I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(12)
I stood in the sun in my rehearsal dinner dress, shivering, besieged by the loneliest thoughts in the world. They aren’t mine; they will never be mine again; they’ll go on being together and happy and a family without me because I’ll be gone. I have lost them.
It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t true. People got married all the time without losing their families. Marriage was addition, not subtraction. But everything about their casual togetherness hurt me: a tan arm draped over a shoulder, a hand in a pocket, smiles, and eye rolls, and headshakes, a light, teasing slap, their voices all in a jumble.
Teo saw me first. He stopped in his tracks, pressed his long brown hands to his heart, and then broke into a jog.
When he got to me, he kissed my cheek and gave me a smile. Half Swedish, half Filipino, Cornelia’s husband, Teo, is a toffee-colored, green-eyed genetic miracle with a smile that could melt a glacier. The fact that it didn’t quite melt the thick glass between me and everyone I loved scared me so much that, for the second time that day, I started crying. Luckily, this time there was no sobbing, just cold in my throat, and heat in my eyes, and a few meandering tears.
“Hey,” said Teo. “You okay?”
I pressed my lips together and nodded.
“Really? Because I think you’re crying.”
I brushed at my damp cheeks and swallowed hard. “Nope. I’m fine. It’s just that—well, you just—smell really good.”
It was true, like honey and limes and barbershop powder.
Teo laughed. “I get that a lot.”
And then they were upon us, a hugging, kissing, joking, fragrant flock of family. First Aidan and Hildy, arm in arm. They kissed me. Same time, different cheeks.
“Hold on. Synchronized kissing?” I pushed them both to arm’s length and eyed them. Aidan and Hildy had a long-standing if sporadic “thing” between them, one that they both enjoyed but that neither ever quite followed through with. “You can’t be flirting again already. You just got here!”
“I’m irresistible is why,” explained Aidan.
Hildy shrugged. “It’s true.”
She leaned in and whispered into my ear. “How’re you holding up?”
“Medium,” I whispered back.
“Are you lying?”
“No fair asking.”
“Sorry. I love you, and Aidan and I can have the getaway car ready at a moment’s notice.”
“It’s been all of, what? Fifteen minutes? And you two are already at the joint-getaway-car stage. Sheesh, you move fast.”
Hildy winked. “You know it, girly.”
Toby caught Hildy in a headlock from behind.
Hildy grimaced. “Guess it’s Toby’s turn.”
Toby gave me a bear hug, like the big teddy bear he was. “So what happened to the plan that you’d marry me when you grew up?”
“Who says I’m grown up?” I said.
They came to me, one by one. Gorgeous Rose-never-called-Rosie, nine years old and already Grace Kelly elegant, turning up her cheek for me to kiss before throwing herself into my arms. Cornelia’s mother, Ellie, pressing a pair of antique blue topaz earrings into my palm (“My grandmother’s. Your something blue.”). Cam bowing low over my hand and kissing it, duke-like, then chucking me under the chin. My stepfather, holding my shoulders, saying, “Best girl in the world. The best, best one,” his eyes full of tears. And so, little by little, touch by touch, word by word, they drew me back to them. There was no rush of relief, no sudden reentry into the world of my family, but by the time my mother was tucking a stray lock of hair behind my ear, the glass barrier between us had grown so flimsy I almost—almost—didn’t notice it was there at all.
Last came Dev in a blue-checked shirt, holding Simon’s white sneakers, his face still like a story I’d read so many times I could recite it—slate-blue eyes, black lashes that went all the way around like a ruffle, a thin scar cutting a straight line through the outer tip of his right eyebrow (bike accident, age sixteen), another under his chin that I couldn’t see right then but knew was there (swing-jumping-off accident, age six). And now, here, his smile, guileless as a little kid’s, sudden as a lit match. Back when we were in love, even after we’d been together for years, that smile never stopped taking me by surprise. It was found money, an arrowhead, a shooting star, a great, shiny stroke of luck every single time. Dev flipped one of Simon’s shoes into the air, caught it with his usual unconscious grace, and, still smiling, said, “Hey, Clare.”
I should have answered right away, but I didn’t because—and I guess this is the downside of knowing someone by heart—right then, without meaning to, I noticed what wasn’t there: no pink flush down the center of his cheeks (“like Hawaiian Punch stains,” I’d once told him); no shifting from foot to foot; no slight lift of his shoulders; no faint abstraction in his eyes, as if he were silently reciting the multiplication or periodic table, a trick he used to steady himself. Not one of Dev’s telltale signs of discomfort or sadness. And if he wasn’t uncomfortable or sad, he must have been comfortable and happy, and, as someone who cared about him, this should have made me happy—obviously it should have—but all I could think was that on the eve of Dev’s wedding, teetering on the very edge of his future with another woman, I could never have greeted him, tan and bright eyed and grinning like a ten-year-old, without even a trace of regret, a wisp of wistfulness. I could not have flipped shoes, for God’s sake. Honestly, despite the fact that the two of us had broken up years ago, I probably would not even have come at all.