So I got on that fucking plane. I put the fake smile on at the wedding that I knew all of my friends saw right through.
Karson had given that absolutely beautiful, heartbreaking, Nora Ephron worthy speech, yet I still got on a plane.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It’ll Be Okay – Shawn Mendes
The wedding was lovely.
It happened on a beach, not far from where Jay and Stella had reunited. Not far from where I’d had those moments of peace with Karson. Where I’d sat on the beach with him and told him I loved him. After, we drove for an hour before we found a tattoo shop that was still open to ink his name on my hip.
There were plenty of ghosts on that beach, but I thought I managed my act very well.
Stella, Yasmin and Zoe were all concerned about my weight, I could see it in their eyes. I made sure to mention the session with my therapist I had booked the day we arrived home, made sure they saw me eating excess amounts of the amazing food offered.
Of course, I also indulged in the amazing Pinot Noir. It was practically a crime not to. Which was how I found myself on a beach in the early hours of the morning, watching the sun just beginning to rise.
I didn’t jump in shock when a dark form sat beside me on the beach. I didn’t scare easily, or at all these days. Instead, I took the steaming cup that Jay offered me.
“You’re up early,” I commented, sipping the warm liquid, staring at the sun creeping up the horizon. “Even for the crazy, disciplined badass you are,” I added. Stella had told me that he was up at five in the morning almost daily.
Five.
In the morning.
The only time I was ever awake that early was when I was still up from the night before.
“I have a child,” he commented. “Sleep is merely an idea these days.”
I grinned into my coffee cup, thinking of my darling Ruby. She was a true wild child, like her Aunt Wren, even if we weren’t blood related. I loved that little baby with all of my heart and then some. She was my only source of sheer, unbridled joy. Not even a shred of darkness entered my heart when she was around.
“Still up from last night?” Jay asked.
“Yes, me and a bunch of Janet’s nephews went to the pub and had ‘skulling’ competitions which are just chugging races,” I snickered. “I won.”
“Obviously,” Jay responded.
The soft crashing of the waves filled up our silence. Jay and I had grown close since he got his act together and crossed oceans to get Stella back.
I knew Zoe and Yasmin had accepted him—he was married to our best friend and was the father of her child, he wasn’t going anywhere—but they weren’t his biggest fans.
They didn’t like the world he operated in, the shadows he cast on our friend and their life together. They blamed him for what happened to me.
I supposed if I wanted to, I could blame him too. He was the one that pissed off the Russian Mafia, he was who they wanted to hurt when they gunned me down in the street.
But that wasn’t how I operated. I knew Jay. Knew his heart. And I knew that he toiled over what had happened. I knew he loved my friend and their precious baby with an intensity that could not be measured. He’d move heaven and earth to protect them. He’d treasure them and burn down cities for his family.
No fucking tax accountant would do that for them.
And I liked Jay. He was scary and intense. Cold. Had a wall around him made of ice and steel. But there was a man behind all of that. One who cared deeply. Felt deeply. And had a horrible past.
I liked being around him. I didn’t feel so disfigured and ruined by my trauma. Didn’t feel like an outsider. He didn’t demand any kind of emotional labor, didn’t look at me with pitying, worried, well-meaning gazes.
“You crossed an ocean for Stella,” I said, my voice barely audible above the waves.
“Not without help,” he reminded me.
I smiled sadly, thinking about the day I told a teeny white lie about Stella being in the hospital in order for Jay to see his real feelings—without the bullshit—about my best friend and rush to her side.