“Sheesh, priorities.” Although, she had a point. I did just buy a hundred-and-fifty-dollar bridesmaid dress that I said I’d wear again but never would. “Who have you and Ridge invited to this thing, anyway?”
Hopefully not Pierce. It was a long shot, but I held on to my wishful thinking. Maybe Ridge would have one of his hot former SEAL men there as a groomsman, and we’d make a few clichés come true.
Tabitha sighed and wandered her way back to the front of the shop, stopping every few feet to examine unique pieces of wedding paraphernalia Gisele had stashed on the table waiting to be put out before she officially opened.
“I wanted a small wedding, but we live in Pelican Bay and I’m marrying Ridge Jefferson so… Everyone.” She set back the small packet of tissues with a standard logo monogram on the front and turned to me. “You need to be on your best behavior for the entire event.”
That meant she invited Pierce.
Damn it.
“Ugh. He’s such an ass.”
Tabitha’s expression didn’t contain any irritation like it should have when she spoke. “Well, be that as it may, he’s hurting right now. I can’t imagine how sad he is over his fiancée leaving him. It was the talk of the phone tree for an entire week.”
Ha. They had no idea about the exact deviousness of Pierce. He wasn’t sad because he was as heartless as the rest of the Kensington family. Let’s not forget that he kissed me!
He used women and then left them. I wanted to tell them the horrible details of exactly why his fiancée left him, but it made me look shitty too and I wasn’t ready to divulge my non-relationship to the bakery girls. It definitely wasn’t a relationship, just something that happened a couple of times, and I planned to make sure it ended. Soon.
Pierce and I had no future together, so there was no point in wasting time and filling them in on what happened.
“Why do you hate Pierce so much? I’ve never heard the truth,” Anessa asked.
“I didn’t always hate him.” It wasn’t until I realized he held the Kensington last name. There was a time in life when we even got along. Sometimes the memories were fresh enough to feel like they happened only a day ago. Our first meeting was one for the books.
Third grade. We had an unusually wet spring and frogs congregated over the elementary school playground. I promised to spend every second of recess saving as many as possible and getting them back to the woods before they grew too hot in the afternoon sun as spring faded into summer. It became my mission in life. I pictured my name on signs denoting me a hero. Katy Kadish—Frog Saver. I designed the cape I planned to ask my mother to sew. In third grade every good super hero needed a cape.
Pierce, an older boy whose classroom had recess at the same time as the third grade, came over and asked what I was doing. His light blond hair sparkled in the sun and his blue eyes were so deep they reminded me of a cloudless day at the beach. I filled him in on my frog saving operation and he jumped in to help.
It wasn’t until that weekend when I visited my Nanna and told her about the friendly boy named Pierce who helped my frogs find a new home that my grandmother filled me in on the true nature of the Kensington family. She weaved herself quite a story—probably where I learned the skill. My mother cut in halfway, telling her to let old stories die, but it was enough to cloud my vision of Pierce from that day forward. And every time given the chance he’d acted exactly as my grandmother warned me a Kensington always did.
As it did every time someone mentioned the ongoing feud between Pierce and me, my grandmother’s tale came to mind, all the gory details included. It involved love deeper than the Marianas Trench. One summer she fell hard for the eldest Kensington—Pierce’s grandfather—and he’d broken her heart in the most spectacular fashion. She spent three months working at their home during a college break and he promised her the world behind closed doors. Right when she believed her knight in shining armor would sweep her off her feet and give her a happily ever after, he dumped her. Without another word, he left, returned to college and later announced an engagement to Pierce’s grandmother.
It left her devastated and alone. I refused to fall down the same path and let the younger Kensington bamboozle me. Rich people were all the same.
Things didn’t work out so horribly for my grandma. She met my grandfather six months later and they married and spent a wonderful forty years together. But even as she sat in the Pelican Bay nursing home, her hatred for the Kensington family never wavered. And she never let me forget.
My grandmother may have fallen for the Kensingtons’ good looks and smooth words, but I would not be taken by the same fate. Pierce and I would not be a tragic Romeo and Juliet fairytale.
I would make sure of that myself. Regardless of how hard it became to ignore my desires for Pierce over the last few years, I refused to do wrong by my grandmother. She trusted me not to go and lose my heart to one of them.
I stared out the front window of what would one day be a wedding shop and my eyes focused on the road in front of me as it rippled like a wave coming in off the ocean.
“Holy shit,” Anessa said one of the first swear words I’d ever heard her use as I held my hands bracing against the wall while the earth shook around us.
A cloud of dust plumed down the street like we lived in the dust bowl and then the sound of thunder rolled through the streets forcing me to cover my ears.
“Was that an earthquake?” Tabitha asked as the sound dissipated back to quiet on the deserted street.
“In Maine?”
4
Pierce
Ambulance and fire truck sirens wailed in my ears long after calm returned to Pelican Bay. It spectacularly shattered the afternoon, and of course, it concerned a Kensington. They cordoned downtown off to keep onlookers safe— smart decision considering we lived in a town of gawkers.
“Are you sure there’s no injuries?” I asked my cousin Jerome for the third time.
