THE JUNIOR BRIDESMAID (17 page)

“Upper West Side?”
I questioned unsure of where the conversation was going.

“Yeah. It’s near
the park and I like the area,” he continued.

I was guessing
that Hugh was sharing where he was going to start looking for apartments. “That
sounds good,” I agreed unenthusiastically.

“No?” He questioned
hearing the ambivalence in my tone.

“Sure,” I
responded.

Unable to
ascertain why I seemed so equivocal on the subject, Hugh pulled far enough away
so that he could see my face while we discussed his future apartment hunt.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked with surprise in his tone.

“Nothing,” I
shrugged. The Upper West Side was very nice but I wasn’t sure what he wanted me
to say.

“Delilah,” Hugh
scolded. “You have to tell me what you are thinking. Despite your repeated
flattery that I am ‘amazing’ I can’t read minds. Tell me what you are
thinking,” he said incredulously.

I was guessing I
should have lightened up on how ‘amazing’ I thought Hugh was in bed because he
was using my words against me. “I think you’ll like the West Side. It’s fun,” I
shrugged.

“And you wouldn’t
like the West Side?” he pushed.

“Um,” I shrugged
again.

“Holy shit, this
is painful.” He raked his hand through his hair. “Let me spell it out for you.
I want to get an apartment on the Upper West Side for
us
. Do you or do you not have an opinion?” His arm gave me a gentle
squeeze as his words began to penetrate my mind and my heart. Hugh wanted to
move in together.

“Wait,” I
stammered.

Hugh started
nodding even before he spoke. “Now she’s getting it,” he added sarcastically.

I lightly smacked
his chest before I scolded his delivery. “Hey. I’m not a mind reader either, ya
know.”

Hugh rolled me to
my back and pinned me to the bed. “No? Are you sure? Let’s give it a try. What
am I thinking right about now?” He pressed his re-awakened manhood into the
cotton crotch of my panties. “Go on. Give it your best shot.” He lowered his
lips and grazed them over mine while he waited for my answer.

Heat instantly
pooled in the exact spot where he was poking. It was like a heat-seeking
missile was launched between my legs. But if he was going to act like a
sarcastic asshole he was going to get a commensurate response. “You want to
move to Holland and become a tulip farmer?” I deadpanned.

“Close.” His hand
slid down pushing the elastic of my underwear to the side. “There are
definitely two lips involved.” He kissed me deep and teased me with his
manhood.

“Hugh,” I breathed
helplessly tearing my lips from his.

“Will you move in
with me?” he asked using his appendage as coercion.

“Yes,” I moaned in
response. It didn’t matter what he asked or what the ‘yes’ was in response to.
I was beginning to see why Hugh made such a great lawyer. He was quite talented
at honing in on a person’s weakness and using it against them. Lucky for me,
mine happened to be his penis.

Go figure.

            My
phone was ringing. I could hear it. But I didn’t want to move. I was exhausted.
I turned and squinted at my iPod, which was parked in the base on my
nightstand. It was 9:30 in the morning. The rays of sun that reflected off of
the metal sheeting that surrounded my bedroom window were blinding. I couldn’t
imagine who would be looking for me on a Sunday morning. I looked over my
shoulder and found Hugh on his belly with the covers just covering his perfect
behind. Ignoring the phone as any normal, well-adjusted, infatuated female
would, I rolled toward Hugh straddling his lower back. He shifted from the
weight and rumbled his ‘good morning.’ My hands immediately went to his back
and shoulders to begin his morning massage. He deserved it. He performed
unbelievably multiple times and lasted way longer than thirty seconds. The
least I could do was loosen him up for the next round.

“You tryin’ to
kill me?” he murmured into the pillow.

“Yep,” I said
exuberantly. “Death by ejaculation.” Hugh’s body began to vibrate with the deep
chuckle erupting from his chest. It was nice that he enjoyed my sick sense of
humor.

I worked my hands
over his skin relishing in the sound of his satisfied groans. “That feels
really good, Delilah.”

“I know,” I
agreed. It did. I knew how to give the perfect massage. Just the right amount
of pressure mixed with a rubbing circular motion up and down the sides of the
spine.

