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She looks away, her gaze fixed on the ground as if searching for answers in the pattern of the carpet. I hold her face gently in my hands, forcing her to meet my eyes again. “Odi, please. Don’t marry him. Choose us.”
The changing room seems to shrink around us, the walls closing in as the enormity of the situation settles. Odi’s indecision hangs in the air, palpable.
The pain in her eyes gives me pause. I try to look at the situation from her point of view. Axel is demanding she marryhim, and she’s not fighting him on it. Why? I know she loves him, but she loves me too. And Kaiden. So why is she choosing him?
Her sad eyes seem to be pleading with me to understand.
When she doesn’t say anything for well over a minute – a lifetime – I sigh and give in. I’ve been selfish. It’s not about me or him, or even our love. It’s about Rose, isn’t it? By marrying Axel, Rose’s father, they have the best chance of getting her back. Together.
“Get the other dress,” I urge her, barely even able to get the words out past my heartbreak.
“What other dress?”
“You know what other dress. The one you lit up in. You looked sensational in all of the dresses, Odi. You’d look amazing in anything. But that was ‘the one’. Don’t settle for less.”
“Zie—”
“I swear I’m just talking about the dress, Odi. No hidden agenda here. I could tell from the moment you stepped out from behind the curtain that you’d made your choice.”
“Why did you kiss me, Zie?” she asks quietly, stepping back to put some room between us and pressing her fingers to her lips.
“Trying to have self control around you is like trying to swim up a waterfall; fucking impossible. But I really do mean it; get the other dress.”
She hesitates, sensing my change of heart. “He won’t like it.”
“You know that’s a load of shit. He’ll love anything you choose. And in this crazy bullshit arrangement, you deserve to at least look and feel like a goddess on your wedding day. Please.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Knock, knock,” Kaiden calls through the curtain. “If you two have finished mating like a herd of horny rhinos at a gangbang, the old trout out here is getting angsty. I’m talking full-on rosaryclutching, praying to the almighty above for divine intervention. I think she wants us gone.”
“Kaiden, gross,” Odi snaps, making him laugh uproariously.
It never even crossed my mind to sneak in here to seduce Odi, but of course that’s where Kaiden’s mind would go. It’s probably better than the alternative.
“I’m going to get dressed, so you can both go wait out the front with the girls,” she says stiffly. “I won’t be long.”
It won’t be long before I lose her for good.
My father is raging. It turns out Ms Smith isn’t who he thought she was, and now he keeps muttering about some unknown bitch carrying a bastard child.
She’s been fired, and I’ve not got into trouble at all.
The kids at school think I’m a legend, and I have to act like it. None of them know the truth. Not even Kaiden and Zie can know how awful it was. How I hated every single second of it. How I begged my father not to make me do this, but he told me to close my eyes and imagine someone else.
It was the only way to get through it.
Imagining Peony.
I didn’t say yes to the dress.
How could I after Zie’s kiss? He practically begged me not to go through with the wedding – as if I have any say in the matter.
Either way it left me all confused and twisted up inside. I didn’t feel like I could leave without a dress, and I couldn’t choose Zie’s dress which was my second favourite. Instead Iopted for Steph’s bland cookie cutter gown and I have zero enthusiasm to muster over it.
After buying the dress, we all went to lunch where Kaiden and Zie cleverly fielded a whole host of questions about my upcoming nuptials which I gratefully appreciated. I barely ate my food, but no one seemed to notice. Except maybe Lou because nothing seems to get past her, but luckily she didn’t say anything.
After lunch, the girls wanted to go shopping for more wedding stuff – their outfits, bridesmaids dresses, shoes and accessories and lingerie for me – but my heart wasn’t in it.
