Page 8 of The Wedding Fake
“You don’t want to?” he asked, wide-eyed but grinning like the world’s sexiest Cheshire. I let myself stare at that grin, hoping it might take my mind off the wedding worries, but with thoughts of this wedding in my head, the smile had lost its potency, and instead of the sexual ache I’d felt moments earlier, now I only felt a little pang in my chest. Probably the beginnings of another anxiety attack. “It’s a long story,” I muttered.
He looked around the elevator, which glowed a dull yellow under the fading emergency light, and spread his arms in a wide shrug. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve found myself with a sudden abundance of time.”
I chuckled in spite of myself. Something about this moment, trapped in a dimly-lit elevator, felt frozen in time, like I could tell Hudson all my secrets without consequence. I slipped my mask off, setting it back in my lap, and he nudged me with his elbow. “Glad you decided to stay,” he joked.
“So,” I began, inhaling deeply, the whole story poised at the tip of my tongue, ready to unload on this unsuspecting stranger, “I have three sisters.”
“Oof. I thought one sister was a lot.” He chuckled. “Where do you fall in the mix?”
“Emily is older, Tess and Nora are younger. Nora is only twenty-two, but she’s getting married in two weeks.” I sighed. Even to a stranger, it felt wrong to say how heavily her choice weighed on me. I was supposed to be supportive, not questioning Nora’s age and commitment.
“May I ask how old you are?” Hudson asked, pulling me from my thoughts once more.
He shifted in my periphery, and I glanced back to find he’d dropped his head back against the wall of the elevator. The new angle gave me a view of his Adam’s apple, and my eyes followed its tremble and bob as he swallowed. Could an Adam’s apple be sensual? “I’m twenty-seven. You?”
“Twenty-eight,” he replied, rolling his head to look at me. “But I interrupted your story. Please, continue.”
I licked my lips. I didn’t have to tell this story. I could make one single move—toss a leg over his lap, maybe—and lose myself in him. Plenty of women would be thrilled to be trapped indefinitely with a man who looked like Hudson, and here I was treating it like a therapy session. There were so many things I could say to him, but I said, “Anyway, Nora has been dating Ethan for a couple of years?—”
Therapy it was, then.
“I take it you don’t like Ethan?” he asked, probably because I still couldn’t say Ethan’s name without it sounding like a curse. I was working on it.
I bit my lip. “He’s just immature and, and…” I didn’t know the word for the gut feeling Ethan gave me, the same feeling I had every time I thought back on my relationship with Dan and considered all the red flags. “Flighty,” I finished lamely, shaking my head almost instantly. “That’s not the word I want.”
Hudson didn’t comment, and I proceeded to tell him the story of Ethan and Nora and finally, Grant Dupree.
“May I ask a question?” he said finally.
In retrospect, I’d probably been talking the better part of a half hour, so another voice was a welcome relief. “Please.”
“Why not just date Grant? Wouldn’t you get everyone off your back if you gave him a shot and it didn’t work out?”
I’d be a liar if I said I hadn’t considered it, and God knew it was precisely Emily’s argument every time we talked, but I couldn’t make myself do it. “There are a million reasons,” I mumbled—the same response I gave my family when they asked the question.
“Hit me with one,” he said, and I looked at him, wide-eyed and surprised, trying to decide how much I was willing to share.
“This is going to sound stupid,” I said, and he sat up straighter, twisting to get a better look at me. He said nothing, but his expression made it clear he was ready to hear. “I have a gut feeling about Grant, too.” He didn’t reply, and I kept talking, needing to fill the embarrassing silence. “I don’t have any empirical evidence, I’m just sure Grant will turn out to be a bad guy—that he’d win me over just to break my heart.” I clamped my lips together, thinking I’d already said too much, and that Hudson would probably assume I was crazy. And perhaps he’d be right. In the time since I broke up with Dan, I’d wavered between thinking he’d taught me to be less naive, and thinking he’d broken me beyond repair. And maybe it was both.
Dropping Hudson’s eye contact, I picked at the hem of my dress where it sat spread over my knees. “No empirical evidence?” he asked.
“No, just my gut,” I replied, pulling on an errant string.
“Claire,” Hudson said. I looked up to find him smiling, looking on the verge of laughter once more.
“I know it’s stupid,” I said defensively.
He touched my knee, not far from the string my fingers still held, and my breath hitched. His fingers were rough and warm on my skin. “Why is that stupid?” he asked.
I spread my arms in an oversized shrug. “I can’t tell my little sister she can’t get married because of some vibe I get from her fiancé.”
He cocked his head. “Are we talking about your sister’s fiancé or his brother?” Hudson asked, and I knew it was a reasonable question, because I was jumping between the two in my head.
“Both—either. I don’t know. They’re the same, Hudson.” And they were. I didn’t trust either Dupree brother, but I also didn’t have any good reason why not.
5
HUDSON