THE WEDDING DAY
Elise kept looking at her watch.
Was it weird that Elise was wearing a watch? She was in her dress, which was a stunning strapless thing with a giant, puffy tulle skirt and a veil that hung halfway down her back. She was wearing the understated earrings and bracelet that Jane and the others had helped her pick out after about eleven hundred hours of shopping.
She was also wearing a huge, chunky men’s-style watch with a wide, black leather strap. Probably it was Jay’s.
But whatever. Elise was running the show here. If there was one thing Jane had learned from her beloved bridezilla, it was that there was always a method to the madness. It was better not to ask questions.
They were obviously keeping Cameron away from her, because she hadn’t seen him all day. Part of her was screaming that she shouldn’t let them, in the name of preserving some dignity. That she should be above needing to be babied, that they shouldn’t have to move mountains on Elise’s big day because they were concerned about Jane’s tender sensibilities. That she should be able to lay eyes on the man and not collapse on the floor sobbing.
But another part, the part concerned with self-preservation, knew better. Her heart wasn’t just broken, it was absolutely shattered.
Cameron had talked about IEDs—improvised explosive devices. It was an apt metaphor. Because what was left after the damage wasn’t even recognizable as a heart. And because she’d been the instigator. She’d overseen the destruction of her own heart. She’d pressed the button herself. As much as she wanted to blame him, to be angry at him, she couldn’t. He had told her, explicitly, what he wanted—and didn’t want. But she, with a degree of hubris sufficient to star in its own Greek tragedy, had thought she could change him. Hadn’t she learned from her father and Felix that people didn’t change?
Clearly, she would have to see him at the ceremony, and at the reception, but until then, she was happy to minimize her contact with him. She appreciated that the girls seemed to know that without her having to say anything. In fact, she wondered if maybe he’d left, either of his own volition or because Elise or Jay had asked him to. Did she dare hope? She wanted to ask Elise, but she didn’t want her friend to think she was suggesting they kick Cameron out of the wedding if they hadn’t already. You couldn’t ask the bride to eject the groom’s brother merely because he’d hurt your feelings.
“Here, sweetie, put some of these in.” Gia entered the room the girls were using to get ready and handed Jane some Visine.
“Is it still that bad?” Jane asked, looking around for a mirror. Last night, in the motel she’d escaped to, she’d cried all the tears out of her body, then fallen asleep in Wendy’s arms and succumbed to a few fitful hours of sleep. She had awoken to bloodshot eyes with racoon circles underneath them. Gia had done her best with the concealer, but no amount of makeup could disguise the redness of her eyes themselves.
Instead of answering, Gia came over and tapped Jane’s forehead, prompting her to tilt her head back.
When she was done, Jane’s eyes were watery from the eye drops. The act of wiping them somehow triggered actual tears. Again.
“Why does this keep happening?” she asked as Gia pulled her into a hug.
“I think it’s totally normal to cry a lot when you get your heart broken.”
“No. Not the crying. Why is it that every time I put myself out there, I get slapped down?”
“That asshole.” Wendy joined in the hug. “That asshole,” had become Wendy’s mantra. It was like she was a non-native English speaker who knew only those words. Jane had never seen Wendy so angry. It was a little bit gratifying, but she had had to extract a promise that Wendy wouldn’t disrupt the wedding by attacking Cameron, or, like, shouting her new mantra at the top of her lungs at an inopportune time.
Elise, who was the only one among them fully dressed and made up, came over and mimed putting her arms around the whole lot of them. “I will totally hug you for real if you want me to,” she said, wincing as she looked down at her impeccably groomed self.
Jane laughed and blinked away her tears. “No, don’t ruin yourself. I’m gonna give you the world’s biggest tackle-hug after the ceremony, though.”
One silver lining of this whole debacle was the reminder that she had the best friends a girl could ask for. Who needed a man when you had this kind of loyalty?
Although perhaps the loyalty of one of them would be tested when she found out about Jane’s latest problem. Refreshingly, though, and unlike the whole Cameron disaster, it was a very specific, very tangible problem: as she had feared, her dress wouldn’t zip up. Like, at all. It was beyond “who needs to breathe anyway as long as the damn thing zips up” territory.
Everyone besides Elise had been walking around in various states of undress for the past hour or so, so no one had said anything about the gaping back of Jane’s dress.
