“Don’t run from this,” Grace said, her voice low. Then she turned and went back inside, back to her wedding celebrations.
Elizabeth stood on the patio and tilted her head back. The stars were bright above the dark shape of the lodge, clear in the way they only were when you left the city behind. She could hear the faint murmur of the reception through the glass, the bass of the music, the occasional rise of laughter.
Grace was probably dancing with her new wife, and somewhere inside, Kelsey was waiting.
22
The bathroom door swung shut behind her and the noise of the reception dropped to a muffled throb, bass and laughter and the clink of glassware all muddled together. Kelsey gripped the edge of the marble vanity and leaned forward until her reflection filled the mirror.
She looked wrecked. Not in the way that would alarm anyone at a wedding, not mascara-streaked or red-eyed, but wrecked in the way that only she could read.
Her cheeks were flushed high and uneven, the kind of color no amount of champagne blush could replicate. Her pupils were still wide, dark and liquid in the warm light of the sconces. A strand of hair had come loose from the Hollywood wave and curled against the side of her neck, exactly where Elizabeth’s fingers had grazed when she’d cupped Kelsey’s jaw.
Her lips felt swollen even though they probably weren’t. They were tingling. They had been tingling for the past five minutes.
She pressed her fingertips to her mouth and felt the ghost of it. The pressure, the warmth, the way Elizabeth’s lips had been softer than she’d imagined and she had imagined them so many times. All those nights of wanting something she had filed underimpossible, and now she could taste the whiskey Elizabeth had been drinking.
There was a moment on the dance floor where I forgot this wasn’t real.
The words played again in Elizabeth’s low voice, and Kelsey turned them over in her mind, looking for a flaw. Some angle she was missing. Some lawyerly qualifier she had failed to catch that would reduce the sentence from confession to observation. But there wasn’t one. S
he had been watching Elizabeth’s face when she said it. Elizabeth’s eyes had been steady and unguarded in a way Kelsey had never seen them.
Elizabeth had kissed her. Not for anyone inside that reception hall. She had kissed her for herself.
Because she wanted to.
The euphoria hit her then, sudden and physical, a pressure behind her sternum that felt like laughing and crying at the same time.
Kelsey bent forward over the vanity and let it happen, just for a moment, just while the bathroom was empty and no one could see her grinning at her own flushed reflection like a lunatic.
Her eyes were shining. She looked ridiculous and young and lit up from the inside, and she didn’t care because this was real.
For months she had been the one wanting. And now Elizabeth wanted her back. The evidence was on her mouth and in her blood and running through every nerve in her body like a current.
But the joy was threaded with something sharper, something that lived underneath the warmth like a stone at the bottom of a river. Not doubt that Elizabeth had meant it. She had felt Elizabeth’s hand tremble against her jaw. You couldn’t fake a tremor like that. The fear was different. The fear was that Elizabeth would decide she shouldn’t have meant it.
Kelsey straightened up and studied her reflection, the giddiness receding just enough for her to think clearly.
She knew what Elizabeth was like. Right now, on that patio, Elizabeth was sitting with her ex-wife, and the gap in her armor that had let the kiss happen was already starting to close. Kelsey could feel it the way she could feel a shift in the weather.
Elizabeth would be telling herself it was the emotion of the day. The strangeness of watching Grace marry someone else. The whiskey. A lapse in judgment, understandable given the circumstances, that would not be repeated.
Kelsey opened her clutch and found a tissue. She blotted the shine from her forehead, reapplied the lip color that Elizabeth had kissed away, and tucked the loose strand of hair back into its wave. Her hands were steady enough. The woman in the mirror looked composed, a wedding guest freshening up between dances. Nothing more.
She walked out of the restroom and turned left, away from the patio doors. She did not look for Elizabeth. She went straight to the bar, planted both hands on the polished wood, and ordered water. When the bartender set the glass in front of her, her fingers shook against the condensation, just barely, just enough that she noticed.
She drank half of it standing there, the cold spreading through her chest while the party swirled on around her. Couples moved across the dance floor in slow, loose circles. A group near the cake table laughed at something Kelsey couldn’t hear. The band had shifted to something mellow and golden, a song she almost recognized, and the whole room felt like it belonged to someone else’s evening, someone who hadn’t just had her entire life tilted on its axis on a bench outside.
Kelsey leaned her hip against the bar and breathed. She looked like a woman taking a break from dancing. She held on to that. She set the water glass down and let her gaze drift tothe patio doors just as one of them opened and Grace stepped through, champagne in hand, moving with the easy confidence of a woman returning to her own wedding. Grace didn’t look in Kelsey’s direction. She crossed the room toward Charlotte, and the crowd absorbed her.
Then the door opened again.
Elizabeth stood just inside the threshold, shoulders bare in the midnight navy silk, her chin lifted slightly the way it always was when she was scanning a room for information. Her gaze moved across the dance floor, past the cake table, along the far wall, and then it found Kelsey at the bar and stopped.
Everything in Elizabeth’s face went quiet. Not guarded. Not closed. Just still, the way the surface of water goes still in the single second before something breaks through it.
Kelsey’s heart beat once, hard, against the inside of her ribs.