Page 8 of How to Ruin a Wedding

His smile returns and warmth sparks in my chest, like a reward for bringing it back out of him, though something tells me nobody has to work too hard to do so. “Do you think a pity party will help?”

“Yeah,” I say, still holding his face. “Party is right there in the phrase. Let’s suck out the sadness like venom from a snake bite. Once it’s gone, we’ll feel better.” I use my chin to gesture to the other side of the room. “And then, we’ll drink some more, play some darts, and make bad decisions.”

He shows a set of perfect white teeth, his canines a little sharper and longer than the rest, which widens his smile. “Okay. Let’s.”

I pull away to think, but his hand reaches around my stool and pulls the chair closer to him, so my thighs are between his. I shake off the attraction that runs through me. I have to remind myself as I think of what to say:I’m going to comfort him, not sleep with him.

“Okay,” I begin, “I have a really sad life, so mine might be long.”

He slides a finger over my cheek and pulls a stray hair behind my ear. “I’m here however long you need.”

Lucy, donotfall in love with a man who shows you a simple act of kindness.

“Okay, so from the beginning. I have never had anything that has been only mine,” I tell him. “My parents died when I was a teenager, and I spent most of my life trying to take care of my little sister.”

His gaze travels around my face, then focuses on my eyes, like a camera lens finding its subject.

“Growing up, I spent recesses in a corner alone, studying to get perfect grades to make my parents proud, so friends were nonexistent for a while. My parents died in a car crash on the way to the hospital because my mom was sick, cancer, and as much as I love an ironic twist, that messed me up for a bit. After that, raising Taina on my own was awhole other kind of hard—balancing grief and responsibility was confusing for a girl who didn’t even know how taxes worked.

“At work, aside from one other woman, I was surrounded by men. I’d never be invited to the weekly team dinners, instead tasked with projects that ran well into the nights my coworkers drank through. I studied my lovers like exams and picked up their hobbies and passions like my own, so we’d have more to discuss. I’d cook their favorite meals, remember their coffee orders, listen to their burdens, and try to ease them or resolve them, and they still left.”

A touch of embarrassment and a shred of worry lodges itself in my throat. It’s too much to admit to a perfect stranger, but it’s because he’s a stranger that this feels like getting the poison out of my body to allow it to heal.

“It’s hard to explain. It feels like I had this deposit of gold within me once, treasured and sought after, but someone has been in there carving out every remnant of it. Only flecks of it remain, it’s not even worth mining. Not so valuable anymore.”

At that, he reaches over and squeezes my hand, and it somehow feels like a hug around my heart.

“Want to know the most humiliating thing I’m doing now to get by?” I ask.

“Tell me.”

I chew on my lip, just a brief moment of sense, trying to keep my mouth shut before the confession slips out. “Wedding wrecking.”

He frowns, scratches his ear before saying, “Sorry, I think I misheard.”

“I’m sure you didn’t.” I tap his arm. And when his eyes grow wide, I hold out my hand. “I’m not here to wreck Anna’s wedding!”

I can see the emotions ranging over his face as he tries to process what I said until he ultimately stalls at a mix of confusion and sympathy. “Okay,” he says, “how does someone even get into that ... field?”

I snort at his attempt at being polite instead of questioning my sanity. “Accidentally?” I answer. “I mean, the entire job is made up. Thereis no frame of reference for me to follow. The idea was this cumulation of an alcohol-induced night, the luck of a loud, even drunker, groom-to-be begging his groomsmen to stop his impending wedding, and a projection of my own misery wishing someone had saved me from a doomed marriage, twice. And, of course, the cherry on top of the dirt-cake, it was the night I was fired from my job.”

“All right,” he interrupts me, curiosity currently winning his carousel of emotions, “you have to give more details than that. There’s a big jump from overhearing a groom having cold feet to straight-up wedding wrecking.”

I shove a couple of fries in my mouth before continuing. “The groom-to-be wasbeggingfor sympathy. His friends knew he liked men, knew the marriage was set up by his parents in denial, yet his buddies were encouraging him to go through with it. They said it was better to play into the facade than risk his parents disowning him—”

“Assholes.”

“I know, right? They kept saying he could date anyone he wanted, secretly. The groom-to-be—and me, when I stumbled physically and metaphorically into their conversation—thought it was unfair to the bride-to-be and whoever would have to live in secret with him.”

“He must have been happy for someone to take his side.”

“He was.” I go on, “Walter was his name, begged me to help him do something about it. Something that became more intriguing when he offered me all the money his parents sent him for a wedding present. I hadn’t seen that many zeros since one of my late-night, wine-fueled Zillow binges, where I scroll through houses I’ll never be able to afford.”

Anders’s chuckle brings a warmth to my chest that interrupts my train of thought before I continue.

“It was a sloppy mess. Crashing the rehearsal dinner, claiming I was in love with Walter and that we were running away together after a one-night stand. But at the end of the night, Walter said this way his family wouldn’t come after him for his sexuality, not for a while, and he planned to travel the world until he was ready to face everyone again.”

“Hearing it like this,” Anders says, downing one of the shots I didn’t even notice him order, “it makes you sound less like wrecking, more likehelping.”