Jerk (14 page)

A
s we entered the lobby
, I cast my eyes on the historical features of the hotel, such as the chandeliers, and immediately felt the warmth and comfort that the hotel would provide us with during our stay. The receptionist was friendly, just like the bellhop, as she told us about the different amenities in the hotel: the spa, the close proximity of the beach, the dining area, and room service. When you’ve been a student and working part-time to support yourself, such luxuries are non-existent unless your best friend is getting married at one of the most prestigious hotels in Jersey.

“So, are you ready to be shown to your room?” the pretty, young blond receptionist said as the bellhop grabbed our bags.

We both nodded, but Kelly squealed and said, “I’m just ready to get married.”

“Ahh.” I sighed as I gave her a kiss on the cheek. The hair stylist, aka her mom, was coming at eight to start on her hair. We’d had our nails done at the salon yesterday and spent way too much time in there, drinking champagne and talking about married life. I thought that Kelly was going to call Sebastian and Dwayne to pick us up. She didn’t, and I had a feeling that she knew more than she let on. She had avoided his name like the plague over the years and made sure that we were not at events together. There was one time, Cole’s christening, but Dwayne couldn’t make it. He was injured pretty badly in a game. That didn’t stop them from making him Cole’s godfather. They still went ahead with the ceremony, but with Dwayne in hospital, they had a stand-in. It was pretty weird, but the priest went along with it. They could have postponed the day, but they’d had family flown in from all over to be there, so it didn’t seem fair.

She was happy, and that was the main thing. I had to control whatever was burning inside of me to remember that and only that.

We headed to our room. We were sharing and then tomorrow night Sebastian and Kelly would be in the bridal suite. We pointed to the antique pictures and chandeliers like little kids as we walked on the tiled flooring. I knew that our room would be beautiful, but, it surprised me when the bellhop opened the doors and I saw the seafront facing the door. I ran to the balcony like an excited kid in a candy store. The sea air and sound of the waves only meant one thing to me.

“Dump our things and let’s go down!”

Kelly didn’t need persuading; she was just as excited as I was.

“
S
o
.” She sighed as we walked on the beachfront with no shoes. We’d left them in our hotel room. I know, kind of childish, but we couldn’t resist the temptation of having the sand under our feet just like we did when we were kids. We could spend hours in the sand, playing and having fun. It felt like a lifetime ago.

“So,” I replied. I had a feeling that I knew what direction this conversation was going in and I wanted to avoid it.

“Are you going to be okay tomorrow?” She moved the stray hair strand that was covering my face. I had decided to go natural for her wedding. No color, just my natural brunette hair. It had been a while since I had been that color.

I jumped up in front of her and screamed, “Kelly is getting married!”

She shook her head. “No, that is not what I meant and you know it! Dwayne. Are you going to be okay?”

This was the moment of truth. She didn’t want me to lie, she wanted to make sure that I was going to be okay, and the only thing I could offer her was, “It is your wedding. Whatever Dwayne and I had—”

“Or have?”

Did she just say what I thought she said?

“You can’t deny that you love him.”

“No,” I whispered.

“So, why do you keep pretending?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I had never been in love before. I didn’t know how to react or what to do. I was scared, fucking petrified of being hurt. I had seen my best friend hurt by Sebastian so badly and I’d vowed never to let a man do that to me. I was a fool. I was pretending that I was something that I wasn’t. Capable of being alone. Changing my hair color like my underwear, pretending that I was happy with the color of my skin, the shape of my body. Everything about me was far from confident, and she knew it.

“Brenda, what am I going to do with you?” she asked as the tears started pouring out of my eyes. I didn’t want to control them. I didn’t know how. I just knew that I had lost Dwayne and it cut me like a knife. Right in my heart. The thing that got me the most was I did it to myself. He didn’t do it.

Or had he?

“Well, you need to wake up”—she lifted my head to face hers as she wiped away my tears—“and go and get your man. Before it’s—”

Her phone rang. What did she mean by before it’s…was that what Dwayne had to tell me tomorrow? He said he had news and we had to talk. Imagine, three years he had as good as avoided me, but now he wanted to talk. I couldn’t believe it. What more could there be? I thought that I knew the worst of the worst. As Kelly got off the phone I asked her, “Who was that?”