But it was time to face the music now that Gia was back from her eyedrops-sourcing mission. Jane was holding out hope that the model might have some kind of high-fashion ninja skills she could apply to magically make the dress zip up.
“Um, you guys?”
The group hug had broken up, but all eyes swung back to her.
“Two things. Number one: I love you all so much.” Jane didn’t let the “aww-ing” and “me-tooing” that ensued really take off before plowing on. “Number two: I can’t zip up my dress.”
She braced herself for Elise’s reaction. Just because Jane was a mess didn’t mean she expected any mercy on this front. But the bride grinned, looked at her huge watch, and said, “That’s okay.”
Huh? “No, Elise, I mean it. This dress will not close.”
Elise’s phone chimed, and she plucked it off the sofa.
“Hey now, let’s see what we can do about this,” said Gia, speaking to Jane—in a tone that seemed kind of artificially singsongy—but looking at Elise.
Elise’s head popped up from her phone. “Right. Yes.”
Everyone converged behind Jane.
“I see what you mean,” said Gia, trying the zipper, but not with much gusto.
“I’m gonna hold my breath, and you zip,” said Jane, even though she knew it was futile. “On three.”
Jane counted, held her breath, and sucked in her stomach for all she was worth. Gia tried again, but Jane had the sense that she wasn’t putting her everything into it.
“Listen to me,” she said, turning to face her friends. “We have to figure this out.”
“Eh, it’s not a big deal,” said Elise, waving a hand.
“Not a big deal?” Jane echoed. Had an alien switched bodies with the bridezilla? “I can’t walk down the aisle with my dress hanging open.” But then, maybe she could. It would be the perfect completion of her humiliation for Cameron to see her in the un-zip-upable dress. Why not go for broke on the shame front?
She turned to Wendy. Wendy would be the voice of reason. Wendy had never let her down. “Can we at least pin it?”
“Of course,” Wendy said. “Let me see what I can do.”
Finally, someone who was acting like a normal person. Jane hitched a shuddery breath and lifted her hair so Wendy could get an unobstructed view.
Silence settled over the room as Wendy started pinning. At least until Elise shouted, apropos of nothing, “We need to go outside!”
“What?” Jane and Wendy said in unison.
“Here,” Gia said, holding open a robe for Elise. “Put this on so Jay doesn’t see you in the dress.”
“Ah!” Elise beamed at Gia. “I didn’t even think of that—thank you!” Once she was tucked inside the robe, she made for the door, clapping her hands. “Chop, chop, girls.”
“Whatever it is, it can wait until I get Jane pinned up,” Wendy said testily.
Elise turned and froze, hands on hips. “No, it cannot wait.” Ah, there was the familiar drill sergeant bride. “Everyone follow me. Now.”
Jane threw a shawl over the gaping back of the dress and did as she was told.
* * *
“Will someone please explain to me what we’re doing out here?” Wendy said as the girls, Jay, and Jay’s mom stood in a line in the parking lot outside the B&B. “The wedding is supposed to start in half an hour!”
Jane was curious, too. But she figured all would be revealed sooner or later. Elise obviously had some sort of surprise for them. Maybe she was having personalized thank-you Mason jars delivered. But, hey, she’d take it. Anything to distract her from the smoking ruins of her heartbreak.
Anything except the blue Corvette that came tearing into the parking lot and screeched to a halt in front of them.
“No way,” she said, turning to go. To flee, really, opting for the “flight” option presented by the burst of “fight-or-flight” adrenaline the sight of Cam’s car had triggered. There was pride, and there was pride. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that running away like a coward was better than sinking to her knees and wailing—with the back of her dress unzipped, to boot.
Gia’s hand clamped down on Jane’s forearm.
What the hell? “Let me go,” she whisper-yelled as she tried to twist out of her friend’s grip. Her struggle only caused Gia to double down, adding a second hand to Jane’s arm and planting her feet as if preparing for a tug-of-war. What happened to the loyal, true friends she’d so recently been snuggling with? Gia’s refusal to let her go was a betraying blade, slicing into her chest.
“Hang on,” said Gia, even as their struggle for control threatened to turn into an outright tussle. Which is why Jane didn’t see what was happening until she heard Wendy gasp. She looked at Wendy, who had one hand clasped over her mouth in horror and the other pointing toward the parking lot.
