THE JUNIOR BRIDESMAID

by Amy Baker

  “Everything okay?” he asked innocently.

  I nodded my response leaning into the doorjamb. Overwhelmed by the stunning sight before me, I quickly forgave myself for not mentioning to Hugh that Ryan needed to speak to him. Or, for that matter, that whatever he needed to share was important.

  “Well, then…are you going to stand there all day?” he questioned coyly.

  I shook my head pushing off the molding with my shoulder. When I got close to the bed Hugh stretched out grabbing me suddenly. He tossed me across his body and onto the bed. I barely had time to rebound when I felt his weight on me.

  “What took you so long?” he murmured against my neck.

  I was pretty sure he was referring to my non-existent trek across my tiny bedroom and he was being facetious. At least I was hoping his question was of the rhetorical nature because I had no intention of answering given the breathless state he had me in. So instead of responding with words, I wrapped my legs around him and held him tightly to me.

  But as I lay there silently feeling Hugh’s body finding unbelievable ways to get closer to mine, something came over me. It was like a tidal wave of emotion. And a confession flew from my mouth unbridled. “It didn’t take me long at all, Hugh. I fell in love with you the instant I set my eyes on you.”

  Can anyone say left field? I felt Hugh’s entire body go still. I wasn’t at all surprised that my sudden admission left him speechless. It had come from that place. You know the place. The place where all bad ideas come from?

  Yes.

  That place.

  My heart.

  The heart, just so you know, is like a very young child…brutally honest and unable to contain itself. That is why it should never be given a voice or turned to in a crisis. The heart wants what it wants and therefore, if given the opportunity, will make poorly timed, spontaneous decisions, which can only be classified as too impetuous or ill advised.

  In this case it was probably both but certainly an error of grave proportions.

  There was no way for me to unsay what I’d said. I swallowed loudly and still there was nothing coming from Hugh whose lips had left my neck and were now buried in the bed covers next to my head. No movement. No words. He was a heap of dead weight. I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. Since I had never perfected the ability to miraculously evaporate into thin air, I had to deal with the situation. So, I dealt with it the only way I knew how.

  I panicked.

  “Don’t mind me.” I downplayed my confession. “I don’t know what the hell I am saying.”

  “Don’t,” Hugh’s muffled response came just on the heels of my excuse. “Delilah, don’t try to take it back.” My palms, which rested flat on his back, could feel the vibration of his voice as he tried to speak loudly enough so I could hear him through the covers.

  “I just…” I began.

  “No,” he rumbled. “You said it. I heard it.” He turned his face away from my neck but still had it planted in the mattress. His physical reaction felt like alienation and didn’t bode well for my emotional wellbeing even though rationally I knew that he wasn’t able to breathe with his face buried in the covers. “You can’t take it back,” he explained speaking a little more clearly.

  “I can’t?” I asked innocently. “I could try.”

  I felt him shake his head. “No. You can’t,” he murmured dejectedly.

  I cleared my throat trying to quickly fabricate another evasive maneuver. “You don’t have to say anything in…” I started with another defensive approach giving him the commonly used but rarely effective ‘you don’t have to return the sentiment’ speech essentially letting him off of the hook, which I thought was a generous gesture.

  “Don’t say that either,” he cautioned.

  “Well, then, I don’t know what to say,” I explained my dilemma peeling my hands off of his lower back unsure where to rest them.

  “That’s because there’s nothing else for you to say, Delilah.” He lifted his head from the mattress and stared into my eyes. “There’s only something for me to say.” The silence that followed was torturous. Hugh took his time and I wasn’t sure what would come out of his mouth next. I watched and waited with bated breath as his eyes danced back and forth on mine. Just when I had reached my hopeful limit and my eyes began to close with disappointment, Hugh began to speak.

  “Darcy treated you so badly because of me.” My eyes opened slowly and drifted to the ceiling over his right shoulder. I wasn’t sure where he was going with the conversation but the last thing I wanted to hear from Hugh’s lips in that very moment was Darcy’s name. That just couldn’t be a good sign.

