Tess in Boots

by Courtney Rice Gager

  “Uh-huh.” She combed her fingers through my hair, trying to decide how to fix it.

  “Why’s he here? And why’s he driving around to the back of the house?”

  “Because he’s dropping off some tools for Jake.” She made eye contact with me in the mirror and smiled.

  “Now? It doesn’t seem like a good time, what with the rehearsal starting soon.”

  “I said the same thing.” She rolled her eyes. “Men.”

  “But—”

  She stopped fiddling with my hair. “Are you okay, Tess? You seem nervous.”

  I took a breath and blew it out. “That’s because I am nervous,” I said.

  “Me too.” She opened the makeup bag I left sitting on the counter and rummaged through it. “Weddings always make me nervous.”

  “Is that why you and Jake eloped?”

  She paused and looked up at me as if I’d sprouted a second nose.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  Sara let out a soft laugh and shook her head. “You really don’t know. I was sure Jake would have told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  She sighed. “We eloped because…”

  “Because?”

  “Because I proposed to Jake!” She put her head in her hands, covering her eyes in embarrassment.

  “You what?” My mouth flew open. “No!”

  She nodded, hands still over her eyes. “It’s embarrassing. I hate talking about it.”

  “It’s not.” I reached out and touched her shoulder. “It’s pretty awesome. And brave.”

  “I guess.” She cringed and went back to sifting through the makeup bag and pulled out a compact of powdered foundation.

  “So how did it happen?” I asked as she went to work powdering my face.

  “Well—close your eyes—we were broken up. And I missed him. You can open now.”

  My eyelids popped open. “Wait. You were broken up?”

  “Uh-huh.” She dug around in the bag for a few seconds, and then went to work brushing my cheeks with a layer of blush. “Jake dumped me.”

  “What an idiot!”

  “Yeah. I thought so, too.”

  “What’d he do that for?”

  She shrugged. “I think he thought things were getting too serious. I think it scared him.”

  I didn’t answer. It sure sounded like Jake.

  “So anyway, we were broken up,” she said. “Not for long. Just a couple weeks. But I knew it wasn’t right. I knew I wanted to be with him.”

  “So you… you what? Bought a ring?”

  She laughed as she placed a bobby pin in my hair. “No. I didn’t plan it or anything. I decided to go over to his place and tell him how I felt. So I did. And I ended up asking him to marry me.”

  “And that’s when you went to Vegas?”

  “Uh-huh.” She walked around behind me and tousled the back of my hair. “Jake’s idea. Turns out he spent the time apart thinking the same thing. Why wait, he said, if we were so sure? I guess when you know, you know.”

  When you know, you know.

  Sara’s words hung in the air as she sprayed my hair in place, and then went to work on my eyes.

  “You okay?” she asked, as she was touching up my mascara.

  “Yeah. I’m just thinking.”

  “About the wedding?”

  “No. About how I wish I had some of your courage. And about whether it’s true.”

  “Whether what’s true? “

  “When you know, you know.”

  She nodded. “I think it is. At least, for me it is. I don’t necessarily think love has to take forever to be love. Sometimes, it just is. Sometimes you can’t help it.” She placed her hands on my shoulders and turned me around so I could see my reflection. “Well, what do you think?”

  “It’s perfect.” I reached up and touched my hair. “Thank you.”

  “Of course. I’m going to head down and make sure the barn’s unlocked,” she said.

  “Sounds good. I’ll see you in a bit.”

  I looked intently into the mirror for a while after Sara left.

  When you know, you know.

  I knew, all right. But Thatcher was gone. I’d missed my chance. It was over, and I needed to find a way to un-know.

  I needed to find a way to forget.

  CHAPTER 29

  I walked along the path alone, listening to the sound of the gravel under my boots and taking deep breaths to calm myself. The bride and groom would be arriving in a few minutes. This was what I’d been working so hard for. It was impossible not to be nervous.

  My anxiousness was heightened when I thought about the plan to leak the story to the media. But that wasn’t mine to worry about, I reminded myself. That was in Natalie’s hands. All I’d have to do was keep things moving along tonight. No, not even. Tonight, all I had to do was stand there and smile. The officiant would take care of moving things along.

  The thought, such a fleeting and innocent one, came and went through my mind as easy as a summer breeze making its way through an open window. And then, it circled back. The officiant. The officiant…

  I stopped short and almost tripped myself. A sickening realization fell upon me. We didn’t have an officiant. There was no one, no one, to perform the ceremony. I forgot to call the pastor. I was so distracted, it slipped my mind.

  How could I have overlooked this? How could I have been so stupid? I’d forgotten the most important detail, and in doing so, I already singlehandedly ruined this wedding.

  Don’t panic, Tess. There’s still time.

  I wasn’t sure if I still had the pastor’s business card. Maybe I could run back into town and stop by the church.

  But on a Thursday night? Who would even be there?

  That’s when I remembered. Jake. Jake could do this! He had gotten one of those instant online ordination certificates a while back so he could perform his friend’s wedding ceremony in the Bahamas. At the time I rolled my eyes, but now I could kiss him for it.

  I broke into a run. I had to find Jake. And fast.