Correction: her hand wasn’t pointing toward the parking lot; it was pointing toward Hercules getting out of a blue Corvette.
“What?” she whispered, barely able to get the word out, which was funny because in her head the question had sounded like a shout.
She swayed toward Gia, thankful suddenly for the bracing contact. But Gia chose that moment to let go and step away, whispering, “You’re okay.”
She was not okay. What part of this was okay? There was no part of this that was okay. There was no part of this that made sense. If she’d felt like Gia had stuck a knife into her chest before, she’d just pulled it out, leaving Jane gasping, a gaping hole in her chest welling with…something.
Even though he was instantly recognizable as Hercules, he looked different from the actor who played the character on the show. The clothing was right: leather pants, tattered beige shirt, leather wristbands. He even carried a sword at his waist. But the similarities ended there. Whereas Kevin Sorbo had long, flowing hair, Cameron still sported the military buzz cut. And of course there were the tattoos. The sleeveless shirt revealed his inked arm, and the angel peeked out from the shirt, which was unbuttoned almost all the way.
There was also the part where he was carrying a shopping bag in one hand.
Jane was pretty sure Hercules didn’t shop at Whole Foods.
“See why you don’t have to worry about the dress?” said Elise, smiling. “And look at you, you’re going to get out of wearing high heels, too, you lucky girl.”
“What are you talking about?” she said through an aching throat. Maybe Elise would prove more of an ally than Gia had. But no, there was nothing on Elise’s face that Jane could make sense of, that she could grab on to to leverage herself out of this bewildering scenario. Her friend merely smiled like she had a delicious secret and turned back toward the B&B, gesturing for the group to follow her.
Wait. They were going to leave her here with him?
“You asshole!” Wendy shouted, and launched herself at Cameron. Well, at least there was one person left she could rely on. Wendy was small but fierce. As her fists uselessly pummeled Cameron’s chest, Jane almost laughed. Would have done so if she weren’t battling a powerful wave of confusion and betrayal and fear that was making it hard to stand upright.
Cameron just stood there and took the beating Wendy gave him. Jane had never seen Wendy in such a state. Her best friend was known for her potty mouth, and she reportedly turned into a tigress in the courtroom, but Jane had never actually seen her beat up anyone. Eventually, Jay pulled her off Cameron.
Gia leaned over to whisper in Jane’s ear. “You come get me if you need me.”
“Wait!” She reached out to grab Gia’s arm, desperate, in a reversal of their previous roles, to keep Gia rooted in place. But she was too late. Gia slipped away. They all slipped away. Well, Wendy went loudly and with great reluctance, but the rest of them slipped.
Which left her standing face-to-face with Cameron MacKinnon dressed as Hercules.
“I love you,” he said.
That was it. Standing was no longer possible. She sagged back against the retaining wall that bordered the parking lot. He lunged for her, but she held up a hand to stop his progress.
He stopped with his hands in the air, but he didn’t step back.
Slowly, she let herself sink down the wall until she was sitting on the ground. Somewhere along the way she’d lost her shawl, too, so the back of the dress flapped in the wind. So much for dignity.
He waited until she’d hit the ground before saying, “I am completely, utterly, fiercely, surprisingly in love with you. I know you don’t believe in the concept of ‘the one.’ I wouldn’t have thought I did, either, but damned if I don’t want, more than anything else in the world, to be yours. Your one and only.”
What? Each word was like the little pinprick of an acupuncture needle: surprising and painful, then, suddenly, an instrument of relief. Capable of displacing pain. Of replacing it with something else, something unexpected and warm.
She looked up. He was backlit by the sun, the man dressed as a god.
“It scares me, though,” he went on. “You scare me.”
She saw, suddenly, that he had no experience with things going his way, with things going right.
And even more surprisingly? She also saw, suddenly, that she didn’t, either.
A sob escaped.
“Hey, hey, baby. Don’t cry.” He sat down, arranging himself cross-legged across from her. Reached out a hand as if he were going to touch her face but stopped short, like he didn’t have the right. “Kick my ass to the curb, but don’t cry over me. I’m not worth it.”
She wanted to grab his hand and press it against her face, to complete his aborted gesture, but she didn’t dare. She didn’t yet trust the hope that was pooling in her chest. “You are worth it, though. Don’t you see? You are.”
