Keep You (30 page)

             
Mike looked like he’d just taken a bite of something that tasted unpleasant.

             
It all added up to trouble in paradise, a fact reflected by the flickering tongues of lightning that danced down from the clouds, licked the surface of the lake and went rolling back up with a cracking burst of laughter.

             
The steaming lamb and potatoes, the tender baby asparagus and mixed greens salad over on the buffet were spread out like a medieval feast, little cookies and biscuits heaped on silver cake stands, great platters of fruit and sliced vegetables laid out beside tins of bread pudding and custard. There were three kinds of soup and two kinds of stew. Enough to feed three dinners worth of guests. Cutlery and china clinked together, voices bubbled and peaked, laughter ringing beneath the slate roof of the pavilion.

             
But beyond, the storm came closer, the thunder like the distant, thumping cannons of an approaching army that drew steadily nearer. The candles kept blowing out. Napkins went tumbling off tables and were caught up in little eddies of air. The new arrivals and most of the bridesmaids were having an oblivious good time. But Jo could sense the tension up at the bride and groom’s table, and she could feel Dennis and Louise Brooks’ scornful stares.

             
“I’ve got a bad feeling about all this,” Jordan said in a hushed tone to Jo’s left.

             
“Probably just the weather,” Dylan offered. “The electricity in the air.”

             
“Oh, there’s plenty of electricity alright,” Beth said with a pointed glanced toward Dennis and Louise.

             
Walt, Gwen and the boys were sitting at the neighboring table with Mitch and his wife. Chase and Logan were having some kind of race with the salt and pepper shakers, complete with vrooming sound effects. Gwen tipped her chair back and touched Jessica’s shoulder. “Are they okay? Mike and Delta? They look a little…”

             
“Like they hate each other,” Jordan supplied, and Gwen nodded reluctantly.

             
“I overheard them talking two days ago,” Jo blurted out before she could stop herself, and regretted it as all eyes at the table swung toward her.

             
“Talking about what?” Jess said, a knowing look crossing her face.

             
Jo shrugged. “I couldn’t really hear. Something about the wedding.” She glanced away from the curious faces around her, not in the mood for gossip, seeking Tam at his place over with Johnson and one of Delta’s great aunts.

             
The way he’d looked at her before was the only thing her brain could process at the moment. She kept trying to pick it apart, to decipher whether it had been longing or hatred or a mix of both he’d sent shooting her way.
I didn’t understand, I still don’t
, she’d told him the night he’d come to her, and it was as true now as it had been then. She’d never imagined that Tam of all people would turn into this confusing riddle of a man she couldn’t figure out.

             
“About the wedding?” Beth asked. “They’re not…oh, Lord, if they back out of this now, after all the trouble we’ve been to…” she let the threat hang, none of them buying it as a threat anyway.

             
“Jo.” Jess leaned an elbow on the table. “If you know something - ”

             
Jo hadn’t known there was a PA system strung up in the metal rafters above them until it crackled to life and scared the bejeesus out of her, and, if the sudden gasps were anything to go by, everyone else too. Maureen’s prim voice came through a touch crinkled.

             
“Evenin’.” She was standing up on a footstool beside Mike and Delta’s raised table, her clipboard under her arm, dressed in her usual black suit. “You all know this is the rehearsal dinner, I don’t have to tell ya,” she said and earned a few chuckles. “We’re gonna run through the speeches for tomorrow night, not the real ones, mind ya, because that would spoil all the fun, but if the best man and maid of honor would like to get up and say somethin’, that’d be splendid.”

             
She hopped off her stool and motioned toward it with a quick flick of her wrist, brows raised expectantly. Regina took that as her cue and pushed up from her chair, executing a practiced set of maneuvers that would enable her to slide through the sea of tables without spilling anyone’s wine. A bolt of lightning branded the sky as she took up the mike, and the PA crackled wildly. Low, distressed murmurs whispered through the pavilion as the few remaining renegade candles went out.

             
“Damn,” Regina said, which earned a handful of laughs, and then launched into her “I’ve known Delta since…” monologue.

             
Jo tuned her out. As a stiff gust swirled the hem of her dress and pattered her legs with raindrops, she sought Tam again. This time, her eyes collided with his. He’d been staring at her, and didn’t look away when she made contact across the shifting sea of heads and shoulders and flashing cutlery.

             
A thousand memories hung between them; the kind of history, the intimate understanding of one another that all those fateful-night-at-a-singles’-bar couples didn’t ever get to have. Life wasn’t a movie or a Taylor Swift song – Jo knew that people outgrew childhood crushes and high school love, that they became these new, more jaded, more sophisticated adult people who didn’t
need
partners, but who chose them from a carefully groomed pool of only the best prospects.

Jo didn’t want to be one of those people, though.

              One corner of Tam’s mouth lifted in the saddest smile she’d ever seen, and then he slid out of his chair.

             
A smattering of applause marked the end of Regina’s speech and Jo’s gaze followed Tam as he went to take her place up at the stool. Regina gave him a nasty frown along with the mike, and flounced back to her seat, skirts lifted. Tam ignored her. He turned to face the crowd, standing in front of the stool rather than on it, fingers white-knuckled on the microphone. Right before he opened his mouth, as his eyes swept out through the crowd, Jo thought she could hear a low-pitched hum radiating beneath the whistles, slaps and booms of the imminent storm. A final peak to the pressure before it bottomed out. Goose pumps prickled up her arms as the sense of standing right on the edge of something stole over her. She traded shifty glances with Jordan and Jess.