  He shifted his elbows side to side settling into a more comfortable position. The mattress dipped and rolled until he stopped moving. Then he went into story-telling mode. “A bunch of guys were at the diner in town after one of the football games. We were having a silly conversation. Do you remember Grant?” he asked me like we were making small talk.

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I was desperately fighting back the tears that were threatening to burst from my eyeballs. He must have seen the distress I was experiencing because he continued without a response. “Grant asked me if I could be with one person for one night in a perfect world where no one would know, who would my free pass go to?” he smirked as he relived the memory. “It was meant to be a silly prank. Grant knew something I didn’t. Darcy and her friends were in the booth behind us. I guess he thought I would say Darcy. I mean, he knew we were getting engaged and all. But that isn’t what I said.” He leaned into his left elbow and took his right hand placing it under my chin. He shifted my face toward his. “Hey,” he called so my eyes would go to his. Once they did he went on. “I chose you,” he flashed a cautious smile and then let it go. “I didn’t just say your name either. We had been drinking and I went into detail,” he said the word ‘detail’ with emphasis. “I realized how much detail when I turned to look at Grant and he looked like he just saw my mother naked,” Hugh sort of half-laughed. “Darcy was so pissed. She started squealing so loud I thought her head might explode. Her friends were all there.” He shook his head at the memory. “It was pretty bad. I had to try to calm her down so I told her that it was a stupid fantasy and she was the real deal. I thought my quick response appeased her but I knew it hadn’t because she was always so mean to you. Delilah,” he began my name on a whisper, “Darcy was mean to you because I told Grant that God put you on this Earth to torture me. You were my end all be all but you were just too young.”

  I couldn’t help the tear that rolled down my cheek without warning. Hugh saw it and he wiped it away. His small smile returned cautiously. “But you’re not too young anymore, Delilah Welling.” His eyes roamed my face while his thumb caressed my cheek. “You are still my end all be all,” he paused to place a sweet kiss on my lips, “and I’ve been in love with you for a very long time,” he finished stringing out his words.

  He waited until his message registered in my expression. Then he gently pressed his lips to mine again. It wasn’t a searing kiss. It was a whisper soft, heart swelling, life altering kiss. The kind of kiss that changes a person’s outlook on the world. And it held more meaning than any elicit thing we had done that weekend. Then he pulled his face an inch from mine and finished me off on a whisper. “And now you’re mine forever.”

  I swallowed hard from the emotion that was coursing through me. Maybe Hugh didn’t realize it but one of my dreams had just come true.

  “I love you, Hugh,” I repeated back. His eyes dropped to my lips and then he lowered his to mine again.

  We kissed, just kissed, for a long while. So long that Ryan’s important message was long forgotten.

  Chapter 13

  I thought I was hearing things. I thought maybe I was in the middle of a nightmare from which I just couldn’t awaken. Because in the deep recesses of my sleeping mind I could hear Darcy Strong yelling at the top of her lungs that she was going to kill me. Darcy had done ma
ny things to me. Maimed my reputation, called me embarrassing names, damaged my self confidence, smeared my name all over Southern Virginia, but in all the years that I’d put up with her she had never threatened to kill me. So I rolled over and chalked up my hallucination to an unwelcomed nightmare. That was until Hugh jumped up and started dressing urgently. I felt a few light smacks on my ass and then Hugh’s voice cutting through the fog.

  “Delilah. Get up and get dressed,” he coaxed urgently.

  I jolted to sitting clutching the top sheet to my chest. My hair was strewn this way and that and I was looking at a half naked Hugh threw the wayward strands. “What? What’s going on?”

  “I’ll kill you, Delilah Welling!” The screeching seemed to be getting closer but it wasn’t coming from the hallway. Then I saw the crazed face and wild hair through my bedroom window.

  Ah!

  “Oh my God!” I screamed.

