This is set a few years into the future and involves scattered bits of lore from other stories of mine and some I came up with for this— I tried to err on the side of narrative negative space at a certain point rather than over-explaining, but please let me know if anything needs clarification.
March 1973
The first sign of trouble was when he walked through the door and smelled vanilla extract, but his daughter came barreling towards him and his heart unfurled like a hothouse flower, every time. "Daddy Daddy Daddy," Lisa babbled into his ear as he crouched to catch her, the words spilling out of her overexcited mouth, "can I hold it today? Can I?"
Last week, Steve had let her hover a flashlight, two-handed, over a car he was working on, and so far that was shaping up to be the highlight of her three-year-old life. Growing up, he'd never pictured a daughter taking over his fantasy garage someday— but the times were a-changin', as Bob Dylan put it, and it wasn't like he'd spent a lot of time imagining being a good father to begin with. Putting it all into practice now, he was shocked by how difficult and draining Frank had always made it seem. This parenting shit was fun as hell.
He came into the kitchen with her balanced on his hip, then set her down under the table to slam her toy dump truck and fire engine together, as she started to wiggle loose. Evie was standing at the counter, pouring chocolate chips into a pan of banana bread batter with reckless abandon; approaching with caution, he wrapped his arms around her waist and pressed his lips to the side of her neck. "You sure you ain't addin' too many in there?" he asked, unwisely, peering down at the scene of the culinary crime.
"You measure that shit with your heart," Evie said without leaving room for argument, stirring with a rubber spoon.
She sighed pointedly as she turned on the oven to preheat, and he couldn't deny that there was trouble brewing any longer. Evie was a notorious stress baker. "Somethin' happen today?" His first thought was Lisa acting up, but not only would the full report be coming the second he walked through the door, that'd be worthy of a Betty Crocker mix at worst. Baking from scratch really spelled disaster.
"My patient, Sharon, you remember her?" Steve didn't, but he jerked his chin up and down like he did, anyway. A tiny crease started to form in the center of Evie's forehead, and she turned away to fiddle with the dial again. "The fourteen-year-old, Jesus, and hips on her like a damn Barbie doll… she delivered just fine this afternoon, no complications, but I swear God flips a coin with those little girls. And you know who's done the most worryin' about her, what plan she's got for takin' care of the baby, where or who she's gonna even go home to? Me and the social worker, Martha, that new one who couldn't find her ass with both hands and a map. Parents nowhere to be found, as usual."
Steve had racked up a million worse sins since senior year at Will Rogers, but the memory of 'slutty Sandy' dogged him all the same, as he imagined Evie coaxing her bloodstained, waiflike patient through contractions— he'd been delighted by his own cleverness at the time, how it had spread around the school like cholera from the Broad Street water pump. Part of him that still loved Soda still reckoned she'd deserved it. Part of him conjured up the old male cliché, his own daughter sixteen with a scarlet letter on her chest, and thought of how dearly he'd want to knock out any guy who'd call her something like that. At that age, he'd been smart, vicious, and self-loathing enough to make an expert bully, with no way of knowing how much vague, sticky remorse lay ahead of him.
He opened his mouth to offer whatever comfort he could give, but that was when he noticed the pale pink envelope on the kitchen table, the paper inside delicately embossed— a far cry from their usual bills or Christmas cards. "Take some deep breaths, okay," Evie warned as he turned it over in his hands and pulled the invitation out, tugging her floral oven mitts off and slapping them onto the counter. "I just mopped this floor, I don't want you crackin' your skull open on it."
We Cordially Invite You To Witness The Wedding Of:
Faye Louise Randle
and
Daniel Arthur Sheldon
Saturday, The Ninth of June,1973, At Five In The Evening
At Southern Hills Country Club, Tulsa, OK, 74136
Kindly RSVP By—
"She called me, earlier today," Evie said delicately as blood sloshed around Steve's ears, hard enough to make him seasick. "She was askin' if I wanted to be a bridesmaid."
"Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me."
It was something Biblical, straight out of the dusty bowels of Leviticus— the widow married off to her dead husband's brother. Hell, it was downright obscene. And worst of all, nobody had ever bothered to get Steve's opinion on it.
"Jesus, Steve, don't be such a dick." This was the kind of ladylike language chicks on the East side used to sweet-talk their husbands. "She was never much of one in the way of girlfriends, bless her heart… what was I gonna do, say no?"
"Yes."
"Forget girlfriends, she ain't even got any other relatives to fight over the bouquet, unless you count that thirty-somethin' stepmama of hers." Now she was rolling her eyes hard enough to scrape the back of her skull. "She's your cousin— your only cousin, might I add. Lord knows I don't like him either, but do you really plan on takin' this to the grave?"
"Just because someone's your blood, that don't make them your problem."