             
And then Tam took a deep breath, shoulders heaving, and started talking.

             
“I met Mike when we were thirteen.” The crowd settled a little, like maybe they’d felt that humming too, but Tam’s opening line had set them at ease. But Jo knew better. She could read the regret etched in his face. “We spent a lot of time in detention for dress code violations: torn up jeans. Mine were just old. Mike had taken the scissors to his.”

             
A few chuckles popped up. Mike found a smile.

             
Jo remembered her brother’s cut up and safety pinned jeans. The holes in the knees of Tam’s. His red sneakers and that first lazy smile when he’d asked her about the kick ball scuff on her nose.

             
“But of course,” Tam continued, “Mike outgrew that fast. Then it was the jock phase, the prep phase…you know all the phases. That’s the thing about Mikey.” Mike’s smile was starting to recede. “He always just wants to fit in.”

             
Randy barked a laugh, but no one else did.

             
“Mike’s family.” His eyes fell on their table “Well, except for Walt over there, is the kind of family everyone wants.”

             
A chuckle. A huff of a laugh. People thought it was a joke. Jo did too until she saw Walt push his chair back, a scowl on his face, and then she was confused.

             
“They’re Norman Rockwell.” Tam looked wistful, right before his eyes cut back to Mike. “Mike, dude, you should appreciate them more. Instead of running around sucking Daddy Moneybag’s dick and hoping getting hitched to
this
” -  he pointed at Delta - “will turn you into the Porsche driving prick you always wanted to be.”

             
There was a collective intake of breath. Delta went crimson from hairline to neckline. Walt surged to his feet. Mike’s hands curled into fists on top of the table. “
Tam
!” he hissed. Louise Brooks fanned herself, mouth agape.

             
“But I figure that, if you still think of me as your best friend, then
as your best friend
, I gotta tell you, you’re making a huge mistake here.”

             
The pavilion echoed with the sound of chairs scraping back across the pavers and the disbelieving gasps of every woman present.

             
“Wales,” Walt bit out as he started forward. “You better - ”

             
“I’m almost done,” Tam said. His voice had grown stronger through the course of his speech and he held up a hand as if to stave off Walt, something very akin to a smile on his face. Dennis Brooks and Randy were both on the move; he didn’t have long. “I got one more thing to say.”

             
Jo was on her feet to see better, because everyone else was on theirs, but she still wasn’t quite tall enough. She stopped breathing when Tam climbed up on Maureen’s stool and pegged her with a look that went all the way through her; the kind of look that tunneled down into her bones and pumped fresh blood through her heart.

             
“Joey,” Tam said, and his voice changed. It was still strong, still laced with an assuredness that gave her the chills. But it wasn’t self-conscious, wasn’t for show. It was like all the angry, jostling people around him had vanished. She felt everyone’s gaze swing toward her. “I’m sorry, baby. Four years ago…that…” Pain carved grooves between his dark brows. “I had to do it, I really did, but I should never have done it that way, and I’m sorry. Because I love you. I love you so much, more than you can even know, and I never wanted to hurt you.”

             
Thunder clapped: Zeus’s palms meeting in the heavens. The trees rattled together like bones. The wind ripped across the lake with a sound of a tsunami approaching. And everything else was silent.

             
Jo brought a hand to her throat, felt her pulse thumping under her skin, and drew in her first breath as Tam gave her one last half-hearted smile, and then turned away from all of them. The mike made an awful blast of sound and static as it hit the slate, and then the pavilion erupted in human white noise.

             
“Holy shit,” Jordan breathed, a hand stuck in his hair.

             
Jess was shaking her head. “Not that kind of grand gesture!” she hissed.

             
“What in the holy hell was that?” Randy boomed.

             
“Oh, Lord,” Beth said. “Oh sweet freaking Lord.”

             
“Did I miss something here?” Dylan asked. “Did he just say he loves you?”

             
Delta had her face in her hands, shoulders shaking. Her mother looked faint and her father was frowning disapprovingly at his wife.

             
Jo saw Walt and Mike ducking out into the night and took off after them.

             
The glass lanterns were swinging on their moorings, tossing warm, elliptical shadows across the grass that slid around like searchlights and made the black silhouettes of the humans charging back toward the castle look like dodgy villains in a BBC movie.

             
She ducked her head against the sparse, stinging drops of rain and quickened her pace, gaining ground on them. Tam was in the lead, and when he spun around, a puddle of light washed over his face and was gone again, giving her just enough of a glimpse to see that his jaw was set and that he wasn’t going to run away from her brothers.

             
“What the hell was that?” Mike exploded as the clouds finally tore open and the rain began to fall in earnest. “What in the…
my sister? Are you shitting me?”

             
“I thought I told you to break things off with her!” Walt’s voice was a contained roar and Jo faltered a step.
What?

             
“
You knew
?” Mike asked Walt. “You fucking knew?”

             
“How did you
not
know, dumbass?!”

             
“Guys!” Jo sucked in a deep breath and closed the gap between them, rain pelting her face, dress snatching around her legs. “Don’t!”

             
Mike turned a vicious snarl on her made all the more sinister by a flash of lightning. “You stay out of this, you little slut!”

             
“Don’t call her that,” Tam hissed and grabbed the front of his sport coat. Walt made a move to step between them. “You want some too? Come on, Walter, I been waiting a loooong time to lay your ass out.”