Page 16 of Business Casual
But she’s hiding in the trees with a bottle of wine and some questionable moonshine.
Her bottom lip trembles. “Nathan broke up with me.”
“Who?”
“My dance partner.”
My sister is a professional ballroom dancer. She and her partner Nathan have been paired together for almost six years. I didn’t know they were dating too.
I rub some of her tears away with my thumb. “When did you two start dating?”
“Who is dating?” She laughs, garbled and thick. “No, we’re not—we’re not dating. We are not ever dating. He wanted to, but I said no, thank you. No, sir. No, no, no thank you. I was very polite about it.”
She swipes at her cheek with the back of her hand. The one still clutching the wine bottle. Some pinot noir goes dribbling down her chest. “He said he couldn’t be around me anymore. He said his heart couldn’t take it and that I—I owed him. That asshole. He said I owed him, but that’s not how love works, and now he’s ruined everything. I’ve worked too hard in my career for that wiry little—that wiry little, tight stealing—oh, oops.”
She drops the bottle and it rolls beneath the cake table. I stop her with a hand on her shoulder when she tries to crawl after it. She blinks up at me with big watery eyes.
“Maybe I need to be more like you,” she says.
I smooth her hair away from her forehead. When we were kids, she used to do the same for me when I’d get migraines. I’d hear the pad of her feet on the floor between our beds before her slight weight curled behind me. She’d pull my comforter over both of us and drag her fingers through my hair until the pain stopped.
“What’s that?”
“I think I need to get claws,” she grumbles. She leans her head into my touch. “Not let—not let myself be bullied. I think my heart needs to be tougher.”
My hand stills in her hair.
“What?”
Nessa raps her knuckles against my breastbone. “Need to bundle up my heart some more,” she slurs. “Bubble wrap it like baby sis.”
She says it like it’s something I should be proud of, but all I feel is a hollow ache, right in the place she’s tapping out an uneven beat. Is that what everyone thinks? That I’ve sharpened the edges of myself to hold people at arm’s length?
Beckett’s concern. Harper’s sad, knowing eyes. Charlie’s surprise.
The ache grows sharper. A thumb pressed to a bruise.
Nessa rocks her head against my shoulder, and I tuck away the hurt to consider later. I resume running my fingers through her hair and blow out a deep breath. “I like your heart just the way it is.”
“Jell-O heart,” she mumbles. “Wiggly and wobbly.”
“Yes, I love your wiggly, wobbly Jell-O heart.” I look over her shoulder and through the cluster of trees to the reception. The party is still in full swing, the dance floor crowded and music thumping. My parents are at the edge of a burgundy rug, my mom draped across my dad’s lap in his wheelchair, her arms around his neck as they sway to the half beat. Beckett and Evie stand together in front of one of the low-burning fires, heads tipped together. Charlie is nowhere to be found, but I don’t let myself look too hard for him.
Vanessa can’t go back out there. Not like this.
I eyeball the distance between us and the shuttle in the parking lot, waiting with its lights dimmed to ferry people back to the town square.
“How’s your stability right now, Ness?”
She looks down at her feet as she considers it, leaning out of my grip to stand straight. She gives me a very serious look, which is hardto take seriously at all when her hair is a mess and she has makeup on her cheeks. She looks like she got in a fight with a rabid animal.
“I can probably jazz square somewhere,” she slurs. “If you ask very nicely.”
“Nessa.” It’s a battle to keep myself from laughing at her. “Can you please jazz square your way to the shuttle bus?”
She tips to the side and straightens one leg in front of her, toe perfectly pointed. She then executes a series of movements that are shockingly lucid and controlled. I guess her muscle memory has remained untouched by the pinot noir.
All right. Unexpected, but I can work with it.”
