This Summer Will Be Different(78)

When it’s time for my speech, I rise to the microphone. My hands are shaking. Even though I can feel Felix watching, it’s only Bridget I see. I’ve been planning to make my best friend cry since the moment she and Miles got engaged. But now that I’m looking at her, the person dearest to me, it’s my eyes that are stinging.

“The first time I met Bridget Clark, she gave me a ride home on her handlebars.” I sound shaky, so I take a deep breath. “In many ways, she’s carried me since that night seven years ago.” My voice cracks in the middle of the sentence. I’ve been avoiding thinking about it for days, and now the truth bashes against me. Bridget is moving to Australia, and I don’t know how I’ll survive without her. I scan the page, knowing I’ll never be able to say everything I’ve written without a spectacular display of sobbing. But I do it anyway. I cry my way through the speech.

“Miles, take good care of her,” I finish. “There’s no one more precious to me.”

I turn to my best friend, her cheeks streaked with tears. “You are the love of my life, Bridget.”



* * *



? ? ?

The wedding captures how Bridget’s world is split between city and coast. We’re downtown, near the corner of Bloor Street and Avenue Road, Toronto rushing by outside. Inside, there are courses upon courses of food, the finest you can ask of any caterer. Roast suckling pig. Deep-fried crab. A whole white fish with ginger and scallions. The bubbly is the good stuff, the string quartet plays Vivaldi. Everything runs on a precisely considered schedule. But there’s also dancing, kicked off by Bridget’s grandfather on the fiddle. Her shoes come off at this point. Zach loosens his tie. The gift he brought is suspiciously Trivial Pursuit–shaped. At eleven, a food truck parks outside the venue with buttery lobster rolls. The dance floor is never empty. I don’t think a group of one hundred people have ever had such a fun night.

Shortly before midnight, the music stops, and Miles takes the mic from the DJ and says, “This one goes out to my wife.”

And then, at the top of his tone-deaf lungs, Miles Lam sings “Un-Break My Heart.”

It’s a bizarre choice for a wedding and exactly right for Bridget. Miles puts his entire soul into it. Fist pumps. Chest whacks. Eyes shut and chin raised to the ceiling.

And the whole night, Felix by my side. Felix’s hand in mine. Felix’s lips on my lips. We dance, and we laugh, and we can’t stop touching each other.



* * *



? ? ?

“I’m relishing you,” I tell Felix, tipsy, as we make out in the stairwell. I’m addicted to how he tastes. Salt and Tic Tacs.

He laughs into my mouth. “Relishing?”

“Yes, and I don’t think I’ve ever relished anyone before. But I relish you, Felix Edgar Clark.”

Felix takes my head in his hands. “I relish you, too, Lucy Beth Ashby.”

After the kissing, when I return to the party from the bathroom, I catch Felix standing next to the floral archway. He looks surprisingly at home in his tux, like he could walk out into the night of the city and look like he belonged.

Mine, my heart says. Felix.

He runs his fingers along one petal, then another, his expression awed. I relish him from across the space, and then I haul him back to the dance floor so I can enjoy him in my arms.

The DJ is playing something slow and old, and my head is on Felix’s shoulder, and I’m certain this curve of muscle and bone was made for me. Zach and his girlfriend, Lana, are close by, and he gives me a thumbs-up. It feels so good, being with Felix, surrounded by our friends and his family. It feels perfect. It feels like I should be with Felix always. For a little while, I pretend that he isn’t leaving on Tuesday.

Mine, my heart keeps saying. Felix. More.





34





Now





We stumble into my apartment, drunk. The champagne is only partially to blame.

“I think this has been one of my top best favorite nights ever,” I say between kisses.

Felix laughs. “It’s up there for me, too.”

I growl and give his bottom lip a little bite.

Felix pulls back, looking into my eyes with total seriousness. “You should know that you’re competing with the night Zach lost a bet and pierced his nipple.”

I nod. “Fair.”

We haven’t left the hallway, haven’t taken off our shoes. We just keep kissing. I’m overcome with the need to make this moment last forever. I want to hold it between my hands like dough and stretch it out slowly and carefully so that it never ends. I feel a flutter of panic at the idea of going back to the ceaseless grind. I don’t want to come home to an empty apartment. And I don’t want to be without Felix. I want to be back on the island.

I pull away from him suddenly, digging my phone out of my clutch.

“Was it something I said?” Felix says behind me.

I peer over my shoulder. He’s looking at me, amused, tie askew, hair mussed from my fingers. Wonderful, gorgeous man.

“I’m getting organized,” I tell him, pulling up my calendar app. “I want to plan this out.”

“This?”

“Us. I don’t think I can wait a full month before I see you again.”