by Meg Maguire
She looked like a bride.
A bride who’d misplaced her fiancé first, and now her lover. Just a bachelorette playing dress-up in another woman’s good fortune.
She shook her head, alarmed the thought had even crossed her mind. As if there was anything pathetic about being single.
Then why a job as a wedding planner? Or a matchmaker, for that matter?
She’d never actually thought about it, how all her jobs seemed designed to celebrate the opposite of what this article said about her. She was supposed to feel empowered and liberated—that was the magazine’s angle. But in all honesty, her singleness didn’t feel like those things. Empowered and liberated were the things Rich had made her feel in bed, and with him gone, his body and voice and heat now thousands of miles away—
A knock at the door, then Jenna’s voice. “Need any help?”
“No, just preening.”
She took a deep breath and opened the door, holding the bodice to her chest.
Jenna’s eyes widened.
“Does it look okay?”
“You look amazing.”
“It’s a bit big.” Right on cue, James swept over with clamps, cinching the excess fabric at her back.
“Oh, yes,” Jenna said, all breathy and overwrought. “That is... Wow.”
James led Lindsey to the lights and reflectors angled around Jenna’s desk. A stack of books had been arranged, their blank spines to be edited in Photoshop with titles such as “Etiquette” and “Chemistry.” Lindsey would be perched next to said stack, with her legs crossed and one of the gorgeous shoes dangling from her toes, smirking and looking “mischievous and beguiling,” as James explained.
Two women took over for Lindsey’s makeup and hair. She admired the results in a mirror held for her, relieved they’d gone natural save for the fine, crystalline glitter swept over her lids. Her hair was done in loose curls, then arranged in an ethereal updo with a few dozen discreet bobby pins.
“Okay,” Ari said, peering through his viewfinder and adjusting his tripod. “Sit on the edge of the desk for me so I can get a sense of the light.”
Lindsey perched, and Ari blinded her with a flurry of test shots.
“Ready when you are,” he said to James.
James hurried over with a paper box in hand. “The pièce de résistance.” He lifted out a tiara, glimmering like diamonds in the bright beams. He paused to fuss with Lindsey’s hair.
“Oh, that’s too funny!” Jenna said. “Hang on.” She hurried to her bag and fished out a magazine, handing it to Lindsey.
The image socked her in the gut.
It was Rich. Starkly lit, stripped to his snug fighting shorts and championship belt, powerful arms locked across his chest. Chin tilted up, he issued the viewer an aggressive, cocky challenge, eyes all but lost in shadow. A crown sat at a careless angle on his head, a deep purple cape draped haphazardly over his shoulders, its ermine trim bringing out the white of the bandage at his temple.
The Prince Is King, read the bold cover copy. Love Him or Hate Him, Rich Estrada Is Light Heavyweight Royalty.
“Isn’t that hilarious?” Jenna asked. “What are the chances you’d both wind up on magazines, wearing crowns? I’ll have to frame them side by side.”
Lindsey managed a laugh, but it felt as though someone were strangling her heart. All it took was a glance at that face and she was ready to fall to pieces. Worst of all, she was back to what she’d been for ten months—his fan, admiring from afar, from her impersonal spot among the masses.
Get lost in the shoot. This is your time in the light. Don’t miss it, dulling your shine for someone else.
Someone she missed, deep down to her marrow, but someone who hadn’t felt the same, not enough to change his plans. Someone with plans too big to change—certainly not for a woman he’d shared a few pleasurable nights with, a couple heart-to-hearts. Someone who shone so brightly, his memory left phantom auras burned across her heart.
They’ll fade, she promised herself. In time, they’ll fade.
James and Ari began issuing directions, and Lindsey scrambled to take them. She sat straight and got the shoe dangling. “Like this?”
James fiddled with her hair and bodice and posture, made her smile a hundred different ways—“Don’t squint. Keep that chin down.”
Perhaps mercifully, not long into the shoot he decided the tiara was “too literal,” so it sat instead atop the prop books. The camera flashed and flashed and flashed, and Lindsey smiled easily through the opening shots. But she could feel her lips turning wooden. In the white chasing each flash, that image of Rich filled the void. With every frame, her hold on her emotions was slipping, a sharp and heated panic rising in her middle.
After fifteen minutes and a million adjustments and poses and blinding flashes, Ari called for a break so he could go through the first round of photos on his tablet.
Lindsey stood, uneasy on her feet, a ricketiness that had nothing to do with the heels. A head rush made her sway.
“You okay?” Jenna asked.
“I, um...” Her throat ached with brewing tears. “Sorry. This dress is so hot, and the lights.”
Jenna hurried off to find Lindsey some water. Not eager to sit on the front steps and suffer the questioning looks of passersby, she thanked Jenna for the bottled water and excused herself to the building’s rear exit for some air.