“Oh, Mom, worrying as usual. I forgot to tell her that I was at the hotel.”

I nodded. We’d practically run out of the hotel room.

“So, what were you saying before?” I said as we kept walking along the beachfront. The moonlight above the sea made the setting so romantic. We both sighed as we looked at it.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Kelly said as she motioned for me to sit down.

“It is, but what were you going to say?”

I had that nagging feeling inside of me that this was the talk that Dwayne wanted to have. If she knew, she should tell me. I would do the same for her.

She wrapped her arm around me and said, “You need to fight for your man and stop fucking around.”

I rested my head on her shoulder and whispered, “Kelly’s getting married tomorrow.”

The conversation was tiring and stressing me out and I wanted to avoid any dramas on her big day.

“Yeah,” she cheered quietly as she stroked my hair. “Yeah.”

“
H
ey
, you,” Kelly said as she pinched my side. “I can’t believe it. This day is finally here.” We were slightly hung over from last night, also we had a bit of a cold. Luckily there was a bottle of champagne in our room—or maybe it wasn’t lucky. We curled up in front of the fireplace on the fur rug and talked about the good old days. There were so many of them for me, but Kelly was a bit boring back in high school, so her stories were limited, but it was fun to just sit down and chat without any interruptions. Her mom never called. I expected her to call and ask us if we had checked out the ballroom suite where they were getting married tomorrow to make sure that everything was in place. She never did—maybe Tom managed to calm her down. My mom and dad were arriving in the morning too. I’d expected them to tell me that they weren’t coming because they were busy. Yet, they made sure that they were free for the wedding. Maybe they’d changed, but since I’d been back in the house since graduation last month, I hardly saw them.

She shook her head and screamed, “No thanks to you and Annette.”

I whispered as I looked in the mirror, “Yep.”

Last weekend was Kelly’s hen do. Oh, Vegas was the bomb. From the flights there, to the casino, and finally to the stripper. Oh, I’d so wanted to bring him back home. Just so I could play with him. Kelly said it was because he looked like Dwayne. Sure, he was tall like Dwayne and had the same sparkly brown eyes, but I thought everyone needed to get a grip. I was fine. It had been three years. We parted, and I needed to be an adult for my sanity and Kelly’s big day. I was fine.

I’d wanted to give her a week to recover, because we made big plans. It was crazy to think that Annette and I could organize it together. We were complete opposites. Kelly seemed nervous about us organizing the hen do, but she never told me why. Anyway, Annette was shy back in high school, but still fun. Maybe being a mom changed her, I know it had changed Kelly. Annette didn’t hold back at the parties and her parents willingly babysat her daughter, which was nice of them.

Kelly needed to do something wild before she got married. She had turned into Miss Sensibility. Ever since Kelly had set up the mother’s group, she felt that she had to be an example to other teenagers who looked up to her. To think that the geeky girl that I’d begged to get friends, was now one of the most popular women I knew and she had a following. There were so many postings on the web about their marriage today.

Congratulations to Kelly, who finally managed to settle Sebastian.

Good luck, Kelly, and have a great day.

I read them all while Kelly took a very long shower this morning. She said she had a hangover and the breakfast that we had did not get rid of it. I didn’t hit the bottle often, but a lot more than Kelly did, by the sound of the noises this morning and her puking up actions at the hen do. Shit, that weekend was good. I couldn’t wait for Annette to get married so that we could do one for her big day too.

She’d never told me who the father was, I just assumed he up and left her, the jerk! Anyway, I knew when to keep my nose out of other people’s business, so I didn’t pry. There was one thing I needed before I got ready and that was my watch. I knew that I put it in my jeans pocket before we hit the beach. I didn’t want to lose it. My grandma gave it to me before she died. It was the only thing I had left of hers, and I needed it to get me through the day. I knew that I couldn’t have Grandma by my side, but I wanted that watch.

S
ebastian and Dwayne
were arguing in the hallway. I didn’t know that they were going to get here so early. It caught me off-guard seeing them and part of me, the chicken part, wanted to pretend that I hadn’t see them and dart back into the room.

