Three Little Words

by Jenny Holiday

  No bra straps visible.

  Dammit.

  His gaze fell to her hands. They’d gotten their nails done today, Noah had said. Hers were a bright cherry red that popped against the pastel dress.

  He couldn’t shake the thought that he wanted to grab a couple of those lacquered fingers and stick them in his mouth. Or, worse, twine his own around them and hold her damn hand some more.

  He was so fucked.

  The women were finding seats and getting Noah’s mom and her boyfriend and Wendy’s aunt settled. The guys had sort of spaced themselves out. In his haste to avoid Tobias, Bennett had left an empty seat between them, but of course all the other women went to sit next to their husbands and older family members, which left the spot for Gia. He watched her assess the situation, take in her fate. She rolled her eyes slightly as she came over.

  He leaned over and whispered in her ear. “I can swap with you.” He didn’t know if she was speaking to him, but he wanted to give her the opportunity to not sit by Tobias.

  Hell, he wanted her to not sit by Tobias.

  “I’m fine,” she said, not looking at him.

  As Wendy performed introductions, it occurred to him that probably he had a job to do here as best man. This wasn’t a formal rehearsal dinner in the sense that there was anything to rehearse—the beach nuptials would take all of five minutes. But still, it was a moment to be commemorated. And of course, he had nothing prepared. He’d been too caught up in his own drama.

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  He felt her attention. Well, at least she was finally looking at him.

  “I’m supposed to give a toast, right?” he whispered. “I completely forgot.”

  “Just wish them well,” she said.

  “I can’t do that. It should be something not generic. It should be—”

  “You want me to do it?”

  “Would you? Or at least start, and then I’ll come up with something while you’re talking?”

  She clinked a knife against her wineglass and stood.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention for a few moments…” The conversation died and everyone turned smiling, anticipatory faces to Gia.

  “Noah Denning,” she began, placing her hands on her hips and glaring at the groom like she was a teacher and he a wayward pupil. “You’re the brother of one of my best friends. And you’re about to be the husband of one of my other best friends.” Her eyes narrowed in mock anger. “So you understand that this means that I’m watching you, because if you mess with either of those ladies, I’ll be all up in your face so far you won’t know what hit you.”

  Noah nodded and grinned. “Got it.” His mother laughed and kissed him on the cheek.

  “But…” Gia drew out the word. She wasn’t done yet. “I think maybe it also means that I’m almost related to you?” Her tone had turned soft, almost yearning. “I hope so, because I honestly can’t think of anyone I’d rather have for an almost-big-brother-slash-almost-brother-in-law.”

  Noah’s smile turned fond, and he nodded again, more vigorously this time, as the women let out a collective “Aww.”

  “Because you, Noah, are all the things a man should be. You’re loyal and kind and protective—” She stopped so abruptly, it seemed like she’d meant to say more. Her hand—those cherry-topped fingers—came down to grip the edge of the table. “And I can’t think of anyone else in the world who’s good enough to deserve our…” She turned to the bride. “Wendy.”

  Wendy, definitely the badass among the circle of friends, looked like she was going to cry.

  Probably because it sounded like Gia was going to cry as she kept going. “Wendy, I don’t even know what to say to you.”

  Her voice was shaking so much that Bennett wanted to stand up, pry that hand from its death grip on the table, and hold it in his to try to bolster her.

  She cleared her throat and started over. “I’ve been lucky enough to have the three most amazing friends in the world.” She made a gesture that encompassed all the women at the table. “And I’m so happy you’ve all found love. But, Wendy, I think maybe you had to work harder than the others to find yours.”

  Wendy’s aunt sniffed loudly, and Jane and Elise nodded vehemently.

  “You deserve love, Wendy.” She lifted her glass. “You all do.”

  Bennett noticed she didn’t say, We all do.

  “To Wendy and Noah.”

  Oh, fuck, he loved her. He loved her so much it was astonishing. It took his breath away when he contemplated it straight on.

  He looked at Cam, whose arm was slung around Jane. Had Cam been…right?

  He didn’t have time to contemplate the question, though, because it was his turn.

  The plan had been for him to use the time of Gia’s toast to come up with something of his own to say, but of course he’d been so captivated by her, by her loyalty and the raw vulnerability that no one else seemed to appreciate, that his brain had stuttered to a halt.

  Thankfully, Jane hopped up and made her maid of honor toast, and then the server came. He was off the hook.

  It was difficult to get through dinner. All he could do was sit there next to Gia, his heart positively busting at the seams with love, and try not to die of it. Try to think of something to say that wouldn’t scare her off, but also wouldn’t be presumptuous, domineering crap like the guys were accusing him of spouting yesterday. It used to be so easy to talk to Gia. Now it felt like the opposite of easy.

  He had just about worked up his nerve to open his mouth and say something—anything—when Tobias spoke to her. She turned and shifted away from Bennett—only slightly, but he was paying enough attention to notice—so she could answer Tobias.

  He’d missed his chance. Now Tobias had her attention, and he was talking about…hedge funds?

  For fuck’s sake.

