“Squash and kale?” I asked doubtfully.
“I’ll give you a foot rub,” César promised, so I let him keep his arm around me and we went home for lentils instead of ice cream.
Chapter 6
I actually stood at the window, watching for the headlights. “You left the gate open, right?” I called to César.
“You’re acting like it’s Christmas and you’re waiting for Santa,” he called back. “Yes, the gate is open, the kegs are tapped, that mulled wine you made smells delicious.”
“To you,” I answered, as my stomach rolled. That “delicious” wine smell had brought back all the queasiness from a few weeks ago and I’d had to hold my breath as I poured out the bottles. But César had tasted it and claimed it was perfect, and I always loved to have some kind of special sauce for parties. I’d filled watermelons with lemonade and gin, made peach sangria, milk punch, and many other concoctions for parties in the past. The guy I had been dating a little, Lincoln, had always let me have people over at his apartment because I had never been able to host at the cottage I’d shared with Kaya and Morgan. Kaya had set down a lot of rules before we’d moved in that we’d sworn to abide by, and I really didn’t want to find my car tossed in a snowbank or hanging upside-down if I broke them.
I heard my phone ring and I walked as fast as I could into the kitchen to look for it. The dress I had on was way too tight for pockets and not made for very quick movement, either. “Here,” César said, and handed the phone to me.
It was my sister. “Hi, Ellie. What’s—”
“Can you hear me? Cam?” she yelled. “I think I have her,” she said loudly to someone else. The noise in the background made me think she was both out in the middle of traffic and at a carnival.
“I’m here!” I said back, my voice ringing out in our kitchen. “Where are you?”
“Teddy and I went to Vegas. Camdyn…” She started to giggle. “Teddy, stop!” I heard the sound of kissing.
If I didn’t know my sister better, I would have thought she was drunk. “Ellie, what’s going on?”
“Cam, we got married!” she shrieked.
“What?”
“We decided not to wait! Teddy came and he got a tryout to play for the Cottonmouths, and we went for a walk and he’s going to…oh, ok…” More kissing. “I’m so happy, Cam!”
“You got married?” I repeated.
“Teddy’s going to move to Florida and we got married and I’m so happy and…oh, Teddy…” She was laughing her head off and gasping.
“You and Teddy got married. Just by yourselves?”
“It was totally spur of the moment. I mean, he asked me and I said yes, of course! And then we decided that we couldn’t wait so he bought the tickets!” She laughed again. “I’m so happy!”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “I wish I could have been there with you.”
“What?” she asked. She gasped. “Teddy, please…ok, we need to go back to the hotel now. Right now. I’ll call you later!”
“Ellie?” I asked into the sudden silence. “El?” She was gone and I put down the phone.
“What’s up?” César asked. “Did you say—”
“Apparently my sister and Teddy Hayes just got married,” I answered, nodding. “Ellie got married in Vegas.”
“That’s great!” He grinned. “I love that guy and your sister is sweet.”
“Yeah. It’s great. She said he’s moving to Florida to be with her. Wow.” I stared at my phone, lost in thought.
“Cam?”
Now I looked up at him, tears swimming in my eyes.
“Aren’t you happy about this?” César asked me. “You were going to move there so she wouldn’t be alone, and now she doesn’t need you to.”
“I’m very happy for her. It’s amazing.” And it was, so I tried to make myself actually feel happiness, because Ellie deserved every wonderful thing in the world. I forced the tears back down. I had been planning to finally call her tomorrow to tell her about the baby and that I wanted to move to be close to her but now, as César said, she didn’t need me. “This is great. Wonderful. She loves Teddy so much and this is exactly what she’s always wanted, to settle for someone.”
“To settle for someone? Don’t you mean that she’s settling down with him?” he asked.
“It’s the same thing, isn’t it?” I stood up. “I heard a car.”
The party got underway quickly after that and in not too long, the huge house was brimming. It was hard to tell if it was actually full of people or if it was just that there were a lot of Woodsmen players there, and they were so big that they took up most of the available space. In any case, everyone was having fun and it was loud with voices and laughter. The mulled wine I had made disappeared very, very quickly. Probably that had something to do with César’s friend Jory, who I saw drinking it out of a mixing bowl that he had taken from our cupboard. I stirred together another big batch, retching a little as I did. The smell of the wine killed me.
César was the life of the party. Someone put on music and random people started to dance, including César. My lips parted as I watched him. He could dance, too? That hadn’t been under Special Talents in the questionnaire.
My eyes kept following him, seeking him out as he talked and laughed with everyone. The whole night, he was surrounded by people, his friends and a whole truckload of women. A specific woman stayed pegged consistently to his side: Arielle, the one he had been seeing.
I knew who she was, because she had introduced herself to me the moment she had walked in the front door as all the guests had started to arrive. “I’m Arielle, César’s girlfriend,” she had announced. “Are you Camdyn?
