cabriolet, and since Tennyson lived around the corner, Melanie picked her up for school each morning. That morning, they’d decided to ride with the top down, singing Madonna and essentially being cool as shit because that was what you thought you were when you were fifteen years old. They’d been two sophomore girls channeling their inner rock stars, sexy, sassy, and about to get rained on. Tennyson had laughed when Melanie flipped out about not being able to get the top up as thunderclouds gathered overhead. Luckily, someone from the strip mall they’d pulled into had helped them. But it had made them late for school.
They’d just walked in, brushing the raindrops from their hair-sprayed bangs, when Principal Addison opened his office door and led a well-dressed lady out into the main office. Trailing behind her was the most gorgeous guy Tennyson had ever seen.
Like every movie with a hot guy walking onto the scene, the world seemed to fade away, and “fine guy” music began to play in her head. She would have sworn real life slowed as Kit brushed back his too-long bleached hair and then shoved his hands into the back pockets of his acid-washed Levi’s. He wore high-top sneakers, a pair of Oakley sunglasses perched on his head, and a JanSport navy backpack slung over one shoulder. In other words, he was super, mega fine with a cherry on top. And the smile around his sexy lips when he noticed the girls told her he knew it.
Tennyson later swore that her heart skipped a beat when she saw him, and she knew Melanie felt the same way because when she looked over at her best friend, she thought about reaching out and pushing her chin up to close her mouth. Melanie hadn’t drooled, but if she had, Tennyson would have understood why.
“Mine.”
Tennyson hadn’t meant to say that word out loud, but it seemed imperative to call dibs on the gorgeous new student. She wanted it known because every girl who had a pulse would be interested in the new guy.
“Oh, here are some of our students. Both these young ladies are in the same grade as Christopher,” Mr. Addison said.
“Kit,” the boy said.
“Oh yes. Kit. Girls, come over here and meet our newest Falcon. This is Kit Layton and his mother. They moved to Shreveport last week,” Mr. Addison said, motioning them forward.
They took the check-in slips from Mrs. Anita and walked over. Tennyson tried to act like she wasn’t that interested, perhaps even bothered by having to greet a new student when geometry was waiting for her, but Melanie had been atypically animated, gushing about how happy everyone would be to have a new classmate. She’d really poured it on thick, and Kit looked slightly taken aback at her enthusiasm. Usually, Melanie was quieter, more willing to let Tennyson take the lead, but not this time. She was a positively chatty Cathy, with dimpled little smiles and a flirty laugh.
“I’m Tennyson,” she said after Melanie ran out of steam.
Kit’s mother smiled. “Like the poet?”
“My mother’s an English teacher. She did this whole thing,” she said, with a little exasperation tempered with an embarrassed smile. “My brother’s name is Heathcliff. At least he can shorten it to Heath. Tenny doesn’t really work as well.”
“Oh, is your mother a teacher here?” Mrs. Layton asked.
“No, ma’am. She teaches public school. I’m here for the theatre program. It’s excellent.” She didn’t add that it was on scholarship because there was no way her public-servant parents could afford tuition at Eastwood Prep with their salaries and five kids to feed. She tried to forget that she was a charity case at the private school.
“Kit does theatre. Or he did before he started playing sports.”
Kit shrugged. “I like hitting home runs better than I like wearing stage makeup.”
Mr. Addison nodded. “I played some ball in my day, too.”
“Well, I must be getting back to the house. I have furniture coming,” Mrs. Layton said, glancing out at the bright autumn day.
“Will one of you walk Kit to second period? He’s in Mr. Leopold’s world history class.”
Melanie’s shoulders sank a little. “Tennyson has that class next. It’s nice meeting you, Kit. I hope we’ll, you know, see each other again. I mean, we will because it’s a small school, but you know what I mean.” She then turned the color of the strawberry bubble gum she loved to chew.
“Yeah. Cool.” Kit turned to Tennyson. “Guess you’re my tour guide.”