  “We went hiking this morning,” he said, his voice artificially loud. It was enough to get her attention. She swung around to face him, and he just barely refrained from giving Tobias the finger. “The guys, I mean. While y’all were getting your nails done. We went to that nature preserve you were showing me before, on your phone.”

  “And how was it?” Her voice was completely neutral. He couldn’t get a read on her.

  He had no idea. He hadn’t seen any of it, had taken nothing in. He’d been too busy with the bro group therapy.

  Too busy wondering if he’d fucked everything up with her irredeemably.

  “Great! There were lots of…trees.” Then he started rambling stupidly about everything he did remember. The preserve was really close to here! Just up the road a bit to the entrance! She should check it out later!

  God, he was an idiot. He could see her glazing over. Retreating from him. Which made him start to panic.

  So he stopped talking and regrouped. Tried to get a grip. Tobias was conversing with Jay across the table, but he was only giving Jay his partial attention. He kept glancing over at Gia.

  Pitching his voice low so only she could hear, Bennett said, “Are you sure you don’t want to switch places with me?”

  “I’m fine, Bennett.”

  He glanced at her still-full plate. “Because if you sat over here, I could—”

  “I’m fine.”

  She was not fine. She wasn’t eating. He had tried not to notice, but he couldn’t not notice. That was the way things were when you fucking loved someone.

  “Okay.” He lowered his voice again. “Let’s go to the restaurant later. Just you and me. I’ll make you something.”

  “I don’t need you to make me anything.” She was whispering, but it was that kind of fierce, overly loud stage whispering. Tobias was oblivious, but she’d drawn Elise’s attention from across the table.

  “I just thought—”

  “I don’t need you to arrange my life,” she hissed, and now Wendy was eyeing them, too.

  Heat bloomed up his neck. “I know.”

  “Do you, though? I’m not on
e of your atonement projects.”

  “My atonement projects? What?” He could maybe concede that the guys had been right and he had been kind of steamrolling over her opinions about the nature of their relationship, and he needed to fix that, but she wasn’t a project. How could she think that, after everything that had happened between them?

  “Oh, come off it. You know what I mean. You’re still atoning for that car crash—feeding the hungry, denying yourself simple pleasures, doing your white knight thing with your girlfriends.”

  He held up a hand. “Excuse me?” How could she presume to know anything about his former girlfriends based on what little he’d told her?

  “I mean, come on. You hang on until you decide they’re better off without you and then you break up with them to spare them the pain? Who does that? Presumptuous much?”

  Presumptuous. Exactly the word Jay and Cameron had used. The word that had been rolling around in his head ever since. It wasn’t that, though. She was misunderstanding. He opened his mouth to protest, but she wasn’t done.

  “And then along comes Gia, and she’s like a hybrid! You can feed the hungry and be Mr. Perfect Boyfriend with Gia! I must have been a total jackpot for you.”

  The whole table was watching them now, but he couldn’t make himself care because the mocking tone Gia was using was razoring him to shreds.

  “Well, you know what?” she went on. “I don’t need your opinion about my hair. I don’t need you to monitor my food intake. I don’t need you to be my career counselor.”

  “That’s not what I’m doing.”

  Wait. Was that what he’d been doing?

  Suddenly he could see it from her perspective. On the surface of things, maybe it did look like he was doing all that stuff for the wrong reasons, because he had a savior complex or something. Because she was right about the atonement stuff—in general, though not as it applied to her.

  And…shit. If what Cam had said was also true—that she didn’t know he loved her—she was misunderstanding everything.

  “I don’t need a savior, Bennett.”

  “No.” He was struggling for words way more than he had with the toast. “I know that. That’s not what I’m doing.”

  “Isn’t it? Because I think we have a pretty serious case here of looks like a duck, walks like a duck.”

  “Okay, well, that’s not why I’m doing it then. You’re not a project.” God. Everything in him rebelled against that idea.

  “I’m not one of your downtrodden.”

  “Well, we agree on that. You’re not one of my ‘downtrodden.’ Whatever that means.”

  She scoffed. “You know what it means.”

  “No!” he shouted. He couldn’t hear any more. Well, he’d listen to whatever she wanted to say, but not before she heard him say the missing piece, the thing that might change everything. “What you are, Gia, is the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. The one I love. I’m in love with you.”

  She blinked rapidly. He’d shocked her. She truly hadn’t known.

  He’d shocked the rest of the table, too. He could hear them whispering, but he kept his focus on Gia. “That’s why I’m doing all this shit. And, okay, maybe I need to knock it off. I wasn’t seeing it the way you see it, and that’s on me. Maybe I have been atoning for my past with the restaurant, with my exes. But not with you. Jesus Christ, Gia, what I’m trying to do with you is about the future.”

  She kept blinking. He thought he saw a tear forming in the corner of one eye. Yes, there it was, a bit of moisture coalescing and gathering. It felt like the perfect metaphor for that moment. They were at the precipice of something. Would the tear fall?

  No. No, it would not.

  Because her face turned to stone as she looked him straight in the eye and said, “What did I tell you about how I would respond to a declaration of love?”

  “You said you would run for the hills.”

