33
Now Bridget’s Wedding Day
My alarm goes off at five. I need to be at the Gardiner Museum early. I’ve rallied the whole team today. But I can spare a few more minutes. I hit snooze, but big hands grip my waist, and Felix rolls me on top of him.
“No fair,” I grumble.
“You told me not to let you sleep in.” He kisses me. “This is your wake- up call.”
Having Felix in my bedroom is magic. A new first. I show him how to use my coffee maker, and he fixes me a pot while I shower. Finding him in my kitchen, blowing into his cup of tea, is surreal. My apartment will never be the same. From now on, I will always picture Felix Clark drinking Earl Grey in this kitchen.
• • •
HE COMES WITH ME TO THE MUSEUM—HE WANTS TO WATCH ME WORK AND HE wants to meet Farah. I introduce him to her, Rory, and Gia, then start on the archway, but my gaze keeps slipping to him, distracted.
“Your heart’s leaking out your eyeballs,” Farah says from across the space.
So I kick Felix out. It’s my best friend’s wedding day, and I need complete focus.
I returned to Toronto seventy-two hours ago, but I’ve slid right back into overdrive—long hours at the shop, a newly signed contract with the restaurant group, full-time positions for Rory and Gia, a raise for Farah, and two more job openings ready to be posted next week. Work is how I coped with losing my aunt, and it’s how I’m coping with Bridget moving. She’s leaving a big hole in my life, and I need to fill it somehow. Job stress I can handle. Saying goodbye to Bridget in two months . . . I can’t even think of it.
All of it slips away as I begin to fix stems of magnolia leaves into the foam base of the arch. I enter the singular place where my mind is quiet and my fingers take over. Halfway through, I have the notion that if I could do this every day—work with flowers and cut the other stuff out—I would be happy. This is the thing I love doing. I was made for this work. And Bridget’s wedding will be my best work yet.
I stand back when I’m done, surveying the structure, assessing the balance. There are branches of blackberries and globes of hydrangea, fresh and dried. Creamy ranunculus, roses, magnolia leaves, and seeded eucalyptus. My arches are usually seven or eight feet high. This one is ten.
It’s partially because Miles is a very tall man and the venue is open and airy, all glass and sharp edges. But it’s also because I’m showing off. By the time we finish, the museum looks like a fairy tale, the aisle lined with blossoms, chair backs swagged in blooms.
• • •
I MAKE MY WAY DOWN THE AISLE, FINDING FELIX AT THE FRONT OF THE ROOM, standing with Miles and the best man. We blatantly stare at each other until I take my place as maid of honor and shift my gaze, waiting for her. When Bridget walks toward us on Ken’s arm, I can’t take my eyes off her. She glows. She’s radiating from within, reflecting light all around. The dress is white. Simple. Scoop neck, sleeveless, a column of silk caressing her skin and falling to the floor. There’s no lace or beading or embellishment of any sort. There’s no underwear, either. Bridget tried a thong, but even that showed through. Her heels are delicate, pearlescent, and I doubt they’ll make
it past tonight’s dessert course. Her hair is pulled back into a low, perfectly imperfect bun, and the greens in her bouquet trail almost to the floor. Her dimples are on full display. She’s gossamer. She’s wind and air and cloud.
The embodiment of happiness. So beautiful, my best friend.
I stare directly at her because I don’t want to miss a thing, but I can feel Felix’s gaze. I know if I look, I’ll see the dimple. He hasn’t stopped smiling all day. When Bridget joins Miles at the altar, my eyes slide to Felix.
“Hey,” he mouths.
“Hi,” I mouth back.
“You look hot.”
“You too.” Felix in a tux is criminal.
He nods his head at the archway. “Also hot.”
I know it is. But I love that Felix thinks so, too.
Before the rehearsal dinner yesterday evening, he told his parents we’re dating. I stood beside him, but Felix did the talking. Christine gripped Ken’s forearm like she might fall over, but then she let out a whoop.
Bridget and Miles’s first kiss as a married couple lasts so long, there are hollers from the audience.
“Get a room, mate,” one of the Aussies shouts.
When the newlyweds make their way down the aisle, Felix whispers something to the best man, and switches positions with him. We turn toward each other. He wipes a tear from my cheek with his thumb and then offers his
arm.
“I know you,” he says.
“We’ve met before.”
“But never like this.”
