Chapter Three
Drake
My stomach was full of the delicious meal Angel had worked so hard to prepare and I was ready for everyone to leave. That wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon. My overly full house was likely to stay that way until midnight. My sisters and bandbrothers along with their families were all having a good time, none of them seeming to notice that I was itching to push them all out the door.
Cole, Devlin, Harris, Nik, Shane, and Jesse were scattered around my family room watching football and trying not to fall into a food coma after consuming the huge-ass turkey Angel had spent all day cooking. The kids were scattered out through the house, either playing or watching movies in the girls’ rooms.
I walked into the kitchen, knowing I was about to enter the women’s lair and that they would be talking about the one thing they were always talking about these days: Lucy and Harris’s wedding. As soon as I walked into the room, all talking stopped and every eye snapped to me. So with irritation at being interrupted, some with relief.
My eyes zeroed in on Angel first. She looked tired, but she was smiling. She loved this time of year, being with all our family and just celebrating being together. I loved it for her, but she had no clue that this time of year had become the time of year I hated the most. The weeks between Thanksgiving all the way up until Christmas Eve—our wedding anniversary—were a living hell for me.
I didn’t want her to think about why my head wasn’t on straight. Didn’t want to give her a reason to think about what had been constantly on my mind for days and was slowly driving me insane. I didn’t want to chance her remembering what day was coming, didn’t want to remind her that the anniversary of where we’d lost each other for so many months was coming up.
She never seemed to pay it any attention. To her it was just the day before Layla and Jesse had gotten married in Vegas.
Putting a smile on my face, I crossed to the kitchen table where she was sitting between Lucy and Layla and dropped a kiss on top of her head. “More planning?” I grumbled as I caught a glance at all the notebooks, catalogues and an endless supply of shit that looked useless and meaningless to me.
“Of course more planning,” Natalie said with a laugh, her irritation fading somewhat. “It’s not every day my son gets married. We want this thing to be perfect.”
I put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder, felt how tense she was, and shot Natalie a cool glare that she either didn’t see or ignored. My eyes went around the table where everyone had obviously been sitting for a while since the kitchen was spotless. Everyone but Harper, Jenna, and Angel seemed to be blind to the fact that Lucy was stressed to the max. A huge wedding hadn’t been her idea. Layla, Natalie and Emmie had gotten it into their heads that this wedding needed to be the event of the year and come March I had little doubt that it would be.
But how stable would Lucy be by then?
She struggled every day with her urge to cut. I knew because I was one of the first people she called when those urges got to be too much. In the months since she and Harris had set the date for their wedding she’d called me more often than she called her sister, which was an almost everyday thing. I dropped whatever I was doing every time I saw her name pop up on my phone. I’d drive into the city and we’d talk for hours until her urge to harm herself passed and she felt like she could breathe again.
Lucy had gotten good at not letting her stress show over the years. That was why it had taken so long for any of us to realize she was hurting herself. If Harris hadn’t discovered the evidence of it, we might still be in the dark and she would still be cutting herself to find relief from all the things that constantly swirled around in her head. She had gotten good at it, but I’d gotten better at reading her.
Layla, Natalie and Emmie were so lost in making this damn wedding perfect that they were blind to the fact that it was destroying what little hold Lucy had on her need to pick up a blade and bleed so she could breathe again. I wanted to grab them and shake some sense into them.
Lucy covered my hand still on her shoulder with her own and gave it a squeeze, halting the blast that was about to leave my mouth at the three women. “I feel like I’m about to pop after all that food my sister stuffed me with today. Let’s go for a walk.”
Lana jumped to her feet, her smile brilliant but forced. I pulled her close as Lucy went to get her coat. I kissed her forehead, then her ear. “Talk to them. Make them open their fucking eyes,” I whispered.
She nodded. “I got this. You got her?”
