May couldn’t save her from this, and Allie didn’t want to burden her sister with it anyway.
It was only that she was so angry, and she needed someone to pin it on, because pinning it on herself wasn’t getting her anywhere. She wanted to feel different. She wanted not to feel this raw pain in the center of her back, as though someone had stabbed her and now they wouldn’t quit screwing with the hilt of the knife.
She wanted not to know that she was making a terrible mistake, but she did know. She did.
She’d made the mistake the first time she let him kiss her. He’d been wanting to for years—she knew that. Everyone knew that. But when she handed him the kiss, she’d also been handing him her capitulation, and that was what it had taken her some time to see: that from there forward, they were always already heading toward this moment.
It hadn’t been a surprise when he’d dropped to his knee and offered her a tiny, beautifully wrapped box last Christmas. It had been inevitable, the choice already made.
She could keep her house and her dogs and the comfortable domestic thing she and Matt had going—the Sunday morning newspaper, the doughnuts he always drove to pick up, their shared semi-ironic obsession with the weekly Jumble puzzle, the reliable twice-weekly sex and Matt’s eager, friendly face between her legs—or she could ruin it all forever by saying no.
She could break Matt’s heart.
Allie hadn’t hesitated.
She wouldn’t spoil this for him. She couldn’t. With the possible exception of her sister, he was the single loveliest person she’d ever met—beautiful and good all the way through—and he deserved to have everything he wanted.
He wanted her, so she’d handed herself over.
She just wished she weren’t so fucking angry.
May laughed again, and the sound drew Allie’s gaze across the room. Ben was giving her that look, and she was giving it back. Like they were the only people in the room. Like all the air in the world was exclusively for them, and everyone else could suck it.
That kind of passion didn’t last. Everybody said so. Five years down the line, ten years, and everybody started changing their clothes for bed with their backs turned.
But you were supposed to feel like that when you walked down the aisle.
And Matt looked at her that way. Just that way.
Allie searched for something else to staple.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“Where are we going with these?” Ben asked.
“Over by the train.”
May pointed, and Ben hoisted the cardboard box full of daisy buckets higher in his arms. His biceps flexed. A corded forearm muscle made its presence known and momentarily distracted her from her preoccupation with her sister’s solitary performance of unhappiness on the other end of the room.
“Lead the way,” he said.
She did, and he followed. “I need to find a way to talk to Allie,” she said.
Ben glanced toward Allie wielding her staple gun. “If you just tell me whatever scheme you’ve got in your head for what goes where, I’ll finish this, and you can talk to her right now.”
“No, I couldn’t. It would be weird.”
“Weird how?”
Ben set the box on the floor and lifted out four buckets, two dangling from each hand. May grabbed another two, and she scanned the flowers and tables quickly, deciding on the arrangement that would look best. “Put that all-orange one on the farthest table,” she directed. “And the mostly pink one on the table right next to it.”
“Is this the mostly pink one?”
“Yes. It would be weird to leave you here doing this by yourself.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “It just would.”
“You’ve noticed what I’ve been doing the past few days, right? Cooking with your mom? Picking up the U-Haul with your dad? You know he didn’t say a word to me all the way from your house to Green Bay?”
“He’s not a big talker.” May walked away from Ben to put a group of mixed daisies on the table near the stage.
“You might have warned me,” he said when she returned to the box.
Disconcerted by his tone, she checked his expression. Not joking.
“It’s not like he told me he wasn’t going to talk to you. He probably didn’t know what to say.”
“Neither did I. Forty miles is a long way to ride without talking. He didn’t even turn on the radio.”
“Sorry.”
“I handled it. I can handle putting these on the tables, too, assuming you tell me what your secret scheme is. Can’t I alternate pink and orange and yellow, and then put the ones that are both kind of wherever?”
“I want it to look more random than that. But not really random. Artfully random.” In demonstration, she put a bucket of pink daisies on the table right next to the same thing. The effect would be an intensification of pink in this spot. She’d balance it out with more orange nearby, and a dash of yellow.