Page 76 of How to Say I Do
I shook my head, following the path of a honey bee over Wyatt’s daffodils. I had no idea how to explain the jungle of my mind, and the considerations I’d never slowed down long enough to let percolate through the email and the texts and the hassle of it all. Empathy took time, time I didn’t have, especially when the headlines kept refreshing. Wasn’t that what London had said?
Eliteand their intrusiveness. Celebs thinking they deserved an invite because they were A-list,duh, and A-listers were what made anything worthwhile. The casual way everyone used and exploited each other without a second thought, never mind the consequences. London, and Harrison, and…
I was overwhelmingly exhausted by the charades, and the subtext behind who dressed Tessa, who had exclusive first rights to her photographs, and what it meant thatElitewas dishing out a cool $10 million to own her wedding. Who was going to be there and why, and what would it all mean, and how was Tessa going to survive the backlash if a celebrity who didn’t get an invite threw a very public shit-fit and sent the social media pitchforks marching. What was real and what wasn’t? What mattered at the end of the day? Or the end of a life?
Where was authenticity in all of this?
Tessa’s wedding and London’s resurrection were juicing these thoughts, but my mind had really churned into gear thanks to Wyatt.
Wyatt lived such a fuller life than I did. He was still tending to the vines and barrels that he and his father had worked together. Jason’s baby mobile still hung in the sunlight in Liam’s bedroom. Wyatt had brought his father forward in time, and he linked his brother and his nephew to their family’s history through his own beating heart. The porch I was sitting on, the swing I rocked in, the bed I slept in, the roof I was under. All of that had been built by Wyatt’s two hands, physical outpourings of real love.
“I’m not sure what I’m doing.”
Wyatt, bless him, tried to reassure me. “You’re giving Tessa and Tyler the best day of their lives. That’s no small thing.”
“I do enjoy helping Tessa and Tyler.” I did, shockingly. Despite my dire predictions of death by baby’s breath only a few months ago, I was persevering, and, in fact, thriving at wedding planning. “But it’s not them. It’s everything else.”
None of what I did lasted. None of it was permanent. Not like how what Wyatt did for his brother and for Jason and for their ranch would echo down his family’s line for generations. There were parties I’d dedicated months of my life to planning, events that had been graced by Kendall Jenner and Drake and hyped to the stars, that were now just dust and internet archives that no one remembered at all. What did any of it matter?
All my questions all seemed so ungodly far away. Just miles andmilesaway, like all that crap was happening in a different reality. The things I lived and died by in New York—call times, shoot schedules, print runs, reservations, VIP velvet ropes—were so inconsequential here.
Being with Wyatt was such a sharp contrast from all of that. I brushed Peanut and fed her apples. Wyatt and I walked hand in hand through the breeze-tossed vines. We cooked together—he was teaching me how to boil pasta—and then we watched the stars as we put away a bottle of wine and held each other’s hand on the back porch. There was no Insta, no hashtag, no Snap of what we did.
But it mattered. It mattered.
On Wednesday, we drove into town for lunch at Wyatt’s favorite restaurant, the sole local joint in town. Frank and Connie, the owners, had known Wyatt as long as he’d been alive. They’d looked owlishly at me that first time we’d both gone into town—when he’d been hunting for those bolts and I’d been going out of my mind—but this time, they happily sat down with the two of us and told me story after story of Wyatt as a precocious little boy and then a small-town football star, and, finally, a “fine young man” that the town was so deeply proud of.
Wyatt turned petunia-pink through their stories, chuckling into his sweet tea while I listened raptly to the stories of the Great Touchdown Run, or of the downtown Halloween party where little Wyatt and Liam had shown up dressed like baby lions and were dragged around in a little red wagon.
On Thursday nights in summertime, the tiny downtown transformed into an open-air potluck. Ranchers and townsfolk clustered together in lawn chairs beneath the shade of the maples overhanging the square, eating barbecue and potato salad and cornbread off of paper plates in their laps. The evening filled up with Southern comfort chitchat, with all its idleness and indulgent pointlessness. The same used to grate on me in Manhattan, and, in the city, I’d slice my way out of any Southern conversation I was trapped in with my sharp edges.
But here I was, laughing along at Wyatt’s side, enjoying myself as we sat in the middle of the closed-down Main Street and sipped wine beneath the summer night sky.
This was a slice of life that had been lost in the big cities, and I felt like I was eavesdropping on a new world. People spoke about the rains that were holding off, and the price of feed for cattle, and how the growing season was going. Families knew each other intimately and shared the comings and goings of their children. Sarah was in Austin at summer camp. Lilly was on a college visit and was thinking about becoming an Aggie, whatever that was. Carlos was out on the rodeo circuit and chasing his buckle.
Dean, an octogenarian who looked like he’d walked right off the set of an Eastwood western, said to Wyatt, “I hear young Jason is taking after his uncle.” Everyone laughed. Wyatt hung his head, and I popped my eyebrows until Dean leaned into my side. “Wyatt here used to talk his teachers down to thebone. You always knew when the McKinleys were coming. You’d hear young Wyatt from blocks away!”
Wyatt chugged the last of his wine as I laughed. We were holding hands in a way that was obvious and unmistakable. I’d thought... Well, I didn’t know what I had thought. Manhattan was an aggressively progressive place, but there were still times when I heard slurs. Of all the things in the world, I would not have expected to be so wonderfully welcomed in Wyatt’s hometown, especially as an out-of-towner, a New Yorker. But welcome me they did, warmly asking me about who I was and where I was from and how I had met “their Wyatt.”
And at the end of the night, when we walked back to the truck, Wyatt had his arm around my waist.
We spent that night at the ranch cuddled in sleeping bags in his back pasture, watching for meteorites and rising planets and the hazy glow of the Milky Way. Wyatt had zipped two bags together, and we were one great tangle of arms and legs, with my cheek against his and our whispers sharing the same air. It was an almost perfect reenactment of our night on the beach when he’d taken me on a constellation tour at the edge of the waves.
Starlight filled Wyatt’s face. He kept looking from me to the sky and then back to me, as if what was down on Earth and who he was holding were more precious than the heavens. Again, I was hit with that sense of timelessness and steadfastness, and of being outside of everything, even myself. With him, all my bitterness and the sublimating frustrations I felt day in and day out melted away. With him, I slowed and stilled, and the growing questions inside me drifted away to pile up in my mind’s shadowy corners.
We’d gone out there to watch for shooting stars, and, finally, one long, fiery trail glided in from outer space.
Wyatt whispered, “Make a wish.”
I couldn’t keep the words in one second longer. “I’m in love with you, Wyatt,” I blurted out.
He went still, so still I thought I’d made a severe mistake.I fucked up. He was going to let me down at the end of the week—
The smile on his face. The look in his eyes. “That was my wish. Noël, that’s been my wisheverytime—”
I kissed him.
He kissed me back fiercely, intently, memorizing me by taste and touch and fingertips.