  As I entered the clearing, I scanned around for him. The fields were empty except for a few waiters milling about the picnic tables. I trotted to the barn and peeked inside. No one there, either. Darn it. Where was he?

  I stepped outside the barn and pulled my phone out of my bag. Jake answered on the second ring. “Hey, Tessy.”

  “Jake! I need you. Help.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know. Where are you?”

  “I, uh, ran into town to pick something up.”

  “Jake! They’re coming any minute. I need you here. Why did you leave?”

  “I needed… something,” he trailed off, and I noticed a strange echo on the other end of the line. He was lying. I could hear his voice. He was around here somewhere.

  “When do you think you’ll be back?” I asked the question just so I could listen for his response, to see if I could sniff him out. I tiptoed around to the back of the barn and surveyed the catering tents. They were clear.

  “Uh… I don’t know. Fifteen minutes maybe?”

  Aha! Caught him. The voice came from inside the barn. He was hiding out in the back room. I hung up the phone and stormed in, making my way past the bar and heaving open the heavy wood door.

  Sure enough, there, with his back to me, stood Jake, and…

  “Mom?”

  She jumped at the sound of my voice. But yes, it was her. My mom. And there were others, too. Many others. I caught a quick glimpse of Annie before the crowd let out an awkward and unsynchronized chorus of, “Surprise!”

  I closed my gaping mouth and took a step back, knocking into the door behind me.

  What were they doing here?

  And then, things got even weirder. The crowd parted, and someone stepped through.

  Logan.

  He wore a light-colored suit, without a t
ie, and his face was so clean-shaven it glowed. A light coating of gel held his freshly-cut hair perfectly in place. He looked amazing.

  And he was here, standing right in front of me. It was all I could do not to stretch my hand out and touch him to make sure he was real.

  He took another step toward me and cleared his throat. “You weren’t supposed to see all this. Not yet.”

  I didn’t respond. I couldn’t.

  “Can we go outside?” he asked.

  I nodded. I could feel my eyeballs bulging out of my head as he opened the door for me. I stepped through the threshold and followed him outside into the field.

  Logan was here. Right in front of me. I hadn’t really thought about how I would feel when I did see him, because he wasn’t supposed to be here. Not today. He was supposed to come on Saturday.

  But he was here today. And so was my mom. And Annie. And who knows how many other people I hadn’t even seen yet. They were all here. It was as if they planned it.

  Wait, I realized. Jake lied to me on the phone. He was in on this. That meant they had planned it. As a surprise. A major, major surprise. And that kind of surprise could only mean one thing.

  Logan was proposing.

  I began to tremble. My knees wobbled, my legs growing weaker with every step. “I think I need to sit down,” I said.

  “Okay, let’s head over—”

  Logan gestured toward the picnic tables, but I couldn’t make it that far. I plopped down right on the grass, with my legs folded up and my skirt flared out all around me.

  “Tess? Sweetheart? Are you all right?”

  “Uh-huh.” I clasped my hands together and placed them in my lap, sucking air in through my nose and blowing it out my mouth.

  He regarded me for a moment with a look of concern. Then, he crouched down to my level.

  “I know this must be a bit of a shock for you,” he said, “me, showing up here like this.”

  “A little,” I said. A little? I was practically going into heart failure.

  “I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.” He gestured back toward the barn.

  I looked at my hands in my lap. Logan was here. Logan was here. I couldn’t make sense of how I felt about it. Part of me wanted to reach out, wrap my arms around him, bury my face in his neck and breathe in his smell. He was so handsome, so familiar, so safe. Another part of me wanted to slap him across the face. The nerve of him, surprising me like this, after what he did to me. But… he had surprised me. And from what I could tell, he made a huge effort to do so.

  It was too much to take in all at once. All I could handle was breathing. Suck in, blow out. Suck in, blow out.

  “Tess, let’s go sit down over there.” He gestured toward the picnic tables again.

  I nodded, but I didn’t move.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh. I’m fine.” I willed myself to stand up. This time my body cooperated, and I followed Logan over to the tables DJ’s parents had set up. The staff disappeared and we were alone, except for the rows and rows of grapevines and the smell of barbecue cooking nearby.

  We sat down face-to-face at the closest table. I realized then, I hadn’t looked into his eyes yet. I looked at his clothing, his hair, his eyebrows, his forehead, his nose. But I hadn’t looked into his eyes. Sitting across from him at the table, I made eye contact with him for the first time since I saw him here. His eyes looked… a little desperate maybe? There was a sense of urgency to his stare, a longing I’d never seen before. It was the first time I’d ever seen such a look in Logan’s eyes.

  “Your hair,” he said, “you changed it.”

  I took a small section of hair between my thumb and forefinger and pulled on it. “Yeah.”

  He didn’t comment on it, but I expected as much. Instead, he reached his open hand out across the table. I looked at his outstretched hand for the longest time, and then lifted my own and placed it in his.

  “I should tell you…” He looked down and shook his head, as if it were too difficult to get the words out. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I should tell you that the night before I left for Europe, I was planning on proposing to you.”

  My jaw dropped open.