The phone began to
ring again and that was when I began to worry. My head turned in the direction
of the living room wondering if I should go see who was trying to get a hold of
me. Unable to concentrate, I swung my leg off of Hugh and padded to the living
area. Pillows flew left and right till I located the remote on the cushions. I
hit the button and answered the call sounding out of breath.

“Hello?” I rushed
fearing they had already hung up.

“Delilah?” the man
questioned.

“Yes?” I answered
unable to recognize the voice on the other end. Momentarily distracted I heard
the door to my bathroom squeal to a close. I guess Hugh was getting cleaned up.
“Who’s this?”

There was a brief
pause before the voice continued. “Ryan. Hugh’s brother. I’m sorry to bother
you but have you seen my brother at all? I’ve been calling his cell but he
hasn’t answered in two days.”

“Oh!” I said with
surprise even though I shouldn’t be surprised at all. I knew why Hugh wasn’t
answering his phone in two days. He had been in my bed for two days. “Um, yeah.
I’ve seen him.” My free hand went to my face to rub my eyes trying to decide if
I wanted Ryan to know that not only had I seen his brother, but I had seen
all
of his brother. Multiple times. If
I gave the phone to Hugh there would be no question. “Um,” I hesitated. “Yeah.
He’s wonderful. I mean, ya know, he’s fine. Just, busy. So when I see him again
I’ll tell him to call you,” I offered.

“Okay. It’s
important. So, the sooner the better,” he drawled. Just then I heard the toilet
flush and the water at the sink go on.

My mouth twisted
weighing my options. I turned to look in Hugh’s general direction as if staring
at the wall he stood behind would help me decide whether or not to bring him
the phone. But in the end my pride won out. “Okay. I’ll get him the message.” I
heard the bathroom door open.

Last chance.

“Okay. Um. Thanks,
Delilah.”

“You’re welcome.”

Last, last chance.

“Bye,” he
finished.

“Bye.”

I heard the click
and that was that.

I disconnected the
call and made my way to the vacant bathroom. I did my business and cleaned
myself up. The guilt I was feeling was formidable as I wiped my toothpaste
riddled mouth with the bath towel that hung on the back of the bathroom door. I
turned out the light and slowly returned to my bedroom scolding my selfish
behavior. As I rounded the corner to enter my bedroom, I saw Hugh propped up
lying against the back of my headboard. His beautiful body leaning against a
stack of pillows. His wavy brown hair was perfectly mussed and the scruff of
his beard made his overall appearance breathtaking.

“Everything okay?”
he asked innocently.

I nodded my response
leaning into the doorjamb. Overwhelmed by the stunning sight before me, I
quickly forgave myself for not mentioning to Hugh that Ryan needed to speak to
him. Or, for that matter, that whatever he needed to share was important.

“Well, then…are
you going to stand there all day?” he questioned coyly.

I shook my head
pushing off the molding with my shoulder. When I got close to the bed Hugh
stretched out grabbing me suddenly. He tossed me across his body and onto the
bed. I barely had time to rebound when I felt his weight on me.

“What took you so
long?” he murmured against my neck.

I was pretty sure
he was referring to my non-existent trek across my tiny bedroom and he was
being facetious. At least I was hoping his question was of the rhetorical
nature because I had no intention of answering given the breathless state he
had me in. So instead of responding with words, I wrapped my legs around him
and held him tightly to me.

But as I lay there
silently feeling Hugh’s body finding unbelievable ways to get closer to mine,
something came over me. It was like a tidal wave of emotion. And a confession
flew from my mouth unbridled. “It didn’t take me long at all, Hugh. I fell in
love with you the instant I set my eyes on you.”

Can anyone say
left field? I felt Hugh’s entire body go still. I wasn’t at all surprised that
my sudden admission left him speechless. It had come from that place. You know
the place. The place where all bad ideas come from?

Yes.

That place.

My heart.

