The Sixth Wedding (28 Summers #1.5)(16)

Kip Sudbury: The name rang a bell, one more recent than that night thirty years ago. Was he a Wall Street guy? A hedge fund guy?

“He was involved in that bond scandal back in…”

“Oh, right,” Fray said.

“He took me to 21 Federal to meet his friends and the next day we went sailing on his father’s yacht.”

“Well, I sat in the back of Mal’s Blazer and drank by myself until the bar closed,” Fray said. Memory was a slippery thing. Fray couldn’t remember what he’d been served for lunch on his plane earlier that day but he could vividly picture himself in his Nirvana T-shirt, smoldering like a red-hot coal in the back of Mal’s car. He remembered being tempted to go with Leland and her New York friends because he’d thought he read some apprehension in her expression—but then Fray realized that what Leland feared was him coming along. She didn’t want him to embarrass her, and expose her for the regular Baltimore girl she was. “And then when we got back to the cottage, we realized Coop had left the island and I snatched a bottle of Jim Beam and headed down the beach.”

Leland turned on her side toward him and laid her fingers across his biceps. He inhaled her scent. She had always smelled spicy—like sandalwood and ginger—rather than sweet or floral. That was one of the many things he loved about her.

“I stripped down to go for a swim,” Fray said. “At least, I think that was my intention because when the paramedics found me, I was buck naked, passed out in the sand.”

Leland moved her hand down to Fray’s thigh and leaned in so that her chin rested on his shoulder and her words breathed straight into his ear. “I’m glad nothing happened to you.”

“I wouldn’t say nothing happened. The next morning when I woke up, I realized I had a problem.” Fray often wondered why that had been his aha moment. It wasn’t the drunkest he’d ever been. He used to black out all the time at the University of Vermont. And there had been one fateful night during a summer home from college when he bumped into Leland and Mallory at Bohager’s downtown. Leland had spent the whole evening talking to Penn Porter, who had been a classmate of Fray’s at Calvert Hall, and Fray was jealous. He’d done at least six shots of J?germeister at the bar—and the next thing he knew, he was waking up in Latrobe Park robbed blind with bruises all over his body and two teeth knocked loose. “I decided I would take a break from drinking.” That was all Fray had intended: a break. He certainly hadn’t meant to go the rest of his life without tasting the first sip of an ice-cold beer or the velvety warmth of a good red wine on his tongue. But once the alcohol had cleared from his system, he liked how he felt. Powerful. In control. The control was its own high, and—if you listened to Anna—he was addicted to it. “The break has lasted thirty years.”

Leland kissed his cheek. Her hand remained on his thigh, which could only be interpreted one way. Fray felt himself stiffen beneath his jeans. Anna had convinced him he was washed-up sexually, but that had been an excuse she invented so she could justify sleeping with Tyler.

“I’m sorry for my part in it,” Leland whispered.

Fray shook his head. “I blamed you initially because you were the easy target. My first love, the one I couldn’t get out of my system.”

“When I landed here this afternoon, I was thinking about our first date in the hot tub.”

Fray was so hard he had to adjust himself, subtly—the last thing he wanted was for Leland to move her hand. “You’d probably be uncomfortable to know how many times I’ve played back that scene in my head when I’m alone.”

“Fray! Seriously?” Leland Gladstone the feminist might have been offended to know that she was the subject of his sexual fantasies, but Leland Gladstone the woman lying next to him sounded…flattered.

“It was a horny teenager’s wet dream,” Fray said. “Coming back out to the hot tub to find you topless?”

Leland propped herself on her elbow and gazed down at him. He could see that she was older—there were lines at her eyes and around her mouth—but she was still the same smart, sassy, complicated person he fell in love with another lifetime ago.

Fray’s upbringing, seen through the lens of 2023, might be described as compromised, meager, possibly even traumatic. His mother, Sloane, was wild and rebellious. She got pregnant with Fray when she was twenty-one and couldn’t identify the father; there had simply been too many men, many of them sailors in port in Baltimore for a few days before shipping out. Fray’s grandparents, Walt and Ida, took on the job of raising Fray. They were kind, but their household was abstemious. Walt and Ida didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t swear. They didn’t allow Fray to eat potato chips or Cap’n Crunch, or drink Coke or chew bubble gum. His bedtime was nine o’clock sharp; he had never once been allowed to stay up to watch Taxi, Barney Miller, or Magnum P.I. If Ida could hear his music playing through his bedroom door, it was too loud. Sloane would live with them periodically when she was between boyfriends and had nowhere else to go, and she acted more like an older sister than a mom. It was Sloane who had offered Fray his first cigarette at fourteen, his first drink at fifteen, his first toke of marijuana at sixteen. She did these things only when Walt and Ida were away or out of the house. “Your grandparents,” Sloane would say—she always referred to Walt and Ida as “your grandparents,” as though they were of no relation to her—”think I’m a bad influence on you.”