Page 76 of I'm Not Yours
“I love the love, the passion for each other, the eternal hope that this couple could get married and stay together, possibly for seventy years. They could have a love like my parents’ love. A love for forever. I want to make a dress for the bride that reflects her, her personality, her new life, and that shining hope.”
“They’re perfect. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” He closed one of my bridal scrapbooks. He’d studied every dress.
“On my wedding day I was wearing a regular suit.” I tried to sound offhand, but it hurt.Still.I bit my lip.Why did I say anything at all?
“You were wearing a regular suit?” Reece was aghast, his mouth open, eyes confused.
“Yep. A suit.” I thought of that suit. It wasn’t even my favorite suit. It was my fifth favorite suit. It was beige. I had left it behind when I left Grayson behind.
“Why?”
“Because we were married at the courthouse.”
He hardly knew what to do with that one, his face frozen in shock. “Why did you get married at the courthouse?”
“Because it was convenient.”
“Convenient?What the hell does ‘convenient’ have to do with a wedding?”
“We were busy. We worked a lot. We were married on our lunch hour.”
“On your lunch hour? You’ve got to be kidding.” Reece’s disbelieving, appalled expression was enough to tell me what he thought about that.
“No.” Grayson had been late. He’d hurried up the steps. He was in trial, buried in work, didn’t “have time” for a nice wedding. “And they’re so expensive, June. A fortune. I don’t want to spend all that money. The result is the same, right? We’re married. But this’ll cost almost nothing and we’re done.” Done.
Yep. We weredone.
I remembered standing in front of the judge. I knew the judge.
Grayson had forgotten my flowers.
“You forgot the flowers?” Judge Allery admonished Grayson.
Grayson blushed.
I said it was okay.
Judge Allery was absolutely flabbergasted. “It’s not okay.No flowers?”
And yet, that was the least of what we were missing.
“Do you have the ring?” Judge Allery cocked an eyebrow at Grayson, as if he thought there was a distinct possibility that the brick in front of him had forgotten that, too.
“Of course!” Grayson puffed up and displayed our rings. Two thin gold bands. Inexpensive. “I’ll buy you a diamond later, June. I don’t have time now. We’ll shop together,” he’d said. I never had a diamond ring. It wasn’t the diamond I wanted, it was the care and thought behind it and the fact that he had not kept his word that was the problem.
We were married.It was done.
The judge spoke very slowly during our vows and stared hard at me. He later told me that he knew Grayson, knew me, and hadn’t a clue why I was marrying him. “A pigeon had clearly plucked your brain out of your head without you noticing,” he’d admonished over a shared beer at a bar.
“My parents were appalled,” I told Reece. “So was the rest of our Scottish clan.”
“I bet they were. Weddings are for families. The whole thing is sad, June, and I’m getting all ticked off at your ex again.” He stood up and stalked around the studio, his cheekbones flushed. “A court- house! At your lunch break? Damn. He didn’t care, did he? He wasn’t thinking of you at all.” He ran a hand in frustration over his hair. “That had to hurt you so much, and yet you make wedding dresses.”
“Late at night, when I was still married to Grayson, I started sketching wedding dresses, dress after dress, with colored pencils. I know it was wedding dress therapy. As the marriage became, for me, more and more sad, I worked out my grief, my loneliness, my anger at him and at myself, through drawing. I lost myself in that marriage, but I’d really been lost for years.
“I drew pages and pages of dresses. The more I drew, the more original the gowns became. They started reflecting the core of the woman, her identity. It was fun. The next day I’d go back to whipping people in court, blasting the other side, inwardly knowing my life was rotting and something had to give.”
“I’m sorry, June.” Reece wrapped his arms around me, folding me into his warmth as if I’d been there a million times before.
