Anything but Ordinary(55)

Someone turned on the light.

“Are you okay?” It was a man’s voice. Greg.

“Yeah, I just need to wash my face,” Bryce said tensely.

“I don’t like it either, Bryce,” he said, stepping farther inside, filling the room with the smell of cologne and his wine-stained breath. He looked toward the main room, and back to Bryce.

“Hear me out,” he said. Bryce ran her hands under the water, her vision blurred. She could feel his whispers on her neck. “I can’t stop thinking about us. I think about my life with Gabby, and I think about what my life could be with you, and I always choose you. Always, and I always will.”

Bryce turned off the water. Paper towels. Where were the paper towels? Greg turned her around and took her shoulders, breathing in her face. His eyes wouldn’t leave hers, and she caught them, a blazing blue. He loosened his grip.

“Bryce, I don’t believe you want this to happen any more than I do, so let’s do something about it!”

“I’m not going to change my mind.” Bryce shook him off and dried her hands on her dress. “And if you really didn’t want to be here, you wouldn’t be here.”

He stood in the doorway, blocking her. “What do you mean?”

Bryce stood facing him, looking him straight in the eye. “I mean that if you really didn’t want to be with Gabby, things would never have gotten this far. You wouldn’t be at the rehearsal dinner the night before your wedding.”

He said nothing. He backed down from the doorway. “I can’t do it, Bry.”

“I asked you this before, and I’ll ask you again.” Bryce kept her voice low, under the din of the restaurant. “What do you want?”

“Honestly?” Greg grimaced. “I don’t know.” He hung his head.

Bryce didn’t like to see him this way. She had cut herself off from him, but she had never stopped caring. He wasn’t happy, she could see that.

She took his cheeks in her hands, not because she wanted him, but because she wanted him to do better.

“It’s not just your life you’re deciding here, it’s Gabby’s, too. And she deserves to be happy. She deserves her fairy-tale prince.”

He just nodded, solemnly. There was wetness in the corners of his eyes.

She dropped her hands from his cheeks. There was nothing left in Bryce but heavy tiredness. She felt sucked dry. Emptied.

She walked past Greg’s slumped figure, but before she hit the doors, she turned around. “You were going to be happy before me. Now be happy after me.”

Outside she watched the traffic for a taxi. After several cars, she saw one speed through a yellow light a block away. With the hollow jolt of death in her, Bryce walked in front of the hurtling car.

Two feet in front of her, the cab screeched to a halt. “Are you crazy?” the driver yelled out his open window. “You wanna get killed?”

In answer, Bryce got inside and asked him to take her home.





he next day, Bryce woke up. What a miracle. Call the president.

During the ride home last night she had started laughing to herself about the ridiculousness of it all. The car pulled up to her house and she took out her money, laughing. She collapsed on her bed and laugh-cried herself to sleep. The driver must have thought she was out of her mind.

Well, she was out of her mind. Technically, since a little more than five years ago, she was.

Bryce had fallen asleep in her dress. She changed into sweatpants, washed her face, grabbed her red gown in its Saks bag from her closet, and asked her mother for a ride.

Her mom greeted Bryce like it was any other morning, absently flipping through a design magazine. Dr. Warren must not have called them yet.

“Good luck, baby,” she said when she pulled up to the church. “We’ll be there for the ceremony.”

“Bye, Mom,” Bryce said, and kissed her on the cheek.

She refused to let her thoughts drift away from the wedding. Did she have her shoes? Yes. Did she remember how to walk down the aisle? One, together. Two, together. She approached the church’s heavy wooden doors through the warm morning haze. They creaked open, and Bryce stepped into the velvety hush.

A silk white ribbon hung from the pews on either side of the church’s center aisle—Gabby’s path to the altar. She and Greg would stand between two huge, mounted bouquets of white roses. Beautiful. Bryce veered off to the right, to the side room where everyone would be getting ready.

At first she thought the beige room was empty; then she saw the bride sitting in the far corner. Her dress was thrown haphazardly across a chair, its full, creamy length on the carpeted floor like spilled milk.

“Hey!” Bryce called. “Where is everyone?”

Gabby didn’t look up. Her hands stayed folded in her lap, hair falling around her face. Bryce walked over and kneeled beside her.

“What’s wrong?”

“Don’t,” Gabby said quietly from behind the curtain of her hair.

“Don’t what?”

She pulled back to face Bryce. She didn’t look like herself. She looked like a wax version of Gabby, a permanent scowl on her tear-stained face. “The wedding’s off.”

“Oh!” Bryce let out a little cry. “Wha—why?”

“I don’t know, Bryce,” Gabby said quietly. “Why don’t you tell me?” Her voice was tight, like coiled springs.