Tennyson lifted a shoulder and affected nonchalance. “I’m going that way.”
Even back then she understood that guys liked a challenge. Before she turned toward the office door, where Melanie was standing looking a bit miffed she didn’t get to do the honors, she saw exactly what she wanted to see in Kit’s eyes—interest.
By the end of November, she’d kissed Kit after two football games and let him get to second base at Leeann Shelby’s house party. At Christmas, he asked her to go out with him, and with their relationship official, Melanie had stifled her infatuation and slid into acceptance that Kit wouldn’t be hers. But even as she and Kit dated for two more years, Tennyson was keenly aware that Melanie had a thing for Kit. She caught it in her friend’s eyes sometimes, in the way she leaned toward Kit and laughed too hard at his lame jokes.
So when they broke up and Tennyson went to New York, she’d wondered if her best friend might be tempted, but she’d thought Kit wasn’t remotely interested in Melanie as anything other than a friend.
Tennyson had been wrong about that.
Because after only six months post-breakup, Melanie got what she’d always wanted since the day that new Falcon had walked into both their lives—Melanie got the hot guy.
Her son turned down the radio and looked over at her. “If you loved Kit, why did you let him go? I mean, yeah, I get the distance thing, but you pretty much gave Melanie and Kit permission. You’re the one who let him go.”
Tennyson had been so caught up in remembering how hot Melanie had been for Kit that she’d forgotten she was driving. She’d almost blown through a red light. Slamming on her brakes, she skidded into the intersection. Quickly, she shifted into reverse and backed up. “Sorry. Um, but you know, Kit and Melanie didn’t need my permission. Obviously.”
“This is just all so bizarre. I can’t believe you and Em’s mom can’t bury the hatchet. I mean, it was twentysomething years ago, and it’s obvious you’re not into Kit anymore. So why can’t you put what happened behind you? Everyone has crap between them. Even good friends, but you don’t act like assholes forever.”
“You mean most people don’t throw cake at each other?” Tennyson joked.
“Only assholes.”
“Well, call me what you want, but you’ll soon learn that often emotions can’t be controlle
d. When something hard like this sits between two people, things bubble over. So in a few years, once you’ve faced things you can do nothing about, after you’ve survived heartache, tears, and loss, you give me a call, and then we’ll talk about who’s an asshole.”
Andrew gave her a sharp look. “So you’re saying you had a good reason to ruin this afternoon? You’re justified because things didn’t go your way all those years ago? Sorry, Mom, you and Melanie don’t get a pass. You’re both literally ruining some precious memories because you can’t get your crap together. You’re like the people who talk about how tough they’ve had it, how they walked to school barefoot, up hills and shit. And you’re mad at me because I drive the truck you bought me. I can’t help that I haven’t had my heart broken. That doesn’t give you and Melanie the right to punish everyone else for your ‘feelings.’”
Tennyson wanted to tell her son to go fly a kite, but she knew some of what he said was true. Neither he nor Emma deserved to shoulder the crap she and Melanie had between them. Part of her wanted to ask Melanie to dinner, to just say all the things she’d been wanting to say for years, but she wasn’t sure Melanie would agree to it, and, if she were truthful, she wasn’t ready to be that vulnerable. “I’m sorry, Andrew. I truly am. I will try my best to take the high road. I’m not always good at that, but I don’t want either you or Emma to feel like what is between the two moms will wreck the wedding.”
“Thanks,” he said, checking his seat belt when she floored the gas and shot through the green light. “So what about this guy you’re messing around with?”
“What guy?”
“I know how you are when you’ve got a new guy.”
Tennyson didn’t want anyone to know she was flirting with something that may or may not be a good idea. Officer Joseph C. Rhett hadn’t been by in a few weeks, even though she’d suggested he stop by when he had some free time. Sometimes he called her, and they talked for hours about inane things. She knew he was interested. He knew she wanted him in her bed. They had been skirting around something more, but she wasn’t ready to put a name to what that something was. “He’s just a friend.”