He smiled, a small, almost wistful smile. “I’m trying. Somehow, I can jump off buildings and be on the front lines of a war, but I don’t know how to…” His voice trailed off, and he had to clear his throat. “I don’t know how to let someone love me.”
She tried to speak, but he didn’t let her, just kept talking. “When you walked up to me last night, for that dance, I had a vision of the future. One where I took your hand and followed you out on that dance floor. What happened next? I got to be yours. I got to be the first person to read your books. I got to be your date to Comicon. I got to make you come every day for the rest of my life.”
That last item made her cheeks heat, and she tried to look away, embarrassed, but he moved his head so that he remained in her line of sight.
“In that version of the future, I was the lucky bastard who got all that. The lucky bastard who got you. I could hardly conceive of it, it was so far out of the realm of my reality.
“But what came next? That was the question. That was the fear. I couldn’t—I still can’t, really—imagine a future in which I kept getting to have all that stuff indefinitely. And although I was having trouble telling my head from my ass yesterday, I could tell you one thing with absolute certainty, and that was that I couldn’t have you and then give you up. It would be worse than the PTSD. Worse than being estranged from my family. I wouldn’t survive it, Jane.”
Jane swallowed the lump in her throat and reached for his hand. She did what she hadn’t been brave enough to do a moment ago, which was to bring it to her cheek. She made the biggest eyes-wide-open jump of all as she leaned into his palm and said, “Then don’t give me up. Be my ‘one.’ Let me love you—because I do.”
He rose then, keeping the one hand on her cheek as he used the other to help her to her feet. They stood like that for a long moment, contemplating each other. A smile spread slowly across his face. She had a feeling it was mirroring what was happening on hers.
“I brought you something,” he said, breaking with her gaze to retrieve the shopping bag he’d dropped on the pavement.
“My Xena costume?” she said, pulling out the knee-high leather boots. The flat knee-high leather boots. “What in the world?”
“I have this thing in my head I call ‘goddess mode,’” he said.
Huh? She must have looked as confused as she felt, because he laughed and elaborated.
“Yeah, I’ve seen you a bunch of times lately sort of out of your element, you know? Dangling off the CN Tower and on roller coasters.”
“It has been kind of a thrill ride of a week.”
“But not just those examples.” He lowered his voice and said, “You’re also in goddess mode in bed.”
Her face heated, suddenly and intensely, like he’d pressed a secret on button.
“And after Comicon,” he went on. “When you were dressed as Xena.”
“Xena’s not a goddess,” Jane said, unable to refrain from issuing the correction. “At most, she’s a demi-goddess, as there was one episode that hinted that maybe Ares was her real father, but—”
He silenced her with a quick, hard kiss. “You are such a sexy little nerd.” Then he pulled away and kept right on talking, clearly not done with his speech—his astonishing speech. “My point is that you are the bravest, most kick-ass warrior I know. You do have a goddess inside you. And I for one think she should come out more often.” He nodded at the shopping bag containing her costume. “So I brought your demi-goddess costume to help remind you. Plus, this way, you won’t have to wear that damned dress that has been stressing you out so much.”
He couldn’t mean…“Oh my God! Is this what Elise meant about not having to wear high heels?”
“Yeah, Jay bumped Kent. He’s ushering now, and you and I are in the main event, my love. My Xena. My goddess.”
“No way!” Jane shouted. “There is no way on God’s green Earth that Elise is going to go for this.”
“She already has,” said Cameron, pulling her breastplate out of the bag. “I gotta say, I think Elise is going to make a pretty good sister-in-law. She has a bit of an inner rebel, that one. I’m looking forward to getting to know her better.”
Jane laughed. And then she laughed some more. Because it was the only reaction she could summon to the astonishing events of the last few minutes.
Cameron laughed, too, and pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her. “Hey!” he exclaimed, finding his way to the bare skin of her back given the unzipped nature of her dress. “Easy access…mmmmm.” His hands were rough and possessive as they slid immediately down to her waist. “I don’t really know what you have against this dress.”
She moaned a little but managed to push him away. “Hey,” she said, playfully slapping his hand for good measure. “There’s one thing wrong here.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Is there now?”
“Yeah. If you cared at all about accuracy, you wouldn’t be dressed as Hercules right now; you’d be dressed as Gabrielle.”
He barked a laugh, and just before his lips hit hers, he said, “I love you. But maybe not that much.”