Page 20 of Give In

It’s not just that he’s Leo’s dad. It’s that I knew, last night, that whatever happened between us was real. I knew it the way you know things that don’t have a logical explanation, the way you know a song is good in the first four seconds before you’ve even heard the melody properly. I knew it and I felt it and then I woke up this morning and left anyway because this weekend was supposed to be about Juniper.

Now it’s about Juniper and also about the fact that I slept with her future father-in-law and didn’t know that until he caught me stumbling at the rehearsal and said four words in that rumbly voice of his that made my entire nervous system stand at attention.

I lay there and think about Heath standing at the altar tomorrow as his son gets married. About how I will stand across from him for the duration of a wedding ceremony and hand Juniper her flowers at the right moment. And how I will hold it together and not blubber all over my bridesmaid dress. About how after tomorrow there will be family events and holidays and a whole future of occasions that put us in the same room.

About how none of that sounds as terrible as it should.

We’ll talk about everything later, baby girl.

Only me.

I’m still face-down when there’s a knock at my door.

I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling, which is, as suspected, beautiful. High and white with crown molding and a ceiling fan turning slowly in the warm air. It’s the kind of ceiling that belongs in a room where a person has their life together.

I am doing my best.

The knock at the door is so expected that I’ve already decided it’s Juniper before I’ve even stood up. Of course, it’s Juniper. She clocked my fake headache the moment I invented it; I could see it in the way her eyes tracked my face with that particular sisterly radar that has been calibrated to my specific frequencies for our entire lives. She’s come to check on me, which is very her, very exactly her, to be thinking about me the night before her own wedding.

I love her so much it makes my back teeth ache sometimes.

I pull the door open, already composing the reassurance I’m going to give her, already reaching for a version of fine that she might actually believe.

It’s not Juniper.

Heath fills the doorway in the way only a man his size can. Which is to say completely and with a kind of unhurried authority that makes the space seem like it was designed around him. He’s still wearing his rehearsal dinner clothes, except his tie hangs loose around his neck and the top two buttons on his shirt are undone.

My body reacts to his presence instantly. My heart pounds loudly, but the beat is steady as if it’s making itself known so his heart can get in sync. My tummy flutters and my lady bits go on high alert.

“How did you know where my room was?”

“Baby girl, I put you in this room.” He shoulders past me into the suite.

“I don’t see how that’s possible. You were asleep when I left.”

He turns to face me. “I own this resort.”

I stare at him.

Of course he does. Of course, the man I met on a plane and brought home, so to speak, owns the resort where my sister is getting married and has apparently been watching over my accommodation situation like some kind of large, handsome guardian. Of course. This is my life. I have made my peace with the fact that my life has a flair for the dramatic.

“Of course you do,” I say.

He watches me with that steady patience that I am starting to understand is just how he is, how he moves through the world, not in a hurry, not rattled, just present and waiting for what comes next.

And here is the thing. Here is the thing I have been lying face down on a hotel bed trying to talk myself out of. Standing here looking at him in the warm light of this beautiful room that he apparently arranged for me, I know exactly what I want. I have known it all evening. I knew it at the rehearsal when his hand steadied my elbow and I knew it at the dinner when I looked at him for two seconds and felt it like a current and I knew it face down on the duvet five minutes ago.

I want him. Not just last night. Not just this weekend. I want all of his nights. For however long he’ll give me.

But wanting something and being allowed to have it are different things, and right now what I need is to be sensible. For Juniper. For Leo. For the family that is being built this weekend that will last the rest of all of our lives.

“Okay, well.” I wrap my arms around myself and look somewhere past his left shoulder. “Let’s get this over with. We can come up with a plan or whatever, and Juniper and Leo need never know we hooked up.” I pause. “Or whatever.”

The or whatever is doing a lot of work in that sentence and I am very aware of it.

He goes still. Not the stillness of someone who doesn’t have feelings about what I just said. The stillness of someone who has a great many feelings about it and is choosing his response carefully. “Is that what you want?”

I look at his face. I look at the grey threaded through his hair and the steadiness in his eyes and the set of his jaw. I think about his laugh on the plane and the way he ordered food for me in the middle of the night, like it was obvious, like taking care of people was just something he did without making a production of it.