The wide alley was empty and she took a seat on the hood of Mercer’s car, hugging the voluminous skirt in her lap. The morning was muggy, and in truth it was hotter out here than in the air-conditioned office, even in the shade. But it wasn’t the heat that had her gasping for a deep breath.
She hurt in a way she hadn’t felt before, a different pain entirely than when her engagement had been called off, or during any of her and Brett’s breakups. It hurt like grief, every heartbeat echoing with loss. A tear escaped, chased by a half dozen more. She let them flow—venting this pain was the only way she’d get through the rest of the shoot.
This was supposed to be her day. Her chance to be the one at the center of it all. She’d expected to feel luminous and magnetic, and though that was how Ari and James and Jenna were treating her...it didn’t hold a candle to how she’d felt with Rich’s eyes on her, any of the times they’d enjoyed one another’s bodies, even when they’d simply sat across from each other in that bar. In the end, she didn’t crave an audience of ten or fifty or thousands. It had taken a single man to make her feel those things, and who knew how long it might take to meet another who could do the same.
She finished her water and forced deep breaths, knowing her break was running long. Right on cue, the back door squeaked, surely Jenna or James coming to coax her back inside. She stared down at her borrowed shoes, collecting her wits and praying the crying hadn’t undone all the makeup artist’s work.
Then she heard it—that familiar scuff and the clack of a crutch. “Linds?”
She looked up, as shocked as she might’ve been had an actual fairy godmother materialized to hover above the stoop.
“Rich?”
He hopped from the step and swung himself across the asphalt. “Jenna said you were out here.” His gaze took in her getup. “She didn’t say you’d be dressed like that.”
“It’s my shoot for the magazine.” She blinked at him, confused. “You’re back.”
“I’m back. Whatcha doing out here?”
“I got overheated. Why are you her
e? Is your foot okay? Did your match get called off?”
“Foot’s fine. Match is still on. Change of plans, training-wise.”
“Oh?”
“You know that bit during the announcements, where they say, ‘Fighting out of San Diego, Rich Estrada’?”
She nodded.
“Never sat right. So I’m back to fighting out of Boston. Out of Wilinski’s.” He nodded at the building.
Her stomach flipped. “You’d give up all those elite trainers and everything?”
He shrugged. “This place is my style. And my home. And if I can train down there with our misfit crew, and actually beat Farreira in November...it’s good for everybody in that basement. It’s good for my mom and my sister. And it’s good for me, despite what my manager seems to think.”
“Well. Lucky us. Um, welcome back.”
He smiled and hopped closer, swiveling to join her on the hood. “But I’m not being a hundred percent honest.”
“About?”
“About what brought me back,” he said, eyes on the building. “I mean, it never felt right, fighting out of some flashy West Coast gym, but that didn’t stop me from doing it the past year. Because there were exactly two people I could admit caring about. And in my head, caring about them equaled bringing home paychecks. But even with the money coming in...it hasn’t fixed how I feel sometimes. Inside.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve got all these people who care about me—Merce and those guys. I didn’t even want to see any of them when I got home. I didn’t trust I was still worth anything injured. I kept everybody at arm’s length. I kept you there. Like all we ever were was a good time.”
She frowned. “Weren’t we? To you?”
He looked to the fabric fisted in her lap. “No.”
Her heart beat hard and her gaze, too, retreated into the ruffles.
“I wanted us to be,” he said. “It’d make everything simple. But there’s something about you. Something like a key that fits some lock in me, and gets all these thoughts spilling out, stuff I’d never tell other people in a million years. Those things I told you on the fire escape, and in bed, after...you know. I never talk to people like that.”
His hand slipped between them, thumb rubbing at the hood’s silver paint. “I’ve known Mercer more than half my life. He drove me to the E.R. in this car when I got concussed after a boxing match when I was seventeen. He let my mom have a nervous breakdown all over him in the waiting room. We lost a mentor together, and he came to my dad’s funeral when I told him not to.... He gives so much of himself, I owe him what I would a brother.”
“Sure.”
He met her eyes, only for a second. “But I’ve never told him half the stuff I told you. Even if I wanted to be that open with him...it’d be like peeling off my skin. I couldn’t physically do it.”
“Oh.”
“But I meet you, and this dark stuff just comes out. I get near you and the wall falls away. It scares me.”
“Why?”
He sighed deeply, avoiding her gaze. “I’m so frigging terrified I’m not good enough to be what my family needs me to be. If I let someone else get close...I don’t know.”
Lindsey waited as he found the words.
