Beautiful Beginning(25)
tell you was the most fascinating thing he’d ever heard. He sort of bent
at the knees, using his hands to gesture wildly, dramatically illustrating
any point he might have. “So vapor and heat rise, drawn up toward the
center of a storm. The updrafts remove some of the saturated air, forcing
it up and over the highest clouds. You following me so far?” he asked. I
nodded, feeling a thread of anxiety form in my chest.
“He’s getting to the fascinating part,” Max assured me.
“So you have all this air rising, but it compresses as it falls, leaving
it warmer and dryer. Calm”—he said, pausing for effect—“resulting in a
stable air mass, dampening cloud formation and leaving the air totally
still. The calm before the storm.”
Max was already nodding; clapping Will on the back like he’d just
explained the most clever analogy ever told.
I frowned. “What are you saying?”
Max reached out, put a solid grip on my shoulder. “What we’re saying,
mate, is that you think you’re keeping your bird in check. But we’re all
waiting for your little bomb to explode.”
I watched Chloe like a hawk the rest of the day, and as terrified as I was
to admit it, Max and Will had a point.
She didn’t give me an ounce of fight when I got back to the room and
showered alone. When I kissed her bare shoulder, she smiled at me warmly,
but without the slightly terrifying look in her eyes like I would either be
f*cked to within an inch of my life or eaten for breakfast. She was wrapped
in a towel, skin still damp from her shower as she blow-dried her hair. She
didn’t comment on the fact that she was naked, she didn’t ask to “help”
me get dressed. She didn’t ask me to f*ck her once.
She was accommodating and loving, and I was completely confused.
When the waiter messed up her order at breakfast, she didn’t react. When
her aunts insisted on following her around with a camera, going so far as
to film her from the opposite side of the bathroom stall, she stayed calm.
When my mother suggested Chloe wear her hair down instead of up for the
ceremony, Chloe had only responded with a pained smile.
By this point I could practically smell the storm in the air, and we hadn’
t even started the rehearsal yet.
“What do you mean ‘small’ accident?” I said, focusing on the wedding
coordinator before quickly glancing to Chloe. She was about thirty feet
down the beach, pacing. A few swear words had floated back to us at first
but now she was sort of strangely silent, arms folded over her chest as she
walked along the sand.
I frowned, but quickly shot my attention back to our wedding coordinator,
Kristin, as she launched into an explanation.
“It’s going to be fine, Bennett,” she was saying, words delivered in a
way I’m sure I was supposed to find comforting, but only resulted in
pissing me off. When things went wrong you screamed at someone. You became
the loudest and squeakiest wheel; you let everyone know that anything less
than perfect was unacceptable. You slammed doors and fired people. You didn
’t stand there in your little blue Chanel suit and pearls and tell the
cyborg bride and clueless groom that it would be fine.
“There’s been a tiny little problem with the wedding clothes.”
Small accident. Tiny little problem. These adjectives didn’t really fit
the feeling of dread that had begun clawing its way up my throat. “The
garments were dropped off earlier today, but when the bags were opened we
realized there’d been some sort of miscommunication and nothing had been
pressed. It’s a minor thing, Bennett. I wouldn’t even bother you with it
if Chloe hadn’t been there and seen it for
herself.”
So Chloe had already seen bags of wrinkled wedding clothes and hadn’t gone
nuclear. I sighed, blinking across the beach to where a few rows of
temporary seating had already been set up. Chloe’s aunts were sitting on
either side of Will, who had his hands folded in his lap and looked . . .
tense. In fact, he looked a lot like he was deciding if he could bolt and
escape this event entirely. Hanna was chatting with Mina but would look
over occasionally to glance at him, and her small smile would invariably
turn into the biggest shit-eating grin I’d ever seen. She was going to
make an excellent ally in the years ahead.
Max and Sara were off . . . somewhere. I actually rolled my eyes when I
realized they hadn’t made it down from their room yet. God, I hated him.
My family stood waiting for the rehearsal to begin, talking among
themselves.
“So what happens now?” I asked.
Kristin smiled. “Everything’s already been taken back to
the cleaners and it will be done in the morning. They’ve promised to drop
everything off tomorrow before one.”
“The wedding is tomorrow at four,” I said, running a hand through my