The heart, just so
you know, is like a very young child…brutally honest and unable to contain
itself. That is why it should
never
be given a voice or turned to in a crisis. The heart wants what it wants and
therefore, if given the opportunity, will make poorly timed, spontaneous
decisions, which can only be classified as too impetuous or ill advised.

In this case it
was probably both but certainly an error of grave proportions.

There was no way
for me to unsay what I’d said. I swallowed loudly and still there was nothing
coming from Hugh whose lips had left my neck and were now buried in the bed
covers next to my head. No movement. No words. He was a heap of dead weight. I
couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. Since I had never perfected the ability
to miraculously evaporate into thin air, I had to deal with the situation. So,
I dealt with it the only way I knew how.

I panicked.

“Don’t mind me.” I
downplayed my confession. “I don’t know what the hell I am saying.”

“Don’t,” Hugh’s
muffled response came just on the heels of my excuse. “Delilah, don’t try to
take it back.” My palms, which rested flat on his back, could feel the
vibration of his voice as he tried to speak loudly enough so I could hear him
through the covers.

“I just…” I began.

“No,” he rumbled.
“You said it. I heard it.” He turned his face away from my neck but still had
it planted in the mattress. His physical reaction felt like alienation and
didn’t bode well for my emotional wellbeing even though rationally I knew that
he wasn’t able to breathe with his face buried in the covers. “You can’t take
it back,” he explained speaking a little more clearly.

“I can’t?” I asked
innocently. “I could try.”

I felt him shake
his head. “No. You can’t,” he murmured dejectedly.

I cleared my
throat trying to quickly fabricate another evasive maneuver. “You don’t have to
say anything in…” I started with another defensive approach giving him the
commonly used but rarely effective ‘you don’t have to return the sentiment’
speech essentially letting him off of the hook, which I thought was a generous
gesture.

“Don’t say that
either,” he cautioned.

“Well, then, I
don’t know what to say,” I explained my dilemma peeling my hands off of his
lower back unsure where to rest them.

“That’s because
there’s nothing else for you to say, Delilah.” He lifted his head from the
mattress and stared into my eyes. “There’s only something for me to say.” The
silence that followed was torturous. Hugh took his time and I wasn’t sure what
would come out of his mouth next. I watched and waited with bated breath as his
eyes danced back and forth on mine. Just when I had reached my hopeful limit
and my eyes began to close with disappointment, Hugh began to speak.

“Darcy treated you
so badly because of me.” My eyes opened slowly and drifted to the ceiling over
his right shoulder. I wasn’t sure where he was going with the conversation but
the last thing I wanted to hear from Hugh’s lips in that very moment was
Darcy’s name. That just couldn’t be a good sign.

He shifted his
elbows side to side settling into a more comfortable position. The mattress
dipped and rolled until he stopped moving. Then he went into story-telling
mode. “A bunch of guys were at the diner in town after one of the football
games. We were having a silly conversation. Do you remember Grant?” he asked me
like we were making small talk.

I didn’t answer. I
couldn’t. I was desperately fighting back the tears that were threatening to
burst from my eyeballs. He must have seen the distress I was experiencing
because he continued without a response. “Grant asked me if I could be with one
person for one night in a perfect world where no one would know, who would my
free pass go to?” he smirked as he relived the memory. “It was meant to be a
silly prank. Grant knew something I didn’t. Darcy and her friends were in the booth
behind us. I guess he thought I would say Darcy. I mean, he knew we were
getting engaged and all. But that isn’t what I said.” He leaned into his left
elbow and took his right hand placing it under my chin. He shifted my face
toward his. “Hey,” he called so my eyes would go to his. Once they did he went
on. “I chose you,” he flashed a cautious smile and then let it go. “I didn’t
just say your name either. We had been drinking and I went into detail,” he
said the word ‘detail’ with emphasis. “I realized how much detail when I turned
to look at Grant and he looked like he just saw my mother naked,” Hugh sort of
half-laughed. “Darcy was so pissed. She started squealing so loud I thought her
head might explode. Her friends were all there.” He shook his head at the
memory. “It was pretty bad. I had to try to calm her down so I told her that it
was a stupid fantasy and she was the real deal. I thought my quick response
appeased her but I knew it hadn’t because she was always so mean to you.
Delilah,” he began my name on a whisper, “Darcy was mean to you because I told
Grant that God put you on this Earth to torture me. You were my end all be all
but you were just too young.”