“I’m scared of letting my mom and Diana down, but with them, there’s no choice. Anyone else I might care about, I thought I could choose them, when the time came. When I’d done what I had to, when I had room for somebody extra. But I don’t have any choice with you, either.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“I don’t, either. I just know when I’m with you, when I even think about you...I feel like some different man. All broken down and defenseless, all this stuff I hate feeling, usually. This stuff that makes me worry, like maybe I might wind up with depression if I’m not careful. Like the kind that killed my father.”
She squeezed his hand.
“Except with you, it actually feels good. Like all that emotional crap inside of me wants to get out, that stuff I can keep barricaded in with anybody else. And with you...I can rush around and try to plug all the holes you open up and try to keep it from escaping, or I can just let it go. Let it all out. And feel lighter, not empty, I guess.” He met her eyes, looking confused. “Sorry. I’m no good with explaining feelings and shit.”
“I think you’re doing just fine.”
“All the dark stuff, it got so much worse the second I landed in San Diego. I knew I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. In my head, I was following the plan...but the plan doesn’t work anymore. So here I am, I guess I’m saying.”
“Because of me?”
He nodded.
As his words sank in, she felt as light and shiny as the dress, so light she might just float up off the hood and into the summer sky. “Wow.”
“When I got settled back at the training camp, it took me two days to realize things were different. I always feel lonely at night when I’m away. Lonely, bored, restless. But this time I felt straight-up sick. Physically.”
She rubbed his hand.
“I told myself it was Boston or Lynn I was missing. The familiar stuff, all the brick and the way it smells here in August. And that it was my family, after I got to see them for a couple weeks. That it was leaving the gym, believing I was actually giving back down there for the first time.”
“But?”
“But it was you, more than all those other things.”
She wanted ask, Really? But tears had her throat too sore to get the word out. Rich coaxed her fingers from the tulle and took her hands.
He blew out a long breath and sat straight. “You wanna be my girlfriend?”
She laughed from pure surprise.
“That a yes or a no?”
She let a tear slip free. “That’s a yes. I’d like that very much.” Glancing down at the dress, she realized that for a wedding planner and matchmaker, this was all very mixed up. A question as delightful as a proposal but with nothing approaching its gravity, issued with her dressed for a jaunt down the aisle.
“Don’t cry. You’ll mess up your makeup.” He dabbed at her lower lashes with his thumb.
“The past few days have been a roller coaster.” But this changed so much of it.
He traced her cheek, fingers cradling her jaw. His kiss was as exciting as it had been last year in the back of that cab. It lit her up as hot and bright as ever, leaving her hungry when his lips finally let hers go.
For a long minute they simply sat, studying one another’s face, fingers playing.
My boyfriend, she mused. You’re my boyfriend. She smiled to herself, realizing how many women were going to hate her guts and feeling rather evil and pleased about it.
Rich asked, “How’s your sister been?”
She sighed to admit that wasn’t going at all to plan.
“I have a proposition for her, too.”
“Oh?”
“If I offered to cover her dues and coach her personally, do you think she’d be willing to come back to train?”
Lindsey blinked. “Of course she would. Until September, like you promised?”
“I meant next summer, actually. For six months or a year, however long she needs to figure out if it’s really her thing.”
“You actually think she could make a job of it?”
He smiled. “I don’t have the first clue. But I know it’s something she wants to explore. Might teach her a few things about herself before sh
e writes off college for good.”
“I think she’d love that.”
“Good. I’m prepared to commit to training her, on two conditions.”
“Which are?”
“When she comes back, she’s got to be able to run five miles without hyperventilating. I’m good, but I’m not a magician.”
Lindsey laughed. “Fair. And the other?”
“She has to graduate.”
Realization dawned. “Ah.” She blinked at him, then grinned. “Aren’t you clever?”
He shrugged, looking humble. “Just don’t tell her I care. Last thing I need is for that girl to think I’ve gone soft.”
“Deal.” They shook, the gesture growing soft and playful, two sets of fingers flexing and twining.
He grinned down at the bundle of gauze and sequins in her lap.
“What?”
“That dress makes me wish I could carry you over a threshold.”
She blushed. “It’s a bit soon for that. I may not be eligible anymore, but I’m happy to stay a bachelorette for a while yet.”
“How about you be my date to Jenna and Mercer’s wedding, then?”
“That’s at least a year away.”
“I’m used to planning for events months in advance. Speaking of which, you better request extra time off to come to Rio Thanksgiving weekend. I want you right there in the front row, screaming my name when I step in with Farreira.”
She bit her lip, imagining that moment. Imagining Rich winning, thanking her alongside the two other women he cared for the most. Striding next to him backstage, warmed by that spotlight, not lost in its shadow.
Speaking of lights. “I better get back inside before the magazine goes broke paying for the photographer to sit around twiddling his thumbs.”