“That suit should be illegal,” I say when we’re halfway down the aisle.
He chuckles, then whispers, “Tonight. You, me, that dress, your dining table. I’m going to bend you over it.”
I lean into his ear, my heart racing. “Not if I bend you first.”
• • •
THERE ARE PHOTOS WHERE WE ARE POSITIONED BESIDE EACH OTHER. A DINNER where we are seated next to each other. Felix invents ways to keep touching me—his hand wanders to the base of my spine as I move, his fingers skim over my shoulder when I laugh. At one point, his palm coasts under the slit in my dress and takes up residency on my thigh. I didn’t let Farah off the hook —she’s still my date for the evening—but Felix talked her into swapping seats. I’m sandwiched between the Clark siblings, and I can’t stop grinning.
When it’s time for my speech, I rise to the microphone. My hands are shaking. Even though I can feel Felix watching, it’s only Bridget I see. I’ve been planning to make my best friend cry since the moment she and Miles got engaged. But now that I’m looking at her, the person dearest to me, it’s my eyes that are stinging.
“The first time I met Bridget Clark, she gave me a ride home on her handlebars.” I sound shaky, so I take a deep breath. “In many ways, she’s carried me since that night seven years ago.” My voice cracks in the middle of the sentence. I’ve been avoiding thinking about it for days, and now the truth bashes against me. Bridget is moving to Australia, and I don’t know how I’ll survive without her. I scan the page, knowing I’ll never be able to say everything I’ve written without a spectacular display of sobbing. But I do it anyway. I cry my way through the speech.
“Miles, take good care of her,” I finish. “There’s no one more precious to me.”
I turn to my best friend, her cheeks streaked with tears. “You are the love of my life, Bridget.”
• • •
THE WEDDING CAPTURES HOW BRIDGET’S WORLD IS SPLIT BETWEEN CITY AND COAST.
We’re downtown, near the corner of Bloor Street and Avenue Road, Toronto rushing by outside. Inside, there are courses upon courses of food, the finest you can ask of any caterer. Roast suckling pig. Deep-fried crab. A whole white fish with ginger and scallions. The bubbly is the good stuff, the string quartet plays Vivaldi. Everything runs on a precisely considered schedule.
But there’s also dancing, kicked off by Bridget’s grandfather on the fiddle.
Her shoes come off at this point. Zach loosens his tie. The gift he brought is suspiciously Trivial Pursuit–shaped. At eleven, a food truck parks outside the venue with buttery lobster rolls. The dance floor is never empty. I don’t think a group of one hundred people have ever had such a fun night.
Shortly before midnight, the music stops, and Miles takes the mic from the DJ and says, “This one goes out to my wife.”
And then, at the top of his tone-deaf lungs, Miles Lam sings “Un-Break My Heart.”
It’s a bizarre choice for a wedding and exactly right for Bridget. Miles puts his entire soul into it. Fist pumps. Chest whacks. Eyes shut and chin raised to the ceiling.
And the whole night, Felix by my side. Felix’s hand in mine. Felix’s lips on my lips. We dance, and we laugh, and we can’t stop touching each other.
• • •
“I’M RELISHING YOU,” I TELL FELIX, TIPSY, AS WE MAKE OUT IN THE STAIRWELL. I’M addicted to how he tastes. Salt and Tic Tacs.
He laughs into my mouth. “Relishing?”
“Yes, and I don’t think I’ve ever relished anyone before. But I relish you, Felix Edgar Clark.”
Felix takes my head in his hands. “I relish you, too, Lucy Beth Ashby.”
After the kissing, when I return to the party from the bathroom, I catch Felix standing next to the floral archway. He looks surprisingly at home in his tux, like he could walk out into the night of the city and look like he
belonged.
Mine, my heart says. Felix.
He runs his fingers along one petal, then another, his expression awed. I relish him from across the space, and then I haul him back to the dance floor so I can enjoy him in my arms.
The DJ is playing something slow and old, and my head is on Felix’s shoulder, and I’m certain this curve of muscle and bone was made for me.
Zach and his girlfriend, Lana, are close by, and he gives me a thumbs-up. It feels so good, being with Felix, surrounded by our friends and his family. It feels perfect. It feels like I should be with Felix always. For a little while, I pretend that he isn’t leaving on Tuesday.
Mine, my heart keeps saying. Felix. More.