I couldn’t help
the tear that rolled down my cheek without warning. Hugh saw it and he wiped it
away. His small smile returned cautiously. “But you’re not too young anymore,
Delilah Welling.” His eyes roamed my face while his thumb caressed my cheek.
“You are still my end all be all,” he paused to place a sweet kiss on my lips,
“and I’ve been in love with you for a very long time,” he finished stringing
out his words.

He waited until
his message registered in my expression. Then he gently pressed his lips to
mine again. It wasn’t a searing kiss. It was a whisper soft, heart swelling,
life altering kiss. The kind of kiss that changes a person’s outlook on the
world. And it held more meaning than any elicit thing we had done that weekend.
Then he pulled his face an inch from mine and finished me off on a whisper.
“And now you’re mine forever.”

I swallowed hard
from the emotion that was coursing through me. Maybe Hugh didn’t realize it but
one of my dreams had just come true.

“I love you,
Hugh,” I repeated back. His eyes dropped to my lips and then he lowered his to
mine again.

We kissed, just kissed, for a long
while. So
long
that Ryan’s important
message was
long
forgotten.

Chapter 13

I thought I was
hearing things. I thought maybe I was in the middle of a nightmare from which I
just couldn’t awaken. Because in the deep recesses of my sleeping mind I could
hear Darcy Strong yelling at the top of her lungs that she was going to kill
me. Darcy had done many things to me. Maimed my reputation, called me
embarrassing names, damaged my self confidence, smeared my name all over
Southern Virginia, but in all the years that I’d put up with her she had never
threatened to kill me. So I rolled over and chalked up my hallucination to an
unwelcomed nightmare. That was until Hugh jumped up and started dressing
urgently. I felt a few light smacks on my ass and then Hugh’s voice cutting
through the fog.

“Delilah. Get up
and get dressed,” he coaxed urgently.

I jolted to
sitting clutching the top sheet to my chest. My hair was strewn this way and
that and I was looking at a half naked Hugh threw the wayward strands. “What?
What’s going on?”

“I’ll kill you,
Delilah Welling!” The screeching seemed to be getting closer but it wasn’t
coming from the hallway. Then I saw the crazed face and wild hair through my
bedroom window.

Ah!

“Oh my God!” I
screamed.

What the heck was
she doing here? And why did she look so enraged on my fire escape?

I scrambled off of
my bed (away from the window) and onto the floor searching for clothes to throw
over my head. Hugh stormed toward the window AND LET HER IN!!! She fell inside
my window from the fire escape and onto my bedroom floor with a thud.

“What the fuck are
you doing here, Darcy?” Hugh sneered. Though it was a good question I would
have preferred he called the police and left her outside.

I managed to get
half dressed, the exact opposite of Hugh. He was wearing pants and no shirt. I
was wearing his shirt, luckily a long one, and no pants. I stood up making sure
to position myself between my bed and the nut-job and tried to control my
breathing. I was hoping that she would answer Hugh’s question as to why she was
scaling fire escapes illegally and spying on me in New York City. As far as I
knew she, Ryan and their three adorable children, Dolly, Dustin, and Damian,
had a happy life.

“You!” she growled
pointing her finger at me.

My eyes widened
confused by the start of her verbal attack. Me what? I hadn’t seen, heard or
spoken to or about her in over a decade. The first word of her sentence should
not start with the word ‘you’ while she was pointing her finger at me.

“Me?” I said with
a squeak.

“How could you,
Delilah?” her eyes were squinting so hard that I questioned if she could see
threw them.

I saw Hugh’s head
swing my way out of my peripheral vision. “How could I what?” I asked
breathily.

“You are the
lowest of the low, Delilah Welling. You are a sick, malicious, devious bitch,
and you should be ashamed of yourself.” Though her verbal accusations outlined
her dismay quite clearly they didn’t help to clarify why she was upset.