  What the heck was she doing here? And why did she look so enraged on my fire escape?

  I scrambled off of my bed (away from the window) and onto the floor searching for clothes to throw over my head. Hugh stormed toward the window AND LET HER IN!!! She fell inside my window from the fire escape and onto my bedroom floor with a thud.

  “What the fuck are you doing here, Darcy?” Hugh sneered. Though it was a good question I would have preferred he called the police and left her outside.

  I managed to get half dressed, the exact opposite of Hugh. He was wearing pants and no shirt. I was wearing his shirt, luckily a long one, and no pants. I stood up making sure to position myself between my bed and the nut-job and tried to control my breathing. I was hoping that she would answer Hugh’s question as to why she was scaling fire escapes illegally and spying on me in New York City. As far as I knew she, Ryan and their three adorable children, Dolly, Dustin, and Damian, had a happy life.

  “You!” she growled pointing her finger at me.

  My eyes widened confused by the start of her verbal attack. Me what? I hadn’t seen, heard or spoken to or about her in over a decade. The first word of her sentence should not start with the word ‘you’ while she was pointing her finger at me.

  “Me?” I said with a squeak.

  “How could you, Delilah?” her eyes were squinting so hard that I questioned if she could see threw them.

  I saw Hugh’s head swing my way out of my peripheral vision. “How could I what?” I asked breathily.

  “You are the lowest of the low, Delilah Welling. You are a sick, malicious, devious bitch, and you should be ashamed of yourself.” Though her verbal accusations outlined her dismay quite clearly they didn’t help to clarify why she was upset.

  I shook my head back at her because I truly didn’t know what she was referring to. “Listen, Darcy. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I held up one hand hoping to ward off any more name calling on her part.

  “Oh really?” she questioned haughtily.

  I just shook my head again. My eyes bounced from Darcy to Hugh and I could see he looked perplexed. I watched his eyes drift down Darcy’s arm to her hand. There she clutched a piece of paper that looked all crumpled and tattered. Hugh pulled the piece of paper from Darcy’s hand and started to read it. I watched him intently because he was staring at it a long time. Either whatever it said was lengthy or he was reading it twice. I saw his jaw clench in anger and then he directed that anger at me. I was so shocked to see the mounting animosity that had begun to palpitate off of his body aimed in my direction that I became speechless.

  Worried and speechless.

  I swallowed hard before I spoke one broken syllable. “Hugh?”

  He shook his head once sharply to shut me up. Then I watched as his hands balled into fists combatively. The waves of anger were almost visibly rolling off of his body. He started to rumble before his voice essentially exploded. “How could you do this?” he roared.

  I jumped having never heard such a terrifying sound. I had no idea what he was talking about, yet I was afraid to find out whatever it was. I was like a young child who wasn’t sure what they were in trouble for.

  “Delilah!” he bellowed demanding an answer.

  The tears appeared instantly. His furious tone had me literally shaking in my socks. “I, I…” I swiped at the tears trying to muster up the courage to ask him what he was talking about but I was so upset that I couldn’t form the words. Hugh took my stuttering response as an admission of guilt and stormed out of the room. On the way, he crumpled the note and whipped it at my head. Luckily it missed but I inhaled a jagged breath devastated that he meant for it to hit me. He might as well have shot me through the heart because his actions evoked the same response. I stood in silence lifeless until reality bit through the shock and I burst into sobs. In my head I had tried to halt the progression of his departure in a million different ways. But physically I couldn’t move a muscle. Deep down I already knew that no effort could have persuaded him to hear me out. He was so furious he had already made up his mind. Darcy headed for my door, swiftly snatching the crumpled note off of the floor and followed behind Hugh storming through my apartment. “I had no idea you were so vindictive,” she muttered. The sobs racked my body as I felt the cold blanket of heartbreak constrict my chest. Hugh was gone. And the only thing I knew was that whatever he thought I did was awful.

  Chapter 14

  “It’s over?” Logan sniffled before he added his usual, ‘over.’

