Bar Crawl(31)

Georgia dropped her hand to her hip, staring at me not in anger, but in something else that was rarer for her. Pity, it seemed. She knew. More than anyone in my life, she would know how it felt to keep people away and then fall so ridiculously in love that she couldn’t remember why she even avoided it for so long. And I’d encouraged her. It was easy to help her story move forward when she had first taken an interest in Regan. I saw their happy ending before they did, and yes, they were a fine example of a relationship clusterf*ck before they each got their act together. And yes, maybe she had a point. Just because Frankie and I had started awkwardly, and were currently not even in a relationship, basically meant nothing as far as relationships were concerned. Regardless, I was never interested in autobiographies.

“Whatever,” was the only—wholly immature—thing I could come up with. I turned for a walk down the beach. It was something I’d heard of people doing when they were pissed or sad, but nothing I’d ever done for myself despite a lifetime of living on the east coast.

Two steps into my intended contemplation, and just as Georgia called after me, I was startled when I spotted Frankie standing where the corner of the gravel parking lot met the sand.

Perfect.

“Sorry,” she said quickly. “I didn’t meant to interrupt anything. I didn’t hear—you know what? I’ll just go.” As she turned, she tucked her hair behind her ears and crossed her arms in front of her.

I looked over my right shoulder for Georgia, but found myself alone. She’d disappeared in a vapor, it seemed, and left me to my own shitty devices.

“Frankie, wait.” I said her name with a slight frustrated growl. I didn’t know what she had heard, and even though there wasn’t anything directly about her as a person, I wasn’t my best self during my verbal altercation with Georgia.

Jogging up the small slope that separated the cars from the ocean, I caught up to Frankie as she turned around. I placed my hand gently on her shoulder, having forgotten how different her skin felt beneath my hand. It wasn’t just skin. It was hers.

“Look,” I started, having no plan of what my further words might be.

She shook her head and smiled politely, showing no signs of a pending crazed meltdown. “It’s okay. I shouldn’t have come here, really. It’s the night before your friend’s wedding. It’s just that, even though she invited me to it, in what was the most bizarre afternoon of my life, I figured if I were going to go…I didn’t want that to be the first time we’d seen each other in this long. You know?” She bit the inside of her lip as she looked over my face.

“Stop.” Moving my hand from her shoulder, I watched as my thumb grazed her chin. She didn’t flinch. “I’m glad you’re here,” I admitted.

“You are?” Frankie dropped her hands to her sides and let out a forced exhale.

I simply nodded, a grin brewing from deep inside me. Georgia and I didn’t need to have a knock-down, drag-out like the old days, nor did I need to have a weepy soul searching, up-till-one-am session like Regan and Ember sometimes did, to know that the muted explosion in my chest was exactly what Georgia had accused me of. The lost boy in me. The one who never wanted to grow up. And he was breaking free.

“Come,” I nodded behind me to the beach, “take a walk with me.”

I held out my hand as I took a step back and, without a word, Frankie placed her hand in mine and followed me down the sandy hill. And there, on the beach I’d written into more paragraphs than I could count, I began my own story.





Frankie





The wedding was beautiful.

Georgia embodied the style that was so clearly her, even though I’d only seen her twice before. She had a netted veil over her eyes, which was attached to a white flower and pinned in her hair at the side of her head. She was certainly the most fascinating woman I’d met in a long time, and I certainly hoped to get to know her more.

He hadn’t told me this was the plan before the ceremony, but CJ walked her down the aisle. That got the tears going early for the modest crowd of fifty, or so, people that gathered on Martha’s Vineyard for the nuptials. After handing Georgia off to Regan, CJ took his spot next to Regan as his best man. A woman who I hadn’t seen before, but CJ later identified as Ember, stood up for Georgia, and dabbed at her eyes through the ceremony, smiling broadly at the bride and groom. The whole scene gave me chills. I didn’t know CJ well enough yet to know the details, but was startlingly clear that there were intricate—and likely complicated—webs of history between the five of them. Love ruled over it all, though.

Regan and Georgia had vows that were equally light and heavy, evenly somber and sweet. They laughed through tears and kissed what was absolutely the most romantic wedding kiss I’d ever seen. Beautiful and not uncomfortably passionate, it sent sonic waves of love through the crowd and left all of us in tears.

At the reception, CJ and I were seated with Ember and her husband, Bo. I’d had to suppress a squeal when I met him. Their names rang a bell, but CJ had only mentioned them a time or two. As soon as I saw him, I recognized him from various music blogs I follow. My recognition of Ember clicked in soon after, of course, but Bo was one hell of a dreamy package.

Meeting them let me gain some more insight to CJ’s complicated brain. Between our dining partners at the reception and his cousin, all incredibly well-known and prosperous musicians, Georgia, whose bakery was readying itself for a one-hour special on the Food Network, and his own—oddly undiscussed—history with that “large social media site,” CJ was part of a truly hip crowd. These twenty and young thirtysomethings were part of a major entrepreneurial buzz that’d been circling their various industries for years. And he was totally at ease with it all, interacting with them and others as if they were normal people. Which they were, of course, but the CJ I’d judged early on in the bar struck me as someone who would name-drop more than he said actual words.