One Last Time: A Second Chance Romance

by Roxie Noir

  “It must have been,” I say. “I didn’t join the kind of sorority that did formals, and I don’t recall your Econ department having a spring gala or anything.”

  “Thank God for that,” he laughs. “Can you imagine those nerds trying to dance?”

  “So says the Nerd King.”

  Seth just laughs. His fingers tighten on my back. Just slightly. Just enough.

  “Well, this is better than being eighteen,” he says. “For one thing, whiskey sure makes me a better dancer.”

  “For two, I’m not wearing a poofy princess dress that looks like my bottom half is made of purple cotton candy,” I say.

  “It did come in handy later,” Seth says.

  “I was hoping you’d forgotten that.”

  “Not a chance, Bird.”

  The old nickname flutters onto me so lightly that it takes me a moment to realize what he said. I’d almost forgotten it.

  “I’m afraid that covering myself with purple taffeta while explaining to Officer Capaldi that we were just looking for your contact lens is forever burned into my memory,” he goes on.

  I start laughing. I can’t help it. This memory should probably be awkward, given that we were literally mid-coitus in the back seat of my car when there was a knock on the window, but somehow it’s just… funny.

  “He didn’t believe you,” I point out.

  “Yeah, no shit,” Seth says dryly. “I’m pretty sure the only reason we didn’t get arrested is because he knew my dad.”

  “Did I ever tell you about the lecture I got when I got home that night?”

  “From who, Vera?”

  “Of course. Apparently I was somewhat disheveled when I showed up, and she was still awake so I got to hear all about how good girls don’t,” I say.

  “Can’t say I ever got that one,” Seth says.

  “Clara had her hands full,” I point out.

  “Though I do have a very clear memory of the time that she stomped out onto the porch as I was getting into the car to go somewhere, shouted and don’t knock anyone up! then walked back inside like nothing had happened.”

  I start laughing, and Seth grins at me. On my back, his fingers are wandering up and down, over the bump where my bra-corset-device clasps. I wonder if he knows he’s doing it or if that’s muscle memory, too.

  “You never told me about that.”

  “I never knew what to make of it.”

  “Seems like a pretty simple instruction,” I point out.

  “I followed it to the letter, did I not?”

  “True.”

  I almost say is it still true? but I don’t. If Seth knocked someone up the whole town would know.

  We dance in silence for a moment. I lean my head against his shoulder again, his jacket left behind somewhere, his shirt sleeves rolled up, forearms exposed. A bead of sweat trickles down his neck, from his sideburn to his collar, and despite myself I want to lick it off him.

  I lied earlier.

  When I told Seth that I don’t want to know anything, I was lying through my teeth. I want to know everything.

  I want to know the name of every woman he’s fucked. I want to know dates, times, frequency. I want to know what position they did it in and where they were and how kinky she was and if she was better in bed than me. I want to know which ones he loved and which ones he didn’t even like.

  I want it all. I want every last dirty detail, but I’m also finally wise enough to know that what I want isn’t always what’s good for me.

  So I’m not going to ask, even though I know he’d tell me. I’ve made that mistake before. It took a long time to get over.

  It’s none of my business, and it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter, and it’s none of my business. We’re just friends who happen to be at this wedding together, dancing and reminiscing about how we used to be in love.

  “Don’t look now, but I think there’s some kind of meeting going on,” he says after a while.

  “What kind of meeting?”

  “Your sisters, your stepmom, and the other bridesmaid,” he says.

  “Evelyn.”

  “Sure. Evelyn’s shaking her head, your one sister is sort of making a motion like she’s clutching pearls, but I don’t think she’s wearing any —"

  “Turn me.”

  The slow song begins trickling to its end, something faster rising in its place. The crowd on the dance floor shifts, re-finds its footing. We spin slightly, Seth’s back now to my family.

  “Am I hiding you from them, or were you tired of my play-by-play?” he asks, grinning, as we pull apart slightly.

  “Both,” I tease as he lets my hand go and pulls at his tie.

  “My play-by-play was great,” he says.

  “You didn’t even know which sister it was.”

  He grins, shrugs, tugs.

  “Stop it,” I say, and grab his tie myself, pull one end gently from the knot. The backs of my knuckles brush against his skin and I tug gently, re-center his tie, pause. I don’t let go.

  And then, before I quite know what I’m doing, I’m unbuttoning the top button on his shirt, drawing closer, the material stiff and the button small in my drunk fingers.

  Seth flattens his palm against my back, his thumb on the bump of my bra closure again. I unbutton another button. Pull back, my hands on his chest. Look up at him.

  “Undressing me in public?” he murmurs, so low I can barely hear him over the band.

  “This is the highly exclusive society event of the year,” I say. “I’d hardly call it public.”

  “Still, we’re in front of all these people.”

  “Am I embarrassing you, Seth?”

  He answers just as the band crescendos, the new song picking up volume and tempo, drowning out his response.

  “I didn’t—"

  He pulls me to him, leans in, and then his forehead is resting on mine and our noses are touching and his hand is flat against my back, the other covering mine on his chest, and I think my heart has stopped.