  I wasn’t absolutely sure what Logan was more upset about…my departure from the company or my break-up with Hugh.

  “Logan do you think we can have this conversation face-to-face?” I asked. “There’s only so many ‘over’s’ I can handle in a 24-hour period.” I just didn’t have the energy to deal with his intercom foolery.

  “You didn’t say ‘over,’” he noted.

  I walked out of my office where I had been packing all of my belongings in a box.

  I stopped in front of his desk and said the single word bitterly. It held double meaning and I was fairly confident Logan understood the double entendre.

  “I just can’t believe it,” he shook his head outlining his disappointment. Of course, I was still unsure what he couldn’t wrap his head around, my transfer to another state or the debacle better known as my love life.

  “Yeah, well. Don’t even get me started on the things I can’t believe.” I picked up his pencil holder desperately needing to occupy my hands and tapped it gently on his desk as I tried to suppress the overwhelming thoughts of recent events. I sniffled back the emotion that was dangling from the precipice and changed the subject. “Do you think you can find me a few more boxes?” I pressed my lips together still reining in the heartache. “I don’t think everything is going to fit into the one that I have.”

  Then Logan’s main concern became clear. “First just tell me what happened with Hugh.”

  Every time I replayed the events that transpired between Hugh and I, tears began to flow uncontrollably. Partly because I didn’t know what happened but mostly because I just missed him awfully. I shrugged in response to Logan’s question because I truly didn’t know what to say. But Logan was adamant. He needed to know even the smallest detail. So I began to explain what I could from the beginning. Maybe if I hashed it out, out loud, things would make more sense.

  “We spent the weekend together,” I began with a half-hearted grin. “It was wonderful.” I pulled a tissue from the box that sat atop his file cabinet. “Then Hugh’s ex from our home town showed up and accused me of…something.” I shrugged and shook my head still reeling from the confusion. “She had a note. Hugh read it. Demanded an answer and left when I didn’t have one,” I finished on a whisper.

  “And you have no idea what the note said?” he questioned suspiciously.

  “No.”

  “Delilah,” he admonished. “Think.”

  My voice rose in defense. “How could I possibly know? I’ve never written Darcy a note in my life.”

  “No, don�
�t think about what the note might have said. Obviously a note exists and you didn’t write it. But we both know a certain someone who could have sent that note, don’t we?” he nodded once raising one eyebrow to his hairline. When I seemingly wasn’t catching on he continued. “Delilah, if Stacey could orchestrate your exile to Virginia don’t you think she could manipulate a girl you once described to me as a complete idiot?”

  My chin jerked back in surprise while my eyebrows simulated a perfect ‘v.’

  “I mentioned Darcy to you before?” I asked with surprise in my tone.

  “Well not exactly. You were on the phone with that pepper from Virginia. What’s her name? Julia?” he shrugged his indifference like it was no big deal that he was eavesdropping on my conversation. “I just unintentionally file all nonsensical shit that doesn’t pertain to me in my head,” he explained with a wave of his hand as if that excused his actions.

  Since I didn’t have the energy to scold Logan on his eavesdropping practices or explain to him that his next boss might not be so understanding of such behavior, I just skipped directly to the dropping, which was a hell of a lot easier. Dropping the subject of his eavesdropping, that is.

  I had to admit, Logan’s theory did make perfect sense. I was starting to think I never gave Logan as much credit as he deserved. His silly antics always undermined his astuteness. I knew he was smart. But since he never behaved like someone who had a modicum of intelligence I had a tendency to forget and thereby underestimate him. As I tested his theory in my mind, my expression became more suspicious.

  “Do you really think Stacey would go so far as to send a note to Hugh’s ex in Virginia?” I asked with disbelief in my tone. “How would she even know about…?” As the question breached my lips my eyes settled on Logan’s. He looked like he was waiting for me to catch on. Then he saw the entire scenario dawn on me and he began to nod. He held up his hand straight out at me and continued to nod.