Downgrade My Ride? I'll Upgrade My Groom! novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Wedding Night

Clay's penthouse was on the forty-first floor, and the whole east wall was Lake Michigan going purple in the dusk.

I'd been here a hundred times.

I had never walked in as his wife.

He set the envelope on the kitchen island.

Then he got out a first-aid kit and made me sit on the counter.

"I can do it myself," I said.

"You can't see your own eyebrow, Atwood."

"Eastman."

He stopped with the antiseptic wipe an inch from my face.

"Say that again."

"Eastman," I said. "Apparently."

He shook his head and went back to work, but his ears had gone red.

His hands were gentle.

He cleaned the cut, closed it with two thin strips, and blew on it the way he used to when I skinned my knees on his driveway.

"You're going to have a tiny scar," he said.

"Good. I want to remember the van."

My phone buzzed on the counter.

I turned it face down.

His phone rang.

He looked at the screen and sighed and put it on speaker.

"Is she there?" said his grandmother. "Put her on."

"She's right here, Gran. You're on speaker."

"Liv, darling. Are you hurt?"

"A cut. I'm fine."

"Good. Now listen to me. Your father called me."

My stomach dropped.

"He asked me to make my grandson annul it by Monday," she said. "I told him I'd rather eat my own hat, and I have some very ugly hats."

I laughed, and it came out wet.

"Clay," she said. "Feed her something. She hasn't eaten since six this morning, I know how brides are."

"Yes, Gran."

"And don't you dare be a gentleman about the guest room. You've been a gentleman for six years and look where it got you. Goodnight."

She hung up.

The kitchen was very quiet.

Clay put the phone down slowly.

"She's eighty-one," he said. "She says whatever she wants."

"Six years?"

He opened the fridge and looked into it.

"I'll make eggs."

He made eggs.

I went to find a shirt to wear, because I was still in the slip, and the slip still had blood on it.

His bedroom was across the hall from his study.

The study door was open, and the lamp was on.

On the shelf behind his desk, between a model of a sailboat and a stack of annual reports, was a small framed photo.

It was my father's dock in Lake Forest at night.

The sky was green and black, the way it went in summer storms.

Two people were sitting at the end of the dock under one rain jacket.

I was asleep on his shoulder.

I remembered that night.

The power went out on our whole road.

I was twenty-two, back from my last semester, and I'd gone down to the dock to watch the lightning because the house was too loud.

He came down and found me.

We sat there until two in the morning talking about nothing, and I fell asleep, and he didn't move for an hour so he wouldn't wake me.

His grandmother must have taken the picture from her terrace.

Three weeks later I met Niles.

"I can explain that," Clay said from the doorway.

He was holding a plate of eggs.

"You kept it for six years."

"I did."

"On your desk."

"It's not on my desk. It's behind my desk. That's very different."

I turned around.

"Clay."

He put the plate down on a stack of reports.

He didn't come any closer.

"That's the night," he said. "You fell asleep, and the storm went right over us, and I sat there with my arm going numb thinking, oh. It's her. It was always going to be her."

My throat closed.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I was going to. I had a whole speech. It was terrible. Then you came over for my birthday and said you'd met someone at a hotel opening, and you were so happy." He shrugged one shoulder. "I wasn't going to be the guy who ruins that."

"So you just waited."

"I didn't wait. I dated. I tried. It never stuck." He looked at the photo, then at me. "And then at your engagement party I had one glass of champagne too many and said the stupidest true thing I've ever said, and you laughed and patted my arm."

"I thought you were joking."

"I know."

"You weren't."

"No."

I looked at the ring on my thumb.

I thought about Niles's text on the floor of a wrecked car.

Don't make a scene.

Then I thought about a man who sat in the rain with his arm going numb for an hour so I could sleep.

"I married you to win," I said. "Today. That's the honest truth."

"I know that too," he said. "I'll take it."

"I don't want you to take it."

I crossed the room.

I put my hands flat on his chest.

His heart was going hard under my palms.

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