Sabrina’s head tilts as she sips the foam from her cappuccino. “Okay.” She nods to herself. “Okay, sure. You and Wyn handle the cake.”
I balk. “Wouldn’t it be faster if we all divided up? Covered twice as much ground?”
“No, it would be chaotic. We’d end up with six cakes.”
“Probably why Harriet suggested it,” Wyn says.
I ignore him, regroup, and face Sabrina again. “If we’re teaming up, then you and I should be on cake duty. I want to be sure I get something you like.”
Her head slightly cocks, and something flits behind her eyes.
She and I have barely had a second alone together since the ride from the airport, and for the first time, I’m wondering if that’s because I’ve been afraid she’d find Wyn and me out or if she’s been avoiding me.
She gives a little shake of her head. “I don’t care about the cake. If I care about absolutely anything other than the ceremony, it’s the bachelorette-slash-bachelor party, so I’ll figure that out.”
“I want to plan that,” Parth says.
“Duh,” she says. “We’ll do it together, and Cleo and Kim can try to find a photographer, if they’re up for it.”
“We’d love to,” Cleo says.
“But a hard out in two hours, okay?” Sabrina says. “No matter what progress you have or haven’t made, in two hours, we meet back at the house.”
Wyn’s gaze darts my way, and I look at the floor.
It’s only two hours, I think.
What have I done, I think.
* * *
? ? ?
I DON’T KNOW if he’s picking up my discomfort and mirroring it back to me or if he’s really in his head. Maybe about the text from Gloria or maybe something else entirely. But as we drive from bakery to bakery, we barely even make small talk.
The afternoon flies by. We’ve reached the ninety-minute mark of our allotted two hours when the fifth local bakery tells us they don’t touch weddings. “No one gets quite so litigious as the parents of a newlywed,” the red-faced baker tells us.
“Did we say wedding?” Wyn laughs, looks at me, and claps a hand to his forehead, shaking himself. He faces the baker again, leaning across the counter with a devastating smile, the kind that looks like a hook has snagged under his lip. “I meant birthday. We’ve been planning this wedding of ours for, like, four years, so I guess that’s why that came out. This cake is for a birthday.”
The baker narrows her eyes. “All our birthday cakes say Happy Birthday on them.”
“Okay, then what about a regular cake,” I say.
“Those say Happy Birthday on them too,” the woman says, determined not to sell us a black market wedding cake, I guess.
“Great,” Wyn says. “We’ll do a red velvet one of those.”
The baker’s lips purse. “Who should it be addressed to?”
It’s not enough that she’s forcing us to buy a cake with Happy Birthday on it when she knows it’s for a wedding.
“Happy birthday, wicked pissah,” Wyn suggests.
“That’s not how you use wicked pissah in a sentence,” the baker tells us.
The rules surrounding this cake are getting more specific by the second.
A smile blossoms from one corner of Wyn’s mouth. “Inside joke.”
The baker does not smile, but she turns to inscribe our not-wedding cake all the same.
In the Rover, we fall back into silence. We’re halfway up the wildflower-covered hill to the cottage when Wyn suddenly pulls over onto the gravel shoulder that overlooks the ocean. “Okay,” he says, looking at me.
“Okay, what?” I say.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I lie.
His head tips back on a frustrated laugh. “Please don’t do this.”
“Do what?” I demand.
“Pretend you’re fine,” he says. “Act like I’m imagining that you’re pulling away from me.”
“Pulling away?” The words squeeze out of my tightening windpipe. I’m suddenly so frustrated it becomes a kind of claustrophobia. I undo my seat belt and throw open my door, stumbling out into the harsh midday sun.
He gets out too, rounding the hood of the car toward me. “This isn’t fair.”
I throw my arms out to my sides. “What isn’t fair?”
“We were getting along,” he says. “We were acting like friends, and now—”
“Friends?” The word tears out of me on a laugh. “I don’t want to be your friend, Wyn!”
“I don’t want to be yours either!” he cries.
I turn up the hill, but he catches my hand and pulls me back to face him. I don’t know how it happens: I’m confident I don’t trip into his mouth, but that’s how it feels, because I’m positive he didn’t initiate it—Wyn would never—and it makes no sense that I would do this, but I have.
I am.
My hands are twisted into his shirt, and his are flat against my back, and we’re kissing, hard, hurried, like this is a timed activity and we’re in our final seconds.
“What was the text,” I hiss out as our lips draw apart.
“What text,” he asks, turning me back to the car, the warm metal of the hood meeting my back.
“From your mom,” I say. “I saw a text from your mom.”
“Nothing,” he says, lifting me onto the hood.
“Wyn.”
“It’s about work, Harriet,” he says, squeezing my thighs, pulling them around his hips.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say as he kisses his way down my throat, hand curling against my ear.
“I can explain it to you right now,” he says, “or we can have sex in the car.”
A plumb line of heat drops through my center, my thighs tightening against him as he kisses me more deeply. “The car? We’re like a mile from the house.”
“I don’t have a mile in me right now, Harriet.”
I push against his shoulders even as the rest of my body strains toward him. “Tell me,” I say.
He steps back. A car flies by our spot on the shoulder, and he blinks as if emerging from a trance. Then obvious anxiety torques his brow and mouth, and I am positive I made the right decision, that there’s something I need to know.
With a resigned sigh, he pulls his phone out of his back pocket and taps on it for several seconds, teeth worrying at his lower lip, while the suspense pummels my nerves.
Finally, he hands the phone to me.
There’s a web browser open to some hip minimalistic shop. A white backdrop. Soft serifed headings: Gallery, Contact, Social Media. Beneath them, a photograph of a massive oak pedestal table out in a green-gold meadow. Mismatched wooden chairs line it, wildflowers bursting up around their legs. Behind the meadow, periwinkle mountains jut up into a cloudless sky.
It’s so beautiful it makes me ache. I feel the same brand of longing I used to get when I rode my bike home at dusk as a kid, past lit kitchen windows, saw the people inside laughing while they set their tables or washed their dishes.
I tap the image. An option to purchase the table pops up. “Fifteen thousand dollars? American dollars?”