Chapter 4: Brunch

The bride came to brunch in sunglasses and did not take them off.

"Don't talk to me," she said, and sat down across from me at the long farm table.

"Good morning."

"I said don't."

"There are biscuits," I said.

"Hand me one," she said, "and tell me why you look like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you slept."

"I slept great. It's the mattress," I said.

She lifted the sunglasses one inch, looked at me with a bloodshot eye, and let them fall again.

I had known her since the seventh grade, and she knew what my face did when I lied.

I buttered a biscuit very carefully.

The barn had been turned into a brunch hall overnight.

There were white tablecloths down the long tables, mimosas in mason jars, and a country ham on a cutting board.

Colt had walked me to the door of Room 4 at two in the morning, and Jesse had walked behind us carrying my shoes.

Neither of them had come in.

Both of them had kissed me goodnight, one at a time, on my own doorstep, and I had gone to bed smiling at the ceiling.

Now they were sitting on either side of me again, and the tablecloth hung to the floor.

Jesse's hand arrived on my leg while I was reaching for the jam.

It settled on the outside of my thigh under the cloth, and his thumb moved up, slow, to a place just under my hem.

I knew where it was going before it got there.

It found the handprint.

I'd looked at it in the shower that morning, a red hand against my skin, a little fainter than the night before.

Jesse's thumb moved across it, back and forth.

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