I shook my head
back at her because I truly didn’t know what she was referring to. “Listen,
Darcy. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I held up one hand hoping to
ward off any more name calling on her part.

“Oh really?” she
questioned haughtily.

I just shook my
head again. My eyes bounced from Darcy to Hugh and I could see he looked
perplexed. I watched his eyes drift down Darcy’s arm to her hand. There she
clutched a piece of paper that looked all crumpled and tattered. Hugh pulled
the piece of paper from Darcy’s hand and started to read it. I watched him
intently because he was staring at it a long time. Either whatever it said was
lengthy or he was reading it twice. I saw his jaw clench in anger and then he
directed that anger at me. I was so shocked to see the mounting animosity that
had begun to palpitate off of his body aimed in my direction that I became
speechless.

Worried and
speechless.

I swallowed hard
before I spoke one broken syllable. “Hugh?”

He shook his head
once sharply to shut me up. Then I watched as his hands balled into fists combatively.
The waves of anger were almost visibly rolling off of his body. He started to
rumble before his voice essentially exploded. “How could you do this?” he
roared.

I jumped having
never heard such a terrifying sound. I had no idea what he was talking about,
yet I was afraid to find out whatever it was. I was like a young child who
wasn’t sure what they were in trouble for.

“Delilah!” he
bellowed demanding an answer.

The tears appeared
instantly. His furious tone had me literally shaking in my socks. “I, I…” I
swiped at the tears trying to muster up the courage to ask him what he was
talking about but I was so upset that I couldn’t form the words. Hugh took my
stuttering response as an admission of guilt and stormed out of the room. On
the way, he crumpled the note and whipped it at my head. Luckily it missed but
I inhaled a jagged breath devastated that he meant for it to hit me. He might
as well have shot me through the heart because his actions evoked the same
response. I stood in silence lifeless until reality bit through the shock and I
burst into sobs. In my head I had tried to halt the progression of his
departure in a million different ways. But physically I couldn’t move a muscle.
Deep down I already knew that no effort could have persuaded him to hear me
out. He was so furious he had already made up his mind. Darcy headed for my
door, swiftly snatching the crumpled note off of the floor and followed behind
Hugh storming through my apartment. “I had no idea you were so vindictive,” she
muttered. The sobs racked my body as I felt the cold blanket of heartbreak
constrict my chest. Hugh was gone. And the only thing I knew was that whatever
he thought I did was awful.

Chapter 14

“It’s over?” Logan
sniffled before he added his usual, ‘over.’

I wasn’t
absolutely sure what Logan was more upset about…my departure from the company
or my break-up with Hugh.

“Logan do you
think we can have this conversation face-to-face?” I asked. “There’s only so
many ‘over’s’ I can handle in a 24-hour period.” I just didn’t have the energy
to deal with his intercom foolery.

“You didn’t say
‘over,’” he noted.

I walked out of my
office where I had been packing all of my belongings in a box.

I stopped in front
of his desk and said the single word bitterly. It held double meaning and I was
fairly confident Logan understood the double entendre.

“I just can’t
believe it,” he shook his head outlining his disappointment. Of course, I was
still unsure what he couldn’t wrap his head around, my transfer to another
state or the debacle better known as my love life.

“Yeah, well. Don’t
even get me started on the things I can’t believe.” I picked up his pencil
holder desperately needing to occupy my hands and tapped it gently on his desk
as I tried to suppress the overwhelming thoughts of recent events. I sniffled
back the emotion that was dangling from the precipice and changed the subject.
“Do you think you can find me a few more boxes?” I pressed my lips together
still reining in the heartache. “I don’t think everything is going to fit into
the one that I have.”

Then Logan’s main
concern became clear. “First just tell me what happened with Hugh.”

Every time I
replayed the events that transpired between Hugh and I, tears began to flow
uncontrollably. Partly because I didn’t know what happened but mostly because I
just missed him awfully. I shrugged in response to Logan’s question because I
truly didn’t know what to say. But Logan was adamant. He needed to know even
the smallest detail. So I began to explain what I could from the beginning.
Maybe if I hashed it out, out loud, things would make more sense.