Later never came.
That thought gets whisked away as soon as CeeCee steps out onto the terrace in her ivory, cap-sleeved wedding dress, hair down, tulle cathedral veil sweeping behind her. Her smile is radiant.
I saw her in the fittings, but this is a whole other level of stunning. She’s always gorgeous, but today especially so. Mom’s crying again. Dad’s crying. And, dammit, I’m tearing up too, which makes CeeCee upset.
“Stop it!” she cries with a wavering smile. “I’m already going to cry during the vows. I need this makeup to hold.” The four of us huddle in for a family hug, something we haven’t done in a long time. It’s nice. I breathe this in.
Before I know it, we’re being arranged and then rearranged. Again and again.
The cameraperson appears disgruntled behind her equipment, squinting and sighing when they can’t get the shot right. “We’re getting a lot of glare off that nose thing. Can you take that off?”
“Uh, no, it’s kind of taped to my face.” I knew something like this would happen, yet I wasn’t prepared for how ruffled it would make me feel.
The cameraperson presses a palm to their forehead. “Okay, can we powder it, maybe?”
A makeup team trots into frame, pushing their brushes in my face, powder flying and making me sneeze, which undoes their work. “It’s fine. I’ll just not be in the picture.” I step aside, cheeks hot with embarrassment.
I expect Dad to speak up for me, but surprisingly it’s CeeCee who isn’t having this. “Nonsense. It’s a family shot. You’re family. They’ll edit the photo later.” She smiles at me,reallysmiles at me, which is new and nice and appreciated. “Make it work,” she says, using the iciness she usually reserves for me and funneling it at the photographer.
“I really don’t want to ruin the shot,” I whisper, testing this new niceness.
“The only way you’ll ruin the shot is by not being in it,” CeeCee says, surprising me even more. A surge of emotions crackles through me. Miraculously, I feel like a proper part of the family unit. Not the Lego that got lopped off and is now lying in the middle of the floor waiting to be stepped on.
Posing for a picture we’ll cherish forever, I don’t feel so out of place. Even with the eye-drawing splint taped to my nose, I belong. Of course, I had to change a few key aspects of myself—namely my job—but that seems small in the grand scheme of things, right?
The cameraperson whispers something to their assistant, who’s trying to reposition the lights to the best of their ability. It’s not until a redheaded knight steps up with a large umbrella branded with the hotel’s name and glittery logo on it that a solution arrives. “Will this help?”
Drew stands far enough to the side to be out of the shot, but his height allows him to position the umbrella in a way that casts a shadow right over my face, blocking the rays from reflecting off my splint. “Easier to brighten up his face in post than edit out the glare, yeah?” Drew says, as if he’s been hiding a secret knowledge of photography in his back pocket for this exact occasion.
Drew.Wholly wonderful Drew, who I should’ve asked to be my date from the very beginning because nobody knows me like he does and nobody else’s thoughtfulness could ever compare.
Certainty curls up inside my chest like a dog in the sunshine. Tonight’s the night that I let those eight letters, three words, and one big meaning out from the locked vault inside my chest. I only hope he receives the treasure I’ve hidden inside as warmly as he’s smiling at me right now.
I mouth a thank-you to him right before the shutter goes off.
Chapter Nine
“You survived it,” Drew says to me a short while after the ceremony, surprising me with his arrival. I was having some alone time out on a balcony overhanging the terrace where party people mill about and snack on hors d’oeuvres.
Drew hands me the signature cocktail from the open bar—a dirty martini with a sprig of rosemary speared through a swollen olive at the bottom of the shapely glass. “What a ceremony.”
“It was beautiful.” I say, wistful. When I passed CeeCee James’s ring, in that fleeting moment of contact—sun setting, eyes glimmering—we clicked back into our old selves. And I cried.
When the happy couple kissed, dusk blanketing the outdoor terrace, the twinkle lights strung overhead blinked on, and Taylor Swift’s “Lover” played on piano filtered in from the other room. The romanticism was all-encompassing, and I thought,If a desk job gets me all this, maybe it won’t be so bad.
“I’d like to thank pomegranate mimosas, sheer willpower, and…” I hover over the word for a second. “You, Drew.” It’s a sweeping statement brought on by the day. The unexpected emotions. The about-face that happened when my sister exchanged her beautiful vows. Whatever our petty disagreements in the past, I melted into a puddle of brotherly love.
As CeeCee and James walked back down the aisle, together, outside arms raised in triumph as if to say “We did it, world! We found our perfect match! Take that!” a Hunger Games cannon sounded in my mind, signaling the death of our childhoods. We’ll never be young and messy together again.
Once this campaign launches, CeeCee will go on to a bigger salary, move out of Jersey City, join a nonfiction book club, take up gardening her own vegetables, and maybe have her first kid. And, where will I be? Hopefully here with Drew, flipping the page to a new, fresh chapter that I’ve been too preoccupied and scared to write.
“What did I do besides show up and look pretty?” Drew asks, winsome, running his thumb across his cutely dimpled chin. I know my fears about taking a step out of the platonic and into the romantic are founded, but I’ve got wedding glitter gunking up my heart, and my whole body is aching for change.
Good change. A new start.
I brush a stray hair out of Drew’s eye. “You were here for me. You ran interception with my parents. You saved the photos. I don’t know what I did to deserve you.” After I say it, I shudder a little. “In my life, I mean. I don’t know what I did to deserve you in my life.”
Down below, the Doop staff and hotel staff work together to transform the indoor-outdoor space for dinner. Long communal wooden tables. Centerpieces of wildflowers. Tall candles and golden cutlery. They move with precision and intensity, yet here, as I gaze into Drew’s eyes, they are a blur of peripheral motion.
