Page 12 of First Comes Marriage

She couldn’t even look at him. Did she hate him that much? After all this time, months of volunteering together, laughing together, and it was all, what, a fucking game to her? It didn’t make sense. And he hated that he was even trying to puzzle it out on what should have been the happiest day of his life. He was marrying Holly Page. He was going to have the picture-perfect future that no one believed he could have.

Fuck Sabrina.

Sabrina took her place at the front of the line of bridesmaids, directly opposite from Baz, her eyes locked on his shoes.

The music changed and the crowd turned as one to face the back of the church. But not Baz. He couldn’t stop staring at Sabrina, daring her to look at him, so it took him a beat longer than everyone else to notice that something was wrong.

Holly should have entered the church already. The song had gone on too long, the organist glancing around as he continued playing, uneasy murmuring rippling through the crowd. Baz turned his head to look over his shoulder at Gavin, who clapped him on the back. “Probably just fixing her veil,” Gavin said.

Baz nodded and turned back towards the church, towards the empty doorway where his fiancée should have appeared by now. At the front of the church, his mother sent a concerned look his way, but Baz shook his head roughly. Everything wasfine.

As the organist started the song over and the crowd began shuffling in their seats, the murmurs growing louder, something sickly and cold turned in Baz’s gut, gathering size and weight with each moment that passed. In his jacket pocket, his cell phone vibrated and he whipped around, turning his back to the assembled congregation as he pulled out his phone.

Gavin, Ethan, and Jamie huddled around Baz as he stared at the screen in disbelief.

Holly:I can’t do this. Sabrina was right.

Holly:It’s over.

“What is it?” Ethan asked.

Baz shoved the phone towards him, each inch of his body growing hot with awareness of the hundreds of eyes watching his every move, waiting for him to come to grips with what they had already realized.

“What do you want to do?” Jamie asked, handing Baz back his phone.

“I—I don’t know.”

“Baz, let’s get out of here,” Gavin said.

“I’ll handle the guests,” Ethan offered.

Baz nodded numbly. Gavin and Jamie flanked him, moving as one to escort him out of the church, as though they could somehow lessen the embarrassment of literally being left at the altar.

“What’s going on?” Baz froze at the sound of Sabrina’s voice behind him. He spun around, meeting her eyes for the first time all day, and clenched his jaw to keep from shouting. “Is everything alright?”

“You got what you wanted,” he snarled.

“What do you—” Her face went white, her lip quivered, andfuck her. She didn’t get to cry. Not when he was the one who’d been humiliated. Not when she was the one who’d caused it all in the first place. “Oh, I didn’t—This isn’t what I wanted.”

Baz scoffed and scraped his hand over his jaw, aware of all the people staring at them now—the cousin who competed in fancy horse competitions and the great aunt who baked the best thumbprint cookies in Aster Bay, Ethan’s parents who’d been the first to take a chance on Baz’s new accounting firm,his own mother. They were all witness to his humiliation. There wouldn’t be a place in Aster Bay he could go after this where people wouldn’t know that Sebastian Graham had been publicly rejected, weighed and measured and found lacking.

And it was her fault.

Baz leaned close to Sabrina, his lungs burning with the rage he refused to let loose in a church, and dropped his voice dangerously low. “Get the fuck out of my town.”

Chapter Five

Now

Sabrina stifled another yawn behind her hand as she scribbled notes from the slideshow on the screen at the front of the packed conference room. She wasn’t sure if she was struggling to pay attention to the session on dynamic pricing because math had never been her strong suit, or if it had more to do with the lack of sleep.

She’d gone back to their room after Sebastian left the bar and waited for him to return, flipping through endless cable channels until well after midnight. By the time she finally gave up and went to bed, he still hadn’t returned. But when she woke the next morning, his suitcase had been moved and there was evidence that he’d slept on the couch in the corner without ever bothering to pull it out.

She hadn’t seen him at all yesterday, falling asleep before he returned to the room. But again, this morning, it was clear he’d slipped in and out of their room undetected, the balled-up blanket in the corner of the couch and the smell of his body wash in the bathroom the only clues that he’d been back to the room at all.

She shouldn’t care that he was avoiding her—they’d avoided each other for the last ten years, hadn’t they? But she also couldn’t deny that his words stung. Somehow his apathy was even worse than his anger. And some part of her, however tiny and irrational, had thought that maybe being on this trip together was a sign. Maybe they could finally hash out what had happened all those years ago and move past it.

But tomorrow they’d fly back to Rhode Island, and they were no closer to reconciling than when they’d arrived.

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