by Nella Tyler
I sent an email off to the bakery to get the appointment scheduled. “I can certainly see about it.”
“Oh my God, this is going to be perfect!” May squealed.
James kissed her cheek. “Only because you’re going to be there, sweetie.”
Usually, I didn’t care about couples being affectionate. But watching these two fawn over each other, watching them endlessly declare their love for one another and talk about floral arrangements and cake companies like every decision they made was the most important decision that they would ever make… it was hard for me not to feel jealous. Further, it was hard for me not to see Dexter.
I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of wedding he would want. Something classy, of course. Something simpler than what his class would suggest, but far more extravagant than what I could afford. Something breathtakingly beautiful. Gold and white as the colors, fine decorating on the cake.
It was completely absurd. I nearly kicked myself in the head on the way home for thinking those things. We weren’t even in love! I certainly didn’t love him. I’d been in love before, and this wasn’t what it had felt like. It was more certain than this, more inevitable than this. With Dexter, I felt like I had to make a million exceptions to fit him into my life.
Love was supposed to be easier than that, right?
When I pulled into the driveway at home, my father’s car was there. I was grateful that someone else was going to be home to make the house feel a little less empty.
“Dad?” I poked my head in the door.
“Briella! Hey, honey!” My dad came out of the kitchen with an apron tied around his waist. It was ridiculous, that apron, but he always insisted on wearing it. I was glad to see it because it meant he was making dinner.
I gave him a hug and felt a little better already. “Hey. How was your trip?”
I walked with him into the kitchen and smelled something delicious cooking. Homemade food was fantastic. It reminded me, again, of Dexter, and of how excellent of a cook that he was. I didn’t know that I’d ever find another man who could cook that well or that willingly again.
“It was more of the same,” her father said. I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but assumed it meant boring business stuff that he didn’t want to tell me. “Tell me about Florida,” he said. “Did you do anything fun there?”
This was my dad. I told him everything. “Yeah. Yeah, I met someone there, actually. The first night. And we went on a few dates; it was, um, it was weird.” I shook my head. “His name was Dexter.”
My dad looked at me with a bit of surprise. “I didn’t expect that. I thought you and Nina would go partying all week.”
“That was the plan,” I said. “But then I met Dexter, and Nina was all over me trying to get me to go on a date with him. So I did. And he was really, really nice, Dad. He was kind, and compassionate, and he listened to me. He cooks.”
“He cooks!”
“And I just really liked him.” I shook my head and felt almost like I might cry. “And I had to leave, you know? I had to come back to Houston. He’s not the guy for me, I don’t think, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.”
“Aww, there now.” My dad leaned over to give me a hug. “It’s all right to go out and meet people. Even if it’s just for fun. You needed to see that men aren’t all awful. Now you know that if you ever need to go looking for someone, you’ll find someone.”
After dinner, I felt significantly better. I went to go back to my room, and then the loneliness started to creep in again. I missed Dexter’s hands, I missed his mouth. I laid down in bed and closed my eyes, wishing that I could will away this incredibly juvenile feeling of angst. I was stronger than this. I wasn’t some ditz who needed a man to be happy—I’d always held my own, even during a horrible relationship.
I set my hand on my phone and ran my thumb across the screen to light it up. I didn’t know why I expected him to call. He had no reason to. He’d gotten what he’d wanted—some sex from a girl he’d never have to see again, one outside of his social group. It wasn’t fair of me to think of him that way, but it made the pain a little less obvious.
Just as I was about to go to sleep, the screen lit up. I checked the Caller ID to see who it was.
Dexter. I felt myself beginning to smile.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Dexter
“Biscuit?”
“Nah, not if we’re gonna work out later.” Tyler shook his head and took a sip of coffee.
I shrugged and set the biscuit back into the basket. I rarely skipped work, and last week had been entirely disorienting for me. For the entire week, I’d done nothing but struggle to keep my head above water and try to manage piles and piles of work. It didn’t help that I had to redo a lot of what Tyler did, because my brother’s skills simply did not lie in investment firm work, but I couldn’t hardly get angry with Tyler. Tyler was more than aware of his own shortcomings.
“I still can’t believe I let you convince me to skip work this morning,” I said. Especially after having had the entire previous week off.
“You have to skip sometimes,” Tyler said. “And not just when Dad gives you permission. Honestly, there’s no point in showing up anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“Even if I’m there, I’m just doing a fuckup job. I might as well stay home where I can get a little sleep. He doesn’t want me there, but he doesn’t want me to leave, either.” Tyler rolled his eyes and stabbed at an egg with his fork. “It’s bullshit. I’ve done everything I can to blow him off.”
That wasn’t really true. Tyler could technically quit and walk away. He could move somewhere else, he could do a thousand things to distance himself from Dad. I knew, though, that he wouldn’t like the departure from this comfortable lifestyle. On his own, he wouldn’t be able to afford lavish parties and probably would have to get his own much less pleasant job.
Perhaps it was resentment towards himself that led Tyler to lash out towards Dad. “I definitely see why you’re upset,” was all I said. Dad wasn’t easy to work with; quite the opposite. He was harsh, demanding, and as I was growing to see, he didn’t have a very good character.
