Nate looks completely embarrassed, and a few of the guys at the table are doing their best not to laugh at him, which is probably in their own best interest, because Nate could definitely take all of them. At once, probably. I can tell that Ethan wants to make a crack, and there’s a part of me that wants to see what would no doubt be a smack down of epic proportions on Nate’s behalf. But Ethan decides not to take the bait. The women, well…every one of them but those in his immediate family is looking at him all starry eyed and I’m a little jealous about it, honestly. There’s a part of me that wants to walk over to where he’s sitting, stand in front of him and write MINE all over his plain grey t-shirt. But that’s crazy, isn’t it? Wanting to mark my territory when there’s no territory to mark? I can’t have Nate-ish territory.
Right?
What is wrong with me?
Thankfully, Nate seems to be oblivious to his adoring female audience. “Can we talk about anything other than my wildlife rescue hospital?”
Amy sighs when she looks at her son, her hands clasped in front of her. In no time at all she’s turned her attention to Xavier.
“How’s your mama?” she asks. Xavier’s mom was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago. She’s doing well now, but for a while there…
“She’s great, thank you for asking,” he says, his mouth half-full. He smiles at her, and this cute dimple makes a dent in his cheek. It makes me remember why I had a slight crush on him when I first met him all those years ago.
“She’d smack you if she saw you talking with food in your mouth,” Jasmine says in a half-biting, half-sweet kind of tone. She and Xavier dated in high school, back before any of us knew them. They broke up the summer before college, but Jasmine teases him a little too much, and Xavier always looks at her a beat longer than he probably should. There’s something there still, but I don’t think they’ll ever act on it, and what kind of hypocrite would I be if I called either one of them out?
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Ben says.
Amy rolls her eyes at her son, but she smiles in spite of herself. “Marco, how’s everything with you?”
“Well, thank you.” He’s always so polite.
“Since we’ve got a wedding coming up and I’ve got brides on my mind, I have to ask. Have you proposed to that girlfriend of yours yet?”
Marco’s mid-swallow, and he nearly chokes on his food. Ben gives him a light pat on the back, but it doesn’t take Marco long to recover.
“No, ma’am. I haven’t.”
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Amy asks.
Marco shrugs, and his face gets serious all of a sudden as he looks around the table, like he doesn’t know how to answer her. “I’m not sure if she’s the one.”
“Ah,” Amy sighs. “It’s best to wait then.”
“How do you know?” Shelby asks. “When somebody’s ‘the one?’”
“I knew when Jack flew across the Atlantic from Paris to Philly while he was still studying abroad, just so that we could be together on Christmas,” Amy says, and unlike the other night at dinner, not a single one of her children playfully groan at this story.
Jack chimes in, taking hold of Amy’s hand. “And I knew when she spent her entire Christmas break trying to mend me back to health.”
This sweet, almost bashful smile pulls at Jessa’s lips. “I knew when Ryan was the first person I wanted to call whenever something good happened. Or when I just wanted to tell someone about my day.”
I look over at Ethan, and his eyes meet mine. There’s a sadness behind them, and I’m wondering if he’s thinking the same thing that I am. He was never—not once during the course of our relationship—that person for me. I always called Gabby with good news, or whenever I wanted to talk.
Gabby’s got this distant look in her eyes. “Ben and I went away for a long weekend in Austin,” she says, looking over at him. “We had tickets for this play that I’d been wanting to see forever.” What she doesn’t say is that she’d had an aversion to going to the theater ever since her parents died, and that weekend was a big step for her. But she doesn’t need to tell the people at this table that, everyone who she cares about knowing the story already knows it. “It was really important to me that I wear this bracelet that belonged to my mother. But I was so nervous that somehow I managed to leave it behind. It seems so trivial, this piece of jewelry, but there was a story behind it, and I just…I needed to wear it that night.” She smiles at Ben with unshed tears in her eyes, and he’s watching her like she’s the most precious thing in his world. “Ben drove all the way back to Dallas to get it, just so I could wear it. That’s when I knew.”
She touches Ben’s cheek and leans in for a kiss.
“Usually Ben’s the forgetful one,” Amy says.
“Like how he forgot the wedding rings.” Jessa’s eyes widen, and she slams her palm against her mouth when she realizes she let something slip that she shouldn’t have.
“Relax,” Ben says, stroking the back of Gabby’s hand. “Nate picked them up on his way out here.”
“And then he missed his flight because he stopped to get barbecue and got stuck in traffic,” Jessa says, and my stomach just…drops.
But there was a weather delay that night. He told me he couldn’t get a flight out until the next morning.
Nate looks over at me, his eyes wide and uncertain. The words his sister just said replay on a loop in my brain.
IT’S WELL past one in the morning when everyone finally begins to shuffle off to their rooms, tired from a long night of eating and laughter and fun between friends. Even though I haven’t known most of the Wright family for long, and I haven’t spent any quality time with my friends in the bridal party for a while, there was something very homey and familiar about this evening that makes the end of it bittersweet.
I’m not very tired, and it seems that Nate’s still wide awake, too. I have a feeling that he’s just waiting to get me alone so that he can explain the whole airport story that Jessa let slip. I can admit to wanting to know the reason for it probably as much as he wants to tell me, which is much more than I should.
We told Amy and Jack that we’d take over the clean-up duties so that they could take the rest of the night off. They’ve done so much for this wedding that it only seems right, and it gives Nate and me a nice neutral ground on which to talk things over. Neutral ground is good; with Nate it’s the least dangerous. Nate’s standing on one side of the long picnic table, and I’m on the other. We’re both holding huge black plastic bags: one for trash, the other for recycling.
Nate dumps paper plates with uneaten bits of food on them into his bag, and I toss remnants of wine into the grass before throwing the plastic cups into the bag to be recycled. The crickets are chirping, and there’s a soft breeze in the air. It’s light enough to cool our skin, but not strong enough to make a mess of what’s left on the picnic table.
The two of us are quiet, a silence that’s not altogether comfortable. I think he’s waiting for me to ask him why his sister thinks that he missed his flight from Dallas when he’d told me that it was delayed until the next morning. He seems kind of uneasy about it, and because I always think the worst, I assume that it’s because he had me pegged as an easy target for airport sex and he isn’t quite ready to own up to that yet. I mean, I was an easy target for airport sex; I was looking for it, for crying out loud. But knowing that would ruin the whimsy of the flirting, the magnetism that I felt when we were together. I want him to tell me the truth, but at the same time I don’t want to know it at all.