I nodded and stepped back, shooting the other women a killing glare that no one but Jenna and Harper saw and grinned at, and then I followed after Lucy. She was already by the door, with her coat zipped up by the time I reached her. I grabbed a hoodie out of the closet by the door and pulled it over my head, then opened the door for her.
As soon as we were outside I dropped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her in close. The wind was blowing, whipping our hair everywhere, but I didn’t pay it much attention as we walked down the street. We were both quiet for a few blocks before she stopped and sucked in a deep breath.
I stood there, feeling helpless, as she moved away and started pacing back and forth in front of me. After a long moment she let out a humorless laugh. “I didn’t think getting married would be this complicated. When he asked me to marry him, I didn’t think past the fact that I was going to become Mrs. Harris Cutter and spend the rest of my life with the boy who has always been my best friend. Then Mom and Natalie started planning and it felt like I was suddenly invisible. I should have put my foot down then, but they were so happy and their joy took me hostage.”
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” I assured her. “Vegas was good enough for your parents and Harris’s. It’s a short plane ride, sweetheart.”
She pushed her curls back from her beautiful face, a face that was pale and drawn. “I think about that every damn day, Drake. I want to just grab Harris and run away and come back a week later married, and they probably wouldn’t even notice we were gone.”
“So do it.”
Her dark eyes lost the frustration and became sad, which was like a punch to the gut. I’d loved and watched over this girl who was now a woman since she was six years old. Now she was almost twenty and yet all I saw was that sweet little girl whose favorite word had been ‘awesome’ and her biggest fear had been whether or not she could get the stories she was so talented at creating perfect. A thousand lifetimes had happened between then and now. She’d lived through a hundred different nightmares. I would have given anything to wipe those nightmares from her mind and replace them with happier memories.
“This wedding means a lot to them,” she told me with a slight quiver in her voice. “And if I’m honest, it means a lot to me too. I’ve bonded with my mother and Nat over the last few months. I feel like I’m the bridge that is connecting the Thorntons and the Cutters, and part of me loves that.”
“Lucy, you can be that bridge regardless of if you have a huge-ass wedding or if you have something much smaller. It’s not the size of the wedding that matters in the long run, sweetheart. It’s that you’ll be married to Harris. That’s all that will ever matter.” I caught her arms when she bit into her bottom lip so hard I knew she was going to draw blood. I knew drawing blood was what she wanted to do, that just that small pain would ground her. “Have you talked to Harris about this?”
She released the hold she had on her lip and shook her head, looking away. “He knows something has been bothering me, but I haven’t told him what. All he has to do is nod or shake his head about a few little decisions. He likes that Natalie is making our wedding such a big deal. She’s happy and that makes him happy. And he deserves to be happy, Dray.”
“Who do you think he wants to be happier? You or Natalie?” She sighed but didn’t say anything. “You, Lucy. He wants you to be happy. That boy loves you with every breath in his body. He’d do anything in the world to make you smile at him. Tell him.”
Her shoulders drooped and after only a slight hesitation she finally nodded her head. “Okay. You’re right. I’ll talk to him tonight.” She wrapped her arms around my waist, giving me a tight squeeze. “Thank you for being my sanity so much these past few months.”
I hugged her back. Dropping a kiss on top of her curly head, I kept one arm around her as we continued our walk. We’d walked another block before she spoke again. “I’ll be here by ten next Sunday.”
I tensed but nodded. “Sounds good. Thanks for helping me with this, Lu.” I frowned at nothing in the distance, trying to stop my mind from going down the road that it was hell-bent on traveling lately.
Lucy was going to watch the girls at my house while I took Lana away for a few days. It had been hard deciding who to get to watch my girls. Ideally I would have picked Layla and Jesse but they were going to Paris for two weeks to celebrate their wedding anniversary. For me, their wedding day was a kind of an anniversary too. One I didn’t want to remember, yet at the same time, there were parts I was dying to remember.
I only hoped my plan worked and that the shit that had been keeping me from sleeping lately would disappear, or at least give me just enough peace to make this time of year easier for me.