“All you have to do is look pretty,” Mom says when she lines us up for the processional. “And smile.” I’ve had plenty of practice.
“I’ll make a weird face if you do,” Tarek whispers to me before it’s our turn.
“My mom would murder us.”
“Okay, sure,” he says, “but now you kind of want to do it, don’t you?”
I pull my arm out of his to give him a gentle shove, but before I can, Mom is cueing us, and then I’m holding in a laugh as we make our way down the aisle. This is the Tarek who I was friends with what feels like ages ago.
I miss that version of him.
It’s nerve-racking, everyone watching us as I wonder if the dress is too short or too long or shows off more of my body than I’m comfortable with. When the grooms walk down the aisle together, the guests draw a collective breath, and I can’t deny that I feel some of that energy too. If I wobble during the ceremony, it’s only because my shoes are a half size too large.
During dinner, we make small talk with the other bridesmaids and groomsmen. They’re all in their thirties, and while I can’t relate to talk of mortgages and day care, I smile and nod when I’m supposed to.
Elisa’s working this wedding, her first of the summer. I do my best to keep my anxiety at bay when she swings by our table and chats with Tarek about Mansour’s and about her chemistry program at Seattle U. She’s the only one able to make that caterer’s uniform look chic, and her blond pixie cut is so cute, it almost makes me want to chop my hair again.
“So good to see you!” she says to me, leaning down for a hug, which I am not at all expecting, and I only barely manage to avoid flinging my braised kale salad onto her.
She and Tarek are friendly, not at all awkward. It makes me even more confused about what happened after I left the marina last year.
“My parents want me to help with dessert,” Tarek says halfway through dinner, typing a message on his phone and sliding it back into his pocket. “You going to be okay here if I leave?”
“Only if you tell me what escrow is so I can have something to contribute to the conversation.”
“Something to do with money.”
“So helpful, thank you.”
He gets to his feet. “See you,” he says, dragging a hand along the back of my chair before he disappears into the kitchen.
When the cake is distributed and the dancing starts, though, I find I’m not exactly in the mood for either. Josh insists that I join them for dancing, but being out here alone doesn’t feel right, and neither does the prolonged strangeness with Tarek. I played my role, but now it feels like I’m intruding, so as inconspicuously as I can, I push out of my chair and head inside.
I run into my dad in the winery’s foyer. “Holding up okay?” he says.
“Barely. It’s hard work being pretty.”
He brushes imaginary lint from his sleeve. “Don’t I know it.”
“Anything I can help with?”
“You’ve done plenty,” he says. “Just relax.” He makes it sound like a big deal, but all I did was put on a dress and stand there. “We’re on our way out, actually, so I was going to ask you the same question.”
“I might join you.”
“Before the dancing?” Tarek approaches us from the kitchen, a plate of cake in one hand. “That’s a shame, because I was really looking forward to it.”
“Stay,” Dad urges before I can interpret Tarek’s words. “Have fun.”
Knowing Tarek wants me there must make me give in. After my dad leaves us in the foyer, I lift my eyebrows at Tarek. “Dancing?”
“What? You don’t want to dance with me?”
I fight rolling my eyes. He can’t keep pretending nothing’s wrong between us, even if part of me is nostalgic for the kids we used to be at weddings, who danced as though we didn’t care what we looked like. I can’t imagine being that unselfconscious now.
“You really want to dance? With all those strangers?”
“Might as well get our mileage out of these clothes,” he says, and ugh, the pull of the nostalgia is too strong.
The dance floor isn’t too crowded, and the breeze plays through Tarek’s hair and lifts mine off the back of my neck. I give him my hand, and his other hand comes around my waist. If he was gentle when he zipped me up earlier, now he feels solid. Sturdy.
“Sorry about my hands,” he says, looking down at the rough patches of skin between his fingers. “I’ve been… having some flare-ups.”
There’s some embarrassment in the way he won’t meet my eyes, and it hurts my heart the way it used to when he stayed home from weddings as a kid. Eczema can be triggered by anxiety, and if that’s the case with these flare-ups, I wonder what’s been making him anxious. Even if we were close the way we used to be, I don’t know if we were ever close enough for him to have told me.
“It’s okay,” I say, quick to reassure him.
The band is playing “L-O-V-E” by Nat King Cole, one of the few wedding songs I can tolerate. It also means I owe my dad ten bucks today. We begin to sway, first slightly out of rhythm with the song, and I have to force his feet to follow the beat.
“You’re leading,” he says.
“Someone has to.”
Silence falls between us for a few moments, as though he’s finally hearing the subtext in my words. “It might be a little overdue at this point,” he says, “but… I think we probably need to talk.”
I’m so stunned that I nearly drop his hand. “Yeah. We, um—we really should.”
He shoves out a breath, and if I’m not mistaken, he looks genuinely apologetic. “I’m sorry, Quinn. For—for ignoring you all year. I can’t help thinking this would be a