That being said, it was reasonable to expect a mean, harsh, demanding boss in a top-quality investment firm. The work we did was high-profile and required a huge amount of perfectionism. That’s where Tyler floundered, it seemed, and nepotism made him resentful instead of grateful. He was acutely aware of his own inadequacy.
“He’s just been such a prick,” Tyler muttered into his mug. “I mean, like that account you walked in on him yelling at me about. I misplaced a comma on the sum, and lost a client.”
I cringed. I had assumed that Tyler had messed up a comma and made a grammatical error, not a mathematic one. It sucked that he’d been barked at for an error of that sort, but I could only imagine the damage that he’d caused. “Shit, you lost a client?”
“Yeah. I know, it’s a big deal, but… in my defense, Dad put me on the client. I mean, of course he’d put his shittiest employee to work on a black man’s case. Because he’s fucking racist on top of everything.”
My initial reaction was to bristle at the tone he took about Dad. I knew that Leonard Mason had his fair share of flaws and I was beginning to see him for the person that he really was, but my instincts still told me to protect him. We continued the conversation when we got to the gym, and Tyler started grunting out his complaints between weightlifting sets.
“Doesn’t help that the client is in fucking Houston, so it’s not like I can do anything to remedy the situation.”
Houston. My mind, as it tended to do involuntarily over the last week, leapt to Briella. I wondered how she was doing and whether she thought about me. We’d talked on the phone before, and it hadn’t seemed too forced. I could only hope that she wanted to try and keep up whatever we had going, even if now it seemed difficult to do.
We switch
ed places so I that I could lift weights and Tyler could spot me.
“So now we’ve lost a client in Houston, and I can’t do anything about it. We’re in Florida,” Tyler explained. He took a long drink of his water bottle.
I considered the implications of going to Houston. I wondered if it would change anything. It probably wasn’t a good idea to even think about it, but I got so distracted that I nearly dropped a weight. Tyler caught it before it could hit my head.
“Careful,” he warned me.
When I got to work, I’d made up my mind about what I wanted to do. It might be a terrible idea, but it was an opportunity I couldn’t afford to miss out on. I’d be kicking myself for the rest of my life if I didn’t at least try to get this spot in Houston and see Briella again. Seeing that my father’s office door was open, I walked in with only a small tap to announce my presence.
“Dexter, good afternoon,” he said.
I offered him a smile. “I wanted to ask you about the Houston account.”
My father raised an eyebrow. “We have a few accounts from Houston. Which are you referring to?”
“The one Tyler lost,” I said. “I talked to him about it.”
Dad sighed and rubbed his forehead with one hand. “Right, that. A horrible mess.”
I nodded. I loved Tyler, but this was a mess for sure. “I was wondering if you might trust the case to me.”
My father waved his hand dismissively. “Ah, I wouldn’t bother. The case was dead in the water anyway. It was better that Tyler was the one to deal with it—I don’t think you’d want that on your record.”
I couldn’t help but feel a ping of irritation to know for sure that Dad had thrown Tyler under the bus like this, especially if it was to protect me. Although, to be fair, I was the one who actually cared about his reputation in this office. “Well, it might be good to actually go to Houston and investigate the situation,” I offered. “Sometimes clients react well to face-to-face interactions, and it would at least show we cared.”
Dad frowned and tilted his head to the side slightly. “Hmmm. Perhaps. I could always send Tyler down… but he’ll probably blow off the appointment to go party.”
He would, and we both knew it.
“I could send you down there for a bit,” Dad said. “But I can’t lose you for an entire week again. I’ll need you to go down there, get business done, and come back.”
My heart almost exploded out of my chest. I had the chance, now, to see Briella again. “Of course. Thank you, it’ll be…. it’ll be good.” I almost wanted to tell him about Briella and impart some of my life to him. I knew better than to trust my father with personal problems, though. He didn’t want to bother with his kids’ emotions.
“It’s not a bad idea,” Dad mused. “You’ve got good instincts, Dexter. That will serve you well in the future.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Briella
The weekend without any clients felt painful. I wandered around my house and looked at apartments on my tablet without wanting to go out. Nina came by one afternoon to share some coffee and tell me about a one-night stand she’d had, and we both laughed at the irony that she hadn’t gotten laid in Florida but found someone back home. Today I had work, but not for a little while longer, and I made tea and eventually settled for curling up on the couch to watch some TV.
Before I could get bored with TV, my phone went off. When I saw that it was Dexter, I was all too eager to hit ‘Accept’ and pause the TV. “Hey!”
“Hey, Briella. How are you?”
His voice made me feel a little bit better. I smiled and settled into the couch a bit more. “I’m doing all right. I’m watching some ghost hunting show.”
“Ghostbusters?”
“No, like real ghost hunters.”
“Did they catch anything?”
“It’s not real!” I laughed. “I don’t know if they even believe it’s real. But I watch it anyway. I don’t have work for a few more hours. How have you been?”
“Busy,” he said. “I think they really missed me while I was gone for the week.”