  “Not in the least, Bird,” he says again.

  My eyes are closed. Did I close them?

  The music swirls around us, rising. We’re swaying back and forth slightly, like seaweed underwater, people around us dancing and laughing and talking, and I know some of them are watching us and some of those people are thinking there’s that Loveless boy and his latest bridesmaid conquest. How cliché.

  I wish I didn’t care what people thought, but I do. We sway together with our faces touching and our lips an inch apart and I think: I was here first.

  As if that makes me somehow special. As if it makes me different from every other woman he’s fucked.

  “You have to stop calling me that,” I finally murmur.

  “Sorry,” he says, a smile in his voice. “Old habit.”

  Deep breath in, eyes still closed. Still swaying.

  “It’s been years,” I say softly. “Don’t habits die?”

  “Doesn’t feel like it.”

  Before I can answer he pulls his face away from mine, keeps his arms on me.

  “Incoming,” he says, and I open my eyes to see my sister Olivia striding across the dance floor toward us, couples parting around her like she’s Maid of Honor Moses.

  Moses of Honor?

  “Delilah,” she calls, all business.

  “Hi,” I answer, the best I can come up with.

  She stops a few feet away, raises her eyebrows, and gives us a long, speculative look. You wouldn’t know that she’s had her hair and makeup done since eight this morning, or that she’s been at a wedding for the past several hours, because she somehow still looks picture-perfect.

  It’s a skill I have yet to master.

  “So you did end your detox,” she says. “An hour ago you were swearing up and down that —”

  “Do you need something?” I interrupt.

  “Do you have the knife?”

  I blink.

  “Why would I have a knife?” I ask,
turning slightly away from Seth, though he keeps his hand on my back. “Where would I have a knife?”

  “The cake knife,” she says, as if it’s obvious.

  “Where would I be keeping the cake knife?”

  “No,” she says, exasperated, waving one hand. “Do you know where it is?”

  “That’s not what you asked.”

  “Do you? You were the last one with it.”

  I stare, blankly, at my second-youngest sister, and wonder if the pregnancy she hasn’t told us about yet is affecting her brain.

  “Bree was putting dinosaurs on it and then you were using it as a boat or something, back in the bridal suite,” she says. “No one’s seen it since then, and they want to cut the cake soon.”

  I stare at a dancing couple for several seconds. It was a space elevator, actually, and Bree was sending her dinosaurs on a mission to find aliens, but then we had to go line up for the wedding and I have no idea what happened to the cake knife.

  “It’s there somewhere,” I finally say.

  “So helpful.”

  “Can’t they just use a regular knife?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

  “This one’s monogrammed.”

  I close my eyes, take a deep breath, rub my knuckles to my forehead.

  “It might be on that window ledge,” I finally say, the last place I remember seeing it. “If not, try one of those shelves.”

  “Thanks,” she says, and turns away. Then she turns back. “Oh, and they want you and your date to line up over there for the shoe game.”

  “He’s not my date,” I say, just as his thumb skips over my bra clasp again, then stops.

  “Then you go line up over there,” she says, half-shouting over the music. “They want us in the background of all the shots.”

  Now she turns away and does her Moses thing back through the dance floor. I turn to find Seth looking at me, still undone as his hand slides off my back.

  “What? You’re not,” I say, briefly closing my eyes. “I gotta go do this thing.”

  “Of course,” he says, perfectly polite if also cool, distant.

  I step away, walk across the dance floor. Whatever power Olivia has I don’t seem to possess, because I’m weaving and dodging all the way back to where the rest of the bridal party is standing.

  When I get there, Vera looks around.

  “No Seth?” she asks.

  Just like that, I feel shitty. Not about Vera. Vera can still go fuck herself, but telling Seth he’s not my date and just walking off was kind of a dick move, wasn’t it?

  Crap.

  “No,” I tell her without further explanation, and her brow furrows slightly, then relaxes.

  “Well, I guess the sides will just have to be uneven,” she sighs. “All right. You’re all going to stand behind Ava and be her backdrop, and the groomsmen will do the same for Thad.”

  “Cool, sounds great,” I lie, and Vera pats my shoulder, then walks off.

  My sisters are chatting with each other, laughing about something. As I move into their circle I glance over at the dance floor, but I don’t see Seth. Not even dancing with someone else. Bernadette maybe.

  I was definitely a dick.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Seth

  I lean against the huge stone column and take another cold, deep breath. Behind me I can still hear the noise of the wedding, even though I’m out on the manor’s wraparound porch, staring out over the barely-lit garden, the chateaus vague beacons of light at the other end.

  A thousand dollars a night. Holy shit. I know Delilah’s family is loaded — I’ve been to their mansion, I’ve seen their horse stables — but every so often I get a solid, stark reminder that money means something completely different to them.

  One night in that chateau is almost a mortgage payment on my townhouse. Who the hell pays that for one night?

  It’s easy to feel inadequate at events like this. Even though I’m far from the only person wearing a suit instead of a tuxedo, I feel underdressed. I’ve never played polo in my life. I don’t golf. I don’t fly first class.

