No Weddings (23 page)

A few tears finally spilled over onto her cheeks. I lifted my hands to cup her face and rubbed the tears away with my thumbs. “Hey, Hannah. You okay?”

She stared up at me with a pained look on her face, then shook her head, breaking away. “I have to pee.”

Before I had the chance to stop her, she barreled into the crowd and skimmed along the wall down the narrow hallway to the bathrooms.

Her panicked expression imprinted into my mind. Carefree Hannah had vanished. Determination rising hard and fast inside me, I took a deep breath and vowed to help her keep that bright happiness she had worked so hard to claim.

When my sisters began to make their way down the hall in pursuit of one of their fallen, I rushed to catch up. In the narrow space, I grabbed Kendall, pulling her back. I lunged forward, clutching Kiki and Kristen by their shoulders before they pushed open the door.

Kristen frowned. “What are you doing, Cade? Back off. This is a girl thing.”

“No. It’s not.” My voice had gone gruff.

They turned to face me. Kristen looked at me. Then she
really
looked. Her eyes widened as understanding dawned. The one who was most like me, who read people as well as I did, had connected the dots that I was the most equipped to help Hannah. I’d been there.

I took a deep breath, tamping down the rush of emotion. “Hannah needs me more than she needs any of you. I need to do this for her—and for me.” My voice broke.

Kristen nodded and moved aside. The other two gaped at her, clearly confused, but they stepped back behind Kristen, letting me pass.

The bathroom door opened and two laughing girls stumbled out. I shot an arm out to stop the closing door, scanning ahead from the doorway. Three sinks lined the wall. An upholstered chair, a small round side table, and a couch sat empty in an entry area.

Searching for the unseen stalls that had to be somewhere on the right, I stepped inside. A toilet flushed. Another girl appeared and walked to the sink, flipping on the faucet.

“Hannah?”

Soft crying. A sniffle.

I followed the sounds to the last bathroom stall. The other two were now unoccupied. I stepped inside the stall beside hers, closed and locked the door, then leaned against it.

“Hannah, please talk to me.”

“Fucking asshole!”

The shouted cathartic words made me smile. “I was going with Dumbfuck.”

She sniffed. Her voice quieted. “That too.”

I heard her stuttered inhalation. Silence followed.

A painted metal barrier stood between us, and I suddenly felt ridiculous. Not that I wouldn’t do anything for the girl suffering beside me, but the way we were partitioned off like this felt like one of those Catholic confessionals I’d seen in movies. Only I was no priest. And Hannah had done nothing wrong.

No, in separate stalls in the ladies’ bathroom of an Irish pub was not the way this was going down. I stepped out and walked to her closed door. My palm wrapped around the top edge and I rattled it.

“Let me in, Hannah.” My words were layered with meaning.

Another loud sniff, then the latch on the lock slid, releasing the door. In the large handicap stall, there was room for the two of us. Barely.

She stood there looking sad and beaten, and I wrapped her in my arms, just holding her.

After an extended silence, she tightened her hold around my waist, speaking without lifting her face away from my chest. “Why now? Why after all this time did he have to show his sorry-ass face? I got over him. I
was
over him.”

“I don’t know, Hannah. Guys are assholes, some more than others. But he takes the prize.”

I felt a nod against my chest. Her body shuddered.

Her words rolled over in my mind. This vulnerable girl who had opened her heart, only to have it stomped on by the same jerk who’d kicked it aside once before, was drunk. And large quantities of alcohol brought out the honesty in people like a lie detector.

“Hannah, are you
not
over him?”

It was hard to say when anyone let go of feelings for someone they loved deeply, no matter how badly they’d been hurt. Like Hannah, my ex had crushed my heart, then disappeared, never to be seen again. Only Hannah’s ex had rematerialized. And the cascading emotions in the aftermath needed to be sorted out.

“I hate him, Cade. After that day, I never wanted to see him again. Never. Look at me, Cade. I’m a mess. Does this look like someone who’s over him?”

At that, I pulled away and looked down at her, seeing through all the hurt and pain. “Hannah, you went through a horrendous loss when he stood you up at your wedding, but you never got closure. He robbed you of that.”

She snorted. “Was that supposed to be closure?”

I shook my head, resting my chin on top of hers as I squeezed her. “No. Closure is us dealing with our feelings on
our
terms. That egotistical fuck pulled a stunt, knowing full well he held the power to upset you. That was on his terms.”

She nodded. Minutes went by in silence as we stood there in the bathroom stall.

After a while, she stirred in my arms, pushing away. I didn’t like the feeling, nor did I feel good about the resigned look in her eyes, but I let her go.

“I have to get out of here. I need to go home.” She looked at me as if from afar, distancing herself with a cold expression on her face. Only it was different than “Ice Queen” cold. She appeared to fall away from herself, absent.

“I’m going with you.” I stepped forward.

She backed away from me shaking her head.

My heart thudded hard, my hands clenching into fists at my sides. I needed to be with her—no longer for her, but for me. An unseen tie that had formed between us began unraveling. I felt it happening. She was falling into an abyss and refused to grab my hand, preferring to fall and be lost.

“I need to be alone.” Her words had deadened. “I’ll grab a cab.”

Terrified to let her go, but sensing that pushing her now was the wrong thing to do, I nodded, following her out.

Minutes later, I stood on the sidewalk with a fierce wind biting through my shirt as I shut the cab door, Hannah tucked safely inside. She didn’t look up at me once, not even a glance. Hadn’t said another word to me after we left the bathroom, either.

Helpless, I stood out in the cold on the sidewalk as Hannah disappeared into the night.

My throat locked up.

I couldn’t find my next breath of air.