He'd thought it was just an ill-timed fling, when it started. Faye was grieving, not thinking straight, after her old man kicked the bucket— not that there was much to cry over with Lyle, but he'd still been her father, and not everybody could be as ruthlessly mercenary as he'd been cutting Frank out of his life. That older Sheldon brother, who'd always had some creepy fixation on her even back when she was dating Bob, had swooped right in to 'comfort' her. And by the time he'd realized how serious this all had gotten, he'd been absent too long from her life for her to listen to a damn word out of his mouth. Now there was an engagement ring on her finger and a date set, the reality slapping him in the face no matter how many calligraphy flowers softened the blow.
"You two are both such only children." Evie pulled the elastic out of the tight French braid she wore to work, let her dark hair cascade down her shoulders. Despite the dire seriousness of the situation, Steve still wanted to run his fingers through it. "No conflict resolution skills to speak of. Y'all should've been smackin' the shit out of each other in the stroller like me and Tony, I'm tellin' you, it builds character."
Steve declined to mention how Tony was doing a year upstate on 'manufacture and distribution of a controlled substance' charges, or how he'd once witnessed her and Belinda get into a screaming, hair-ripping fight over a peach silk blouse from Dillard's, and ask if that was the kind of 'character building' she had in mind— his back always hurt like a son of a bitch when he had to sleep on the couch. Shaking his head, he turned the invitation over in his hands again, like it'd metamorphose into something else if he just wished it hard enough. "Those rich motherfuckers better not be shakin' us down for no cash."
The bride's family paid for the wedding, he remembered that much, and the thought was sticking in his craw like a popcorn kernel between his teeth; at the time of his own, he'd been more than happy to hand the responsibility for the catering and napkin rings off to Evie's mother and prissy stepsister, the bill off to the stepfather who'd walked her down the aisle. Last he'd spoken to Dan Sheldon, even if his daddy's bank account had been frozen by the feds, he was finishing up a law degree from some frou-frou private school. Like those people needed any help from the Randles, or were fixing to get it.
"They invited us over this Saturday, I'm sure they'll have their pitch finalized by then— you got the same look on your face as Lisa when I put her in the timeout chair." She planted a hand on her hip, jutting her elbow out. "Listen, she didn't exactly sound like she was trapped in no hostage situation. Sounded downright excited about the whole thing, believe it or not, and that's comin' from her."
He worried about her, sue him. He could count the amount of people he still cared about on one hand, two of them standing in this room, but no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't knock her out of the number three spot. Faye might've been brilliant, but she was brilliant in a way that made her an easy mark— nasty reckless streak running through her, too, like she didn't care what happened to her one way or another. It was a combination that could go off like a powder keg, with the right trigger.
"If Tony had tried shootin' his mouth off that I shouldn't be marryin' you, somehow I doubt I would've listened." A sly smile started to creep across her face. "Though when Kathy was convincing me to go out with you, it was because she figured I could use you to get an in with that dreamboat Soda Curtis. You're lucky you turned out to be cute."
As a disaffected teenager, he would've sulked over that for days, if not weeks, well-aware that he was the eternal wingman in a Curtis world; a couple of years ago, just the mention of his name would've sent him into a stormy silence, and clattering the screen door on his way out. Today in their sunny kitchen, it was like he'd already died and they could start laundering his reputation, their high school days passed through a halcyon filter. He pressed her against the counter, let his hand trace down the curve of her ass and settle on her inner thigh. "You reckon Soda could do this to you…?"
The abandoned banana bread ended up setting off the smoke detector.
This felt like a fucking episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, hauling ass over to the Sheldon estate for afternoon tea; the Randles weren't as bad off as Steve had once liked to posture, but this level of conspicuous consumption, down to the gold mermaids on the driveway fountain, was beyond anything he'd ever encountered up-close and personal. There were kids starving on the East side, for Pete's sake. "You think that shit's real?" Evie muttered out of the side of her mouth, cutting her eyes towards it. "Like… all the way down?"
"It's got to be a gilded coat," Steve muttered back.
He was wearing salmon-colored shorts, of all fruity things, a white polo unbuttoned halfway down his chest, as he came from around back to greet them. Dan Sheldon and his brother were mirror images: same dark hair and eyes, olive skin, and way of tilting their nose downwards at you, like they'd just smelled shit and weren't sure why the maid hadn't wiped it up yet. Whenever Steve looked at him, he saw the face that had beaten Johnny, one of the toughest little motherfuckers he'd ever had the pleasure of knowing, into a mess of feral panic and blood and tears. The face that almost killed Ponyboy and turned Johnny into a murderer. When all else failed him, Steve's corrosive hatred of the enemy always kept him warm, like a gulp of strictly-verboten whiskey during guard duty. Now they were going to get the last laugh with his sis—
Cousin. She wasn't his sister, wasn't really much of his anything— and last he'd checked in with Darry, Ponyboy had run away to San Francisco to become a professional homosexual/communist/disappointment with Randy Adderson, of all people. He was the only one holding onto it all, a soldier back from an actual war, the needle of his mind still stuck on the groove of high school fights. He didn't know where to put it down.