  Sure, I own a successful business, own a home, and even paid the last of my student loans off last year, but right now it feels like those things pale in comparison to inheriting my parents’ ridiculous wealth. Work hard and achieve goals? Cool, but have you ever thought about spending a month in Europe and never looking at how much anything costs?

  I don’t think I could ever buy something without knowing the price. Hell, right now I could tell you the price of gas at every station within a ten-mile radius of my house.

  The breeze outside shifts, works it way down my collar, and I finally shiver. It’s cold as hell out here, but after the heat of the dance floor inside it felt good, like the next best thing to a cold shower.

  And after the one-two punch of Delilah unbuttoning my shirt and telling Olivia I’m not her date, I could sure use a cold shower.

  I stand up straight. I shake my head, run one hand through my hair, the roots slightly damp with sweat. I remind myself that she’s right, that I’m not her date, that I blindsided her on Vera’s request and right now we’re just friends at the same wedding together.

  And then I walk back inside and tell myself that I was just taking a quick breather and Delilah holds no power over me. Maybe if I keep telling myself that, it’ll become true someday.

  The door shuts behind me. The atrium is empty, warm, and mostly quiet though I can hear the music through the doors to the ballroom, the horns in the band kicking up once more.

  Or did they ever stop? I’ve had far too much whiskey to know how long I’ve been gone, and I don’t have any idea whether they’re about to play the shoe game or whether it’s over and done with and everyone’s back to dancing.

  The furthest door opens. In the low light a pink dress swirls out, the door stops. An arm holding a champagne bottle emerges, and that’s all I need to know it’s her. She whirls around the door, dodges, watches it close, holding something in her other hand as well.

  Then she sees me. She pauses, takes a tentative step, starts walking.

  “That’s you, right?” Delilah calls.

  “Who else would I be?”

  I watch her as she walks carefully toward me, balancing something in one hand. I watch the rigid, careful line of her shoulders, the side-to-side sway of her hips, the way each leg is briefly outlined in dusky pink as she moves.

  Fucking witchcraft, I tell you.

  “There’s like a bajillion people here, you could be anyone,” she says, her voice quieter as she walks up to me, then holds up her hands: a bottle of champagne in one, two plates of wedding cake in the other. “Pick your poison.”

  I take the champagne. It’s still corked, so I pull at the foil around the top until it tears.

  “Should I even ask how you got the whole bottle?” I say, unwinding the wire cage.

  “It’s classified information,” she says, raising one eyebrow. “Let’s just say that it was a… sticky situation.”

  I crumple the foil together with the wire cage, put it on a mirror-top side table, and give her a questioning look.

  She laughs.

  “I just told the bartender the bride asked for it,” she says. “It’s late, I’m a bridesmaid, they assume I want it for official wedding reasons.”

  “What possible official wedding reason would your sister have for wanting an unopened bottle of champagne?” I ask, turning the bottle in my hands.

  “She had monogrammed plates made for the two of them, so they could eat their first meal as husband and wife on something special,” she says. “At this point, no one questions her.”

  I glance along the atrium: slim side tables against the wall, flower vases on top, windows, lighting sconces with electric candles.

  “Think I could put a light out?” I ask, gesturing at one with the champagne bottle.

  “If I say no, will that just make you more determined to try?”

 
“There’s one way to find out.”

  “Seth, if you break something I was never here,” she says, but she’s laughing, still holding two plates of wedding cake. “I swear I’ll leave you here to deal with Vera all on your own, may God have mercy on your soul.”

  I grin at her, then take the cork in one hand and twist.

  “You’re no fun,” I tell her as it pops off into my palm.

  “I’m just trying to be a good big sister and not ruin Ava’s wedding,” she says as I tilt the bottle to my mouth and drink. “God knows I’ve probably come close.”

  It’s good, cold and fizzy and stiff. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand when I lower the bottle, then look over at her.

  “What did you do?”

  Delilah holds out one of the plates of wedding cake, so I put the champagne bottle on the side table and take it.

  “I haven’t had my blowout fight with Vera yet, if that’s what you mean,” she says, picking up her own fork.

  “Of course not,” I tell her. “You’re here, not shoveling the horse stables back at the estate.”

  Delilah snorts.

  “She’s a regular stepmother, not an evil fairy tale stepmother,” she says. “I’m not exactly Cinderella. This dress wasn’t made by mice and birds.”

  “Good. I’m not exactly Prince Charming,” I say, which is an odd thing to say to your friend because didn’t Cinderella and Prince Charming fall in love? Didn’t they kiss at midnight and live happily ever after?

  Delilah clears her throat.

  “Sorry about the date thing,” she says.

  I lift a piece of wedding cake into my mouth and try to really, really focus on it though the whiskey and champagne are making it hard.

  It tastes like… cake?

  “You’re right,” I say, scooping another forkful. “I’m not your date. I’m just some guy who happens to be seated next to you at this wedding.”

  “I was so right that you came out here and missed the whole shoe game?” she says. “Not to mention the cake cutting. The server spatula thing was monogrammed. Made the whole ceremony feel super romantic.”

  “I needed some air,” I say, and eat another bite.