  And then she did just that.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Gia’s mind was all over the place. Feverish—wasn’t that the word people used for moments like this, when you were so upset you weren’t sure what was real and what wasn’t? When you didn’t know whom to trust—including yourself?

  All she knew was that she had to get away. So she fled the restaurant, stopping briefly in front of Elise, looking deep into her eyes and saying, “Please let me go. I promise I’ll talk to you later, but please let me go now.”

  She’d tried to imbue the plea with all the fervor in her heart, and it seemed to have worked. She kept looking over her shoulder, but by the time she was two blocks from the restaurant and no one had emerged from it to follow her, she relaxed a little.

  The problem was that she didn’t know where to go. Not back to the hotel—they’d all be there, and even if they gave her the space she’d requested, she’d still feel them everywhere. And she wasn’t just talking about Bennett. She hadn’t resolved things with her friends last night—they’d merely respected her wish to change the subject after she promised to give their thoughts on her career some consideration.

  She hadn’t resolved anything.

  She paused and forced herself to look at her surroundings. She was on a main road, unremarkable and studded with restaurants and strip malls.

  But wait. What had he said? The nature preserve was “just up the road.”

  He probably meant “with a car.”

  She started to get out her phone, intending to order an Uber, but of course, she had no phone. It was in her bag, which was hanging on the back of her chair at the restaurant.

  Well, fuck it. One of the girls would grab it.

  She started walking, this time with a purpose.

  It wasn’t lost on her that Bennett had saved her even though he wasn’t physically present, by giving her a destination.

  Saved her again.

  Bennett.

  Bennett, who was in love with her.

  Did that make a difference, as he seemed to think?

  She tried to think of other people who loved her. It wasn’t a long list. Her parents, she supposed, but at the same time, her mother was still constantly saying stuff that made Gia feel bad. And her dad, like Bennett’s all those years, just kind of hovered in the background.

  She narrowed her criteria: people who loved her and actively wanted her to be happy. Her brother, Dante. Though not super actively. If you asked him, he’d want her to be happy, but it wasn’t like he was out there campaigning for it.

  Wendy. Wendy with her love-motivated righteous anger. Jane and Elise. Elise had been actively invested in the idea of Gia being happy since her RA years, when she was professionally obliged to care.

  Bennett.

  Was it possible that his actions could mean something different than they otherwise might if the intention beneath them were different?

  If, for example, he was doing all that stuff not because he was filling some hole in himself, but because, as he said, he loved her?

  It was astonishing. It was too much.

  She turned off her brain and kept walking.

  But there was something there that hadn’t been there before, something in her chest. It was light and heavy at the same time. It felt a little bit like…hope?

  When she finally reached the park, she passed a closed education center and started down a trail. She didn’t stop to read anything or to look at the map. Right now she needed to move. Move unthinkingly. She’d face the world later.

  She forced herself to take deep breaths of the warm, moist air as she walked. As she’d expected, the landscape was completely different from at home—palms and more of those freaky moss-covered trees instead of the maples and pines of Ontario. But the effect was the same. The act of walking through nature calmed her jangly nerves.

  So, since it was working, she did more of it. Just kept going, farther and farther along the path.

  Until she rounded a corner, stepped wrong on a squishy, mossy patch of earth, and twisted the hell ou
t of her bum knee. She tried and failed to regain her footing and cried out when she heard something crack in her ankle. Pain—much worse than the initial knee pain—slammed into her as she tumbled to the ground.

  * * *

  “Go away.”

  Bennett was lying on the bed in his dark room staring at the ceiling. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He was beyond talking. Talking was for people whose hearts were intact. There was no amount of talking that could repair his. Watching Gia run away earlier that evening, he’d understood that it was the last time. That she’d meant what she said. Meant what she’d done.

  “Bennett!”

  It was Wendy.

  He sighed. Ignoring the guys was easy. Wendy was harder. It was probably sexist, probably some vestige of his southern upbringing, but he couldn’t tell a woman to fuck off the way he had Noah and Cam and Jay when they’d tried to talk to him after the dinner. Even Wendy, who, unfazed, would probably respond by telling him to fuck right off in return and then breaking the door down.

  Didn’t anyone around here have any respect for the concept of a broken heart? “Wendy,” he called. “Please leave me alone.”

  There was a pause, but he was pretty sure she hadn’t gone away.

  “Bennett, Gia hasn’t come back. It’s been hours. We’re really worried about her.”

  He vaulted up off the bed. Wendy’s voice had been small. Scared. And Wendy didn’t do small and scared.

  “I’m sorry,” she said when he yanked open the door. “We’ve looked everywhere for her. Everyone else is still out combing the beach. I thought—hoped—that you might have an idea of where she’s gone.”

  “She’s an adult. She can call a taxi. Or you.” She doesn’t need my help. Wasn’t that what she had told him earlier in no uncertain terms?

  “She can’t, though—that’s the problem. She left her bag, with her phone in it, at the restaurant. She doesn’t have any money or any way to get in touch with us.”

  His first reaction was to panic. He had no goddamn idea where Gia would go in St. Petersburg, Florida.

  “It’s dark now. She’s upset, and she could be anywhere. My aunt is after me to call the police, and I’m starting to think she might be right.”