Faye was wearing a white sleeveless shirt and skirt, hair tied back in a high ponytail, tennis racquet dragging against the ground. Her back was straighter than he remembered, her skin tanned darker. Trying to keep it subtle, he craned his neck to get a good look at the rock— smaller than he would've expected, but what was the saying again, money talks, wealth whispers? Maybe the next generation of Sheldons was learning the value of the more subtle approach. Maybe after the honeymoon, they'd bulldoze that damn fountain.
After a few seconds of hesitation, Faye stepped forward first. They hugged awkwardly, bodies refusing to slot together right, Faye's lips brushing against his cheek as he reached up to pat her on the back— since when did she do that? "It's good to see you," she said into the bend of his shoulder, the smell of sweat and sunscreen radiating off of her. An easy contentment. "Been too long."
"Really has been," he shocked himself by saying, and was even more shocked that he meant it.
There was a whole spread laid out inside what they called the 'solarium', Jesus help him, a room with a glass roof like a greenhouse that was starting to cook in the heat. If a maid had done it— and Steve knew, from unfortunate personal experience, that Faye couldn't boil water— they'd already ushered her out of sight. Dan pulled Faye's chair out, made a show of pouring her glass of iced tea for her. "It's great to finally have y'all here." He was wearing his daddy's politician smile, the one he still reflexively slapped on in his mugshot, but he couldn't erase the lines of tension gathered around his mouth like elevator cables. "Gosh, I don't think you've ever even seen the place before."
Steve didn't speak passive-aggressive mumble, but this was the south, and he sure recognized it when he heard it. "We've been so busy lately," Evie swooped in, resting one hand on his as she reached for a cucumber sandwich with the other, more restraining than affectionate. "Steve just opened his own garage, he's working crazy hours to get it off the ground and running, since he finished his associate's."
Yeah, that was him, the East side's answer to an entrepreneur— he got a certificate in accounting at the junior college, even, right after he got out of Nam, so that he didn't have to trust his business's books to anyone except himself. Usually remembering that fact made him feel like pretty hot shit, considering half the neighborhood had been done with high school by sixteen. He doubted these two were all that impressed by his educational attainment, though, and for a second annoyance shot through him like an emergency flare, at Evie for trying to brag on him and at himself for caring at all. He sure as shit wasn't competing with them for anything. "You didn't tell me you'd started your own garage," Faye said. Nobody else picked up on the slight edge in her voice, but he could tell she was kind of pissed. "Guess you really have been busy."
"And you didn't tell me you were gettin' married," Steve said with a tight, closed-lip smile. He swallowed down a truly deranged objection, which was that he didn't remember being asked for his blessing, with an overlarge gulp of iced tea. "Life sure is full of little surprises, huh?"
The conversation, stilted from the beginning, veered into the completely inane— the recent rash of hot weather, if The Godfather had deserved to win Best Picture last month, flower arrangements for the wedding. Evie was good at this kind of small talk by nature and often had to make worse. Meanwhile, Steve was elbow-deep in the guts of disassembled cars all day, and his nearest and dearest coworker was Tim Shepard, who was the only person who'd ever made him feel good about his own social skills. They blasted the good stuff at ear-splitting volumes— Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Who— to avoid even having to talk much to each other, which worked just fine for them. "Where do y'all think you'll be livin', after the wedding?" Evie finally asked, after they'd exhausted the individual merits of hydrangeas vs. peonies vs. orchids in a bridal bouquet. He knew she was really trying to find out if Dan could still afford the property taxes on this place.
"We're stayin' here, we figured," Dan said, dabbing mayonnaise off the side of his mouth with an embroidered napkin. "It's close to Mother and Dad," the former installed in a nuthouse in Oklahoma City and the latter cooling his heels in FCI El Reno for the next two years, "close to…" He had enough sense to stop himself in mixed company, but Steve knew damn well he wanted to say Bob's grave. "It'd be a real pain to have to sell the place, you know, find someone who'd maintain all this to our high standards."
Steve had to keep the corner of his mouth from rising at his tone. It was a level of self-awareness he hadn't expected, even if he refused to find this fucker funny. "Right, but Faye's got to finish her degree, don't she." He tried, as surreptitiously as possible, to keep a blueberry scone from crumbling all over the front of his shirt— Evie made way better baked goods than this, even when they came from the Betty Crocker mix, or burned to a crisp. "Doctorate's what… seven years?" He was blanking on the exact details, but he figured he was in the right ballpark. For the first time since that invitation showed up, it occurred to him that she should've still been up at Mizzou, nowhere near Dan's solarium. "How's she gonna do it from here, some kind of secretarial correspondence course?"
The tension in the air