H
annah hadn’t returned any of my calls. When I’d shown up at her shop around noon, Chloe said she’d called in sick. Well, at least I knew she was alive.

But “alive” only meant you pulled oxygen into your lungs and your heart chugged along. It didn’t mean “okay.” I needed to make sure she was okay.

Sunday night came and went, but Hannah didn’t call or show up at my place for dinner. My heart burned a hole in my chest while I isolated myself in my bedroom, staring at the ceiling. Her trauma had become my trauma, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Morning came and I still stared at my ceiling, as if the secrets of the universe lay written in the wrinkles of plaster, waiting to be unlocked.

I kept imagining what I would feel like if the roles had been reversed, if it had been my ex who had shown up out of the blue, smug look on her face. Those looks were the stuff of our nightmares, the fears that we had a weakness when it came to this one horrible person in the world, and they had power over us, over our emotions. But it was only because we gave it to them.

So as I waited for Hannah to deal, I handled my pain as best I could. If she had to trudge a path through hell and back, then I would too, because we’d both been there. Because I also had demons so entrenched into my psyche, I’d let them govern my life.

In fact, the hold my past had on me was so tight, I’d made a fucking rule to protect my heart:
no weddings
. Like hiding from all the fluff of someone else’s best day of their life would erase my worst. No amount of bleach in the world could scour that shit from my mind as if it never existed.

A sudden epiphany lit up in my mind like a blinding light bulb. I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and shrugged into my jacket. After scooping up my keys, I rummaged through the junk in my desk drawer. Then I grabbed a pair of pants out of my closet and stuffed them into a white plastic bag.

The ride over to Hannah’s seemed to take forever. Left to my thoughts, they all came up blank. My only focus was Hannah. Finding her. Seeing her face. I’d checked her shop first, hoping I was wrong, but she’d pulled another sick day. Not surprising. The gut-wrenching, nauseating feeling hadn’t disappeared for me either.

It would never go away. Not unless we made it go away.

Her street was quiet. When I pulled into her drive, loose gravel crunched beneath my tires, washout from her landscaping after the heavy rain overnight.

A dense fog had rolled in, humidity from the waterway behind her house intensifying the effect into a near-total whiteout. As I walked through the soupy air, the mist parted, spinning into little eddies on either side of me.

I jogged up the steps. Taking a deep breath, I pounded on the door.

As I waited, I scanned her two front windows. No lights were on. I debated the wisdom of creeping around back, banging on every pane of glass until she let me in, but quickly discarded the idea as the act of an insane man. The last thing I wanted was to be cast into the category of a stalker.

I knocked a second time with a bit less anger. Three hard raps on the wood.

Nothing.

Determined, I turned around and sat on the cold brick step, putting the plastic bag beside me. By the time little dewdrops formed on the plastic, I figured at least another twenty minutes had gone by. I leaned back and knocked again.
Rap, rap, rap
.

My steady knocking was repeated every thirty minutes or so.

As the sun broke through the dismal fog, I wondered if I should’ve brought soup. What if she really was sick? Chicken noodle was always my favorite. I calculated how far away the nearest convenience store was and how long it would take me to get there and back.

Although, what a sad offering to someone in need: soup in a can. I pulled out my phone and surfed the Net to find the nearest restaurants and eateries. It wasn’t even 10:00 a.m. Most wouldn’t open until 11:00 a.m. for lunch.

I rapped on the door again. It had been at least forty minutes since my last attempt. I didn’t want her to think I’d given up.

My doorstep vigil continued. Noon approached. The thought of creeping around the perimeter of her house to find an open window, or at least peek inside, had been revisited and discarded. Three more times.

Legs suddenly cramping, I stood up and stretched, walking down her pathway to work the kinks out of my muscles. When I turned around to return to the spot I intended to sit in all day if necessary, the door cracked open.

Like a starving man suddenly offered a bite of bread, I rushed forward, afraid I’d imagined the opening, or that the invitation would be taken away.

The door opened further, revealing a distraught Hannah in flannel pajamas. Her eyes were red rimmed, her cheeks wet with fresh tears. Her hair was a tangled mess.

I dropped the bag inside her living room and crushed her to me, inhaling the sweet tropical scent of Hannah.

She shivered. “You’re freezing.”

“Tough shit.” I refused to let her go and, instead, pushed forward and kicked the door shut. Her stiff body eased bit by bit the longer I held her.

We said nothing. Just stood there, holding each other.

With great reluctance, I gently released her. We needed to talk. Absent a professional therapy session, Hannah and I needed to deal with our demons head on. There would be no way to move forward unless we exorcised the darkness from our past.

I took my jacket off and she backed up, staring at me the way she had in the bathroom at McGinty’s—like she wanted to increase the distance between us, like I was dangerous. That look killed me, but I held back, giving her the physical space she needed.

Hell, I’d made it into her house. That was a first step. And nothing would make me leave now. Not even Hannah. We were in this together, even if I needed to play the role of both interventionist and commiserating victim.

She took a deep breath. “I need to get something to drink.” Looking frazzled, she disappeared behind the column, closing the shutters over her counter.

I sat in one of the chairs. The thing was more comfortable than it looked. I scooted my ass back and forth, finding the sweet spot in the cushion, before relaxing back.

The chair faced the kitchen. Hannah banged around in there, opening and shutting cupboards. I heard a whirring noise.

A slow smile curved my lips. We’d been here before, and the familiar situation gave me a small amount of comfort. Only then, I’d been a cocky son of a bitch camped out in the front of her shop, while she, the Ice Queen, with her impermeable shields, got her bake on in her kitchen in the back. Now, we’d become two different people who’d cast off their armor, baring themselves. And no matter what else Hannah or I wanted from each other, in the midst of it all, we’d become friends.