“You need to tell her now!”

Tell her, who? Me? I thought as the curiosity part of me made me walk towards them and not away.

“Oh, Brenda. What are you doing out here?” Sebastian said as he adjusted his shirt. He only did that when he was nervous. I had spent plenty of time with him at college and knew when he was feeling anxious. Like when he handed in an assignment or when Cole was sick and he wasn’t at home. Not seriously ill, but little childhood illnesses such as colds and coughs.

“I was looking for my watch.” I sighed. I didn’t face Sebastian, but kept my eye on Dwayne. How could he still look as hot as he did back in high school? He was slightly taller, tanned, and his dark complexion just looked perfect in the white suit that he had on.

“Brenda,” Dwayne whispered Sebastian just said, “I’ll leave you two to it.”

I hardly heard him, as I couldn’t get my eyes off Dwayne.

“
D
wayne
,” I purred as he held me in his arms as he had done so many times before. His hair shone in the sunlight. All the reasons that I fell in love with him six years ago were apparent as he held me in his arms. He had caught me in the hallway as I tried to figure out where I had left my damn watch. I knew I’d put it in my jeans pocket when we walked on the beachfront last night, but for some reason I couldn’t find it after that. Maybe because we had quite a few drinks before we hit the sack.

“Do you want this?” he asked as he pressed his lips against mine. It was so unexpected. The wedding was in four hours. Guests were arriving and I hadn’t known he was going to get here so early. Too early in fact.

I wanted it. Yes, I’d craved him every night while I was away at college. I never returned his emails, let alone his calls. How could I? He had cheated on me. He’d tried to brush it off by saying we had broken up. That wasn’t the case. We were both going to different colleges. I knew what it was like, and I thought back then it seemed like the right thing to do. Go our separate ways. Not miss each other, and maybe meet someone new. It would be easier that way. That is what I thought at the time. I was eighteen, and logic and I didn’t go hand in hand at times. I pushed him away. I didn’t want to get caught up in the moment. I was here for Kelly and Sebastian. It was their day; what happened with Dwayne and I was in the past.

“My emails, calls, you just ignored them.”

Now, he was ignoring my comment. I couldn’t get distracted and let him break my heart again. It had been so easy for him. One minute I said “We’re going to college. Maybe it is best we break up.” The next he was sleeping with some girl.

“Shit, Brenda. You wanted us to go to college and experience it. You are the one that said we should go our separate ways. You, not I. Then, six months later you tell me it was a mistake. How did I know it wasn’t another phase?”

To say that I changed my mind every minute was a bit of an understatement. Kelly always begged me to have the same hair color for more than a month, otherwise my hair would drop off and she would not be seen around town with a balding twenty-one-year-old. I know, bad joke. I had spent so many nights with Kelly on the sofa watching those damn romantic movies, that I’d forgotten that they were just that, make believe. I’d expected him to protest, for Dwayne to declare his undying love for me and say that we shouldn’t break up. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t even think he was upset. And that hurt so bad. I brushed it off and got on with life after he did not react to my suggestion. All he did was shrug and say, “Okay.” He left me standing there with my heart on a plate and he dismissed it as if it was a piece of dirt. It was then that I knew that I loved him and he’d never felt the same way about me. That was what got me through the heartache.

“I don’t do games. I certainly won’t be subjected to them,” he puffed and left me stranded in the hallway. Just like he did that night at his house. I told him my suggestion, then he just jumped in the car. Dropped me home and that was it. Nothing after that. I was speechless. For two good years we had been in each other’s pockets at high school. I thought that would mean something to him. Then, it hit me one day during class in college A guy who looked just like Dwayne walked past me, and Sebastian said, “Just call him already.” He looked at me and nodded as if he knew exactly what was on my mind.

Dwayne walked away from me, as he had done before. A tear escaped my eye. I was so angry, and then he came back and said, “When you decide what you want, then let me know. Just don’t expect me to come running.”

With those last words he was gone, like a wind that rushed into my life. The ghost of the past come to haunt us both. I couldn’t let it go. How could I? …