  He pulled his hand away from mine, and I could see him reach for something in his pocket. “I had the ring with me and everything.” He placed a black box on the table and opened it up.

  I gasped. Inside was the most dazzling ring I’d ever seen. It caught the light as the box opened, and I literally squinted as the sun glinted off the band. It was a large oval solitaire, surrounded by a setting of tiny diamonds and a delicately-carved band. It was stunning, absolutely exquisite.

  I looked from Logan, to the ring, and back again. My mouth was still hanging open, I realized. I closed it and rubbed my lips together.

  “As you know, things didn’t go as planned. I wanted to do it after dinner, but the conversation… took a turn. I didn’t feel like it was going well, and I didn’t want the memory to be tainted for you. So I figured it wasn’t the right time,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe my ears. On our last night together, Logan was minutes away from popping the question. But I opened my big mouth and ruined everything.

  “I was disappointed,” he said, “and I know I acted weird. I’m sorry for that. Mostly, I was disappointed in myself for letting it get to that point. For ever making you question how I felt about you, Tess.”

  There it was again, that flash of desperation in his eyes. No, not quite desperation. It was fear. Fear of losing me, maybe?

  “It was hard being away,” he continued. “I spent most of the trip feeling sorry for myself. But then, I got this idea. I decided I would ask you as soon as I got home. I even switched my flight and got in a day early to surprise you. I ran over to your place straight from the airport.”

  “But I wasn’t there,” I said. I didn’t mean to chime in, but I became so enthralled with hearing his side of the story I couldn’t help it. I was like a child, shouting out a familiar part of a favorite storybook.

  “Right. You weren’t there.”

  I sat there in silence, taking in what he said. Hearing his side of the story made me feel sympathetic toward him. But still, I had so many questions.

  “Why didn’t you call, Logan?”

  He folded his hands and pressed his thumbs together the way he did when he was nervous. “The note said you needed to get away. I thought you didn’t want to see me. I could certainly understand if you were mad. I didn’t want to smother you, or scare you off.”

  “So you decided not to come after me?”

  He leaned forward and shook his head. “I did come after you. You just didn’t know it.”

  My shoulders tensed. How long had this been going on?

  He took a deep breath and seemed to hold it for a second. “I called Jake. I wanted to find you, and I was hoping Jake would know where you were. So I called him.”

  Jake? He hadn’t said anything this whole time? He knew how upset I was about Logan. How dare he keep this from me?

  “I made him promise not to say anything. Because I wanted to surprise you. He agreed to keep quiet, and to help me.”

  “Help you with what?”

  “Once I found out where you were, I came up with this plan, and I needed his help. Do you remember my old roommate from the apartment?”

  I nodded.

  “I got his girlfriend, Viv, to help me, too. She works as a private investigator. So I hired her to come down here.”

  Viv? He had hired Viv?

  “You sent a private investigator down here to spy on me?”

  “It wasn’t like that. I sent her down here to… move things along. To help you plan all this.” He gestured over to the tent.

  Oh no. Viv had seen me with Thatcher. She asked about us. She knew there was something going on. She was the only one at the vineyard who’d picked up on it. Well, besides Jake, but that was different. I’d
told him. Viv figured it out on her own. Of course she did. That was her job. Did she tell Logan?

  “What did she… did she say anything?”

  He shrugged. “She got weird all the sudden. She called me and said she was out. I tried to convince her otherwise, but she kept saying it wasn’t fair to spring something like this on you. Something so big.”

  I put my head in my hands. The woman Annie saw with Logan, and the voicemail on his phone; it wasn’t another woman, I realized, at least not in the romantic sense. It was Viv.

  “That’s why I called to tell you I was coming to see you Saturday,” he said. “I didn’t want you to feel ambushed.”

  I lifted my head to look at him.

  “I’m sorry, Tess. I should have told you the truth, but I was so afraid of running you off. I thought if I could sweep you off your feet, then things would fall into place. And I could have you back.”

  I looked into his eyes, expecting to feel anger toward him. But instead, all I could feel was an overwhelming sense of regret. I spent the past month trying to get over Logan. I started seeing someone else. I fell in love with someone else, or at least I thought I had. Now I was so confused about everything.

  And all this time, he was pursuing me.

  “Logan… I wish I’d known,” I said.

  “I know. And I wish I’d done this a lot sooner.” He stood, picked up the ring, and walked around to my side of the table. Then, he got down on one knee and took my hand in his. My heart felt like it was about to leap right through my throat.

  “I’ve tried to propose to you twice. I’m hoping the third time is the charm. I love you, Tess, and I don’t want to go another day without you as my wife. Will you marry me?”

  As much as I’d longed for this moment, now that it was here, I couldn’t stay in it. I needed to go somewhere else. I felt faint. My breath became short. My pulse raced. I couldn’t look at him. It was all too much.

  My eyes went in and out of focus. I fixed my gaze on my arm, desperately trying to find a way to keep from falling over.

  Breathe, Tess. Breathe.

  I distracted myself by counting the freckles on my arm. Eleven. There were eleven freckles on my left arm.

  I counted them another time, and then another. Wait, there was one more. Make that twelve. Twelve freckles.