“You’re a good worker,” I presumed. It was a safe assumption to make. When he put his mind to his work, he did very well, and I expected that his absence from a company would result in quite a problem. “In any case, I miss you more than they could.” I wished I hadn’t said that. It was horribly corny, for one, and for another, it was unlikely that I hadn’t just come off as desperately trying to get his attention back.
“I miss you, too,” he said. I was relieved he felt the same way. I wasn’t honestly sure why he’d called. He couldn’t get sex from me from where he was, so he had to care genuinely about me and want to stay in touch.
I’d set a terribly low bar for him in my mind. I shook my head and said, “I should let you get back to work.”
“Yeah, but I wanted to call and say hi. I might call you later, if that’s okay.”
“Of course.” I didn’t know when my clients would be done, but I usually finished up around evening. I thought about maybe talking to Nina about all of this and seeing what she thought.
We hung up, and I got ready for work. I didn’t really want to go deal with a set of newlyweds who wanted everything to be perfect. It was hard not to be resentful in my situation. And that was strange—when I’d been in a relationship with Jason, I wasn’t resentful. I was hopeful. Now, though, it felt like a knife to the face to hear people going on and on about their loved one, their dream wedding.
I still liked my job, though. I liked to plan and organize and make everything just right. Besides, I didn’t have the option to start hating my job now. I needed to get an apartment of my own, and none of the ones I had my eye on were anything close to what I could afford. I needed to save up for a few more months as it was; dropping my job and picking up a job at a grocery store would be a dead end for me.
I thought about getting something to eat on the way out since I was early, but I saw my dad’s car pull into the driveway. He walked in the door as I started to walk out, and I gave him a hug. “Hey, Dad!”
“Hey, sweetheart.” Dad returned my hug and set his briefcase down by the door. “What have you been up to today?”
“Just sitting around for the most part. I talked to Dexter.” I wasn’t ever sure what to disclose with Dad when it came to Dexter. I didn’t want to tell him too much and have him think that I was an idiot, but I couldn’t bear to tell him nothing.
“Oh, did you? How did that go?”
“Pretty well. It was a quick call, since he was at work. He said he’d call me back later,” I said. “I hope he does. I miss him.”
“I’m glad to see you excited about a boy again,” Dad said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m all worried like dads are supposed to be. But I know you learn from the things that happen to you.”
“I just don’t want you to think that I’m stupid for trusting anyone,” I admitted.
“Nonsense. I think it’s brave. And as long as he’s treating my Briella well, that’s all that matters to me,” Dad said. He kissed the top of my head and went on his way.
Delighted with my father’s acceptance of my situation and generally optimistic about the way my day had been going so far, I felt a little bit happier than I had when I woke up when I got in the car to go to work. I was meeting this particular couple in a café that they had met in, and when I arrived, I could tell that things were a little strange.
For starters, they didn’t seem to want to talk to one another.
“Hey, so were you thinking of an indoor or an outdoor venue?” I asked, sitting down with a notebook and my tablet when introductions had been made.
He glanced at her, and she shrugged. “It’s whatever. I mean, either works.”
He looked up and nodded. “Whichever, then.”
I couldn’t believe the apathy concerning the venue. I knew exactly where I wanted to get married, and it blew my mind to think that anyone could go to the effort to hire a wedding
planner and then not care what they planned. It was a waste of money, honestly—but then, I wasn’t about to tell them that. “Right, so we can get you an outdoor venue, but it might be hot. It’s about to be summer, after all.”
“Indoor, then,” she said.
“Sure,” he echoed.
“Okay…” ‘Indoor’ didn’t really narrow it down. “Were you thinking about a chapel, a church, some kind of museum…?”
He looked back to her, and they both shrugged.
They didn’t seem to want to talk to each other. I had absolutely no place being anything of a marriage counselor, but I could sense tension here, and I knew a bit about diffusing tension from years of being friends with Nina.
“A lot of times, people worry about the photographability of certain places,” I said. “Those pictures will last forever, so it’s good to get a venue that provides good lighting.”
She perked up a little bit. “I hadn’t considered that.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I mean, it’s one of the biggest days of your life. Maybe it’s stressful as hell, but if you don’t do everything you can to make it worth something, you’ll regret spending it stressed and upset.”
He sighed. “We have been stressed. It’s all so expensive, you know? And we’re trying to get our lives started out.”
“That can be hard,” I agreed. I certainly understood the financial struggle. “It’s just good to remember that you’ve got each other. That’s why you’re getting married, yeah?”
She smiled up at him. “Yeah, that is. Doesn’t matter if his parents hate me.”
“They don’t hate you, Marcie. Oh, you’re joking.” He laughed, and the tension in the room started to lift a bit.
“All right, so are you looking for a church or somewhere else?”
“Churches are so cliché! I want a museum.”
“Marcie.”
The meeting went on like that for a while, and we got some real progress made. I delighted in the fact that I’d helped to relieve some of their stress. It could be painful, not knowing what was coming in the future. I didn’t know what my future held for me, either, but passivity wasn’t the answer. If I didn’t care, I’d make mistakes, or at least I’d look back and wished that I’d put more effort into things.
