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When Ward left me alone and moved on, then I would end it. When Bowie wanted someone else, even if he didn’t recognize it in himself or didn’t want to hurt my feelings, I would let him go. In the meantime, I would enjoy every moment of it, just like I’d told Danni.
I’d made my decision. “Yes.”
“Yes, as in, yes, you’ll marry me?”
“Yes,” I agreed. It would make him happy and it would make me happy to release him from this later. I would glad for him, if not for myself.
“Yes,” he echoed, and he kissed my hand. My stomach fluttered but I thought it must have been nerves from agreeing to a commitment like this, a commitment that I’d always figured would be a lifelong one for me. Or maybe it was from the fear that I was making another poor decision. Could I trust anything about myself? I didn’t know.
But I was sure that the flutters that rose further through my chest when he looked at me didn’t relate to the touch of his lips against my skin, not at all.
Chapter 11
“Not another one.”
“No, Dad, this isn’t going to be like Aubin’s wedding,” I said to him through the phone, and my sister next to me in the passenger seat of my car sniffed loudly.
“It sure isn’t. I don’t understand why you have to rush things like this,” she said, again. “Why can’t you stay engaged for a while and give yourself more time to plan?”
“We don’t want that,” I answered and hoped that this time, she’d listen. Aubin had been very underwhelmed when I’d texted and said that Bowie and I were going to have a simple ceremony, just close family, and the reception would be at the cottage. He had hired landscapers to clear some of the jumble that blocked the view of the lake and that had made more room on the back patio, too. We didn’t need a ton of room anyway, since our guests would only be his parents, my dad, and my sister. Not her husband Bill, she’d informed me. He was flying to Oklahoma.
“He’s taking the job there with the Rustlers?” I’d texted back to her, and after a while she’d said no, that he was only looking. They weren’t moving.
“It’s too hard to get married and make it a big deal in the middle of the season,” I continued to explain now. “Bowie bought heat lamps so we can be comfortable outside, and new patio furniture, too.” We were having a caterer and the same baker that made Aubin’s cake was doing a small one for us. She’d agreed to take it on when she’d heard that this was a wedding of a Woodsmen player.
I hadn’t wanted any of those things. But I had wanted to have a nice party for Bowie, who was entering into this with a lot of enthusiasm. He had been the one, in fact, to contact the baker and ask about the cake, and he’d been the one to insist that we call his parents together to tell them the news. They seemed nice but were surprised that he was marrying me and not that other girl from before, as his dad had called Bowie’s previous girlfriend of so many years. It showed me, even more than his words about them had, their lack of closeness and communication.
“What time is it? Hell. I have to get going to work,” my dad announced to us through the phone’s speaker.
“You do? Wait, Dad—” He’d already hung up so I stopped talking, but I knew for sure that he wasn’t scheduled to go to the country club or to the stadium today. “That was a lie,” I told my sister, and any untruth out of our dad’s mouth had the potential to signal something very bad.
“When doesn’t he lie? It’s like breathing for him,” she answered, and immediately took up the previous topic, the one she’d been harping on. “I really don’t like your rush with this wedding.”
“I thought you’d be happy that I didn’t want to make it a big deal, coming so close to yours,” I said.
She shifted a little in her seat to look at me better. “Really? You were actually concerned about that?”
“Really,” I said, and it had been on my mind. I had already done my part to mess up my sister’s wedding on the day of and I didn’t need to come in afterwards and make things worse. The marriage of a Woodsmen starter was already going to get enough attention around northern Michigan. “It was partially that but also, we need to do this quickly. Because of Ward.”
“Because he would be upset if he found out? I’ve heard the things you’ve been saying about him, and I’ve heard that his family is really upset. There’s tons of stuff online, too.”
This was one of the reasons I’d wanted to talk to my sister today, because of all the rumors that were flying around. It had taken about a second after I’d explained things to Danni for wild gossip to explode in the locker room—well, not the locker room, since we weren’t allowed in there right now—but among the Wonderwomen and on every kind of social media there was. I didn’t usually look at it but Aubin had brought me up to date on what they were saying.
“This woman wrote that Ward stalked you,” my sister said now, reading from someone’s recent posts on a Woodsmen fan account. “She’s saying that he tried to choke you, that he really hurt you.” She shoved her phone into her beautiful purse and pulled down in the visor, checking her lipstick in the mirror.
But I got a glimpse of her face. Her brows drew in and I swore there were tears in her eyes. “He did do those things,” I said quietly.
“She wrote that she talked to another of Ward’s girlfriends, a woman who’d dated him when he was still in high school. He hit her across the face and that girl broke up with him.”
It shouldn’t have surprised me. “That’s terrible but it makes sense. People act the way they act, right? You always told me that you can never change someone. I guess I hoped that Ward would change by himself because he loved me. I don’t think he really felt that, though. I can’t see how you’d hurt someone on purpose if you loved…Aubin! Are you crying?”
“No,” she told me. “Crying only ruins your makeup. And I was right that people don’t change but—Sissy, did he really do those things to you?”
“Did you think I would make up something like that?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We don’t talk that much,” I said. “You and I aren’t like other sisters, like how your partner Jess and her sister are best friends. I think we’re too far apart in age and we’re too different.”
