Don't Kiss the Bride

I hope the show’s not giving her crazy ideas. Our story isn’t going to end tragically good, or romantic. It’s just going to end—simply and anticlimactically.

She’ll go her way.

I’ll go mine.

Simple.

I try to ignore the fact that if it were simple, I wouldn’t have turned down sex with a hot chick because I couldn’t stop thinking about my eighteen-year-old fake wife.

Not good.

Not good at all.

“I think I’m just gonna head to bed,” I answer.

Disappointment flashes across her face and disappears just as fast. “Okay. Goodnight, Lucky.”

“’Night.”

“Watch out for any random kisses on the way upstairs,” she jokes.

The first thing I do when I get to my room is scrub the hell out of my face.

Chapter 19

Skylar

I’m doing Pilates in my room when my phone buzzes with a text.

Jude: Can you come down to the basement?

Me: That’s not at all creepy, said no one ever.

Jude: Just come down here. Wear shoes with rubber soles.

Me: Still creepy.

Jude: Stop being a bad wife ;-)

Laughing at his little joke, I roll up my Pilates mat, slip on my sneakers and head downstairs.

The basement is unfinished and musty, with a cold concrete floor. I rarely come down here unless I need something out of the big wooden pantry or need to do laundry. Jude stores his tools down here, and lots of old boxes and furniture. One corner is set up as a gym, which he uses several times a week.

My sneakers squeak as I make my way toward him at the far end of the cellar, and I realize the floor is wet. By the time I reach him, we’re standing in about two inches of water. He’s frantically moving cardboard boxes off the floor, piling them up on an old workbench and on stacked wooden pallets.

“Yikes. What’s going on?” I ask.

“The sump pump broke,” he replies, not looking at me.

“What’s a sump pump?”

“It’s like a vacuum that keeps the basement from flooding when it rains a lot.”

“Oh,” I say, looking at the rising water on the floor. This can’t be good.

“Help me move this stuff. I can’t let it get ruined. Try to move the lighter ones, if you can.”

Quickly, I grab an old dusty box that has Erin written on it in black marker, and move it to the other side of the room where it’s still dry.

I carry two more Erin boxes, then help him push an old filing cabinet and a desk out of the water.

“Thanks,” he says, wiping the back of his hand across his forehead. His long hair is sticking to his sweaty face.

“You’re welcome,” I reply. “Who’s Erin? A former wife?” I counted six boxes with her name on them, and he was obviously in a rush to move those first.

Catching his breath, he leans back against the old desk. “My little sister.”

“Oh. She used to live here, in my room?”

“Yeah.”

I wonder why Erin didn’t take her stuff with her when she moved out.

“How old is she?” I ask curiously.

He lifts the hem of his T-shirt and wipes his face with it, putting his abs on full display.

Holy moly.

My mouth has suddenly gone dryer than the Sahara. Swallowing, I drag my eyes from his chiseled eight-pack.

“Hopefully, she’s twenty-six,” he says.

“Hopefully?”

“It’s a long, long story, Sparkles. I gotta run to the hardware store, get a new sump pump, and clean this mess up with the shop vac. My entire Saturday is fucked.”

“I could go with you,” I suggest tentatively. “You could tell me about her on the drive. I’ll help you when we get back.”

His attention shifts down to the growing puddle on the floor. I wonder if I’ve overstepped our roommate line in some way. We’ve been married four weeks today, and we’ve been pretty much keeping our distance from each other, except for dinner and a television show together.

“Or I could start shop-vacking the water while you’re gone,” I say, trying to fill the silence. “I’m not going to let you do all this by yourself. I live here, too.”

He finally lifts his gaze. The thin lines around his eyes are deeper. His eyes a little red-rimmed with exhaustion and defeat.

“You can come, if you want,” he says.

Silence sits between us for the first few minutes of the drive to the hardware store. I think back to the first day we met when he gave me a ride home.

I had no idea he’d change my entire life.

I’m just about to bring that up when he starts to talk in a low, haunting, voice, “Erin was my younger sister.” He tells me all about how she simply disappeared one day. How he searched for her for weeks and how the police had finally assumed she was either a runaway, or dead.

Horrified, I listen. Erin was only sixteen. Two years younger than me. Vanished, without a trace or a clue other than a strange text message. Jude’s voice cracks with emotion as he talks about her, and it’s heartbreaking. He believes she’s dead because she wasn’t the type to run away. They were close—she’d never leave him without saying good-bye or being in touch, especially after all this time. The story doesn’t end there, though. He goes on to tell me about his mother and her fight with cancer, her recovery, and the way she moved out—leaving him with a house full of memories and little more than the occasional phone call and a few birthday and holiday cards since. I knew Jude had a bad time with drugs and alcohol when he was younger, but I didn’t realize it had anything to do with everything he just told me. It shifted my idea of his substance abuse from something reckless and rebellious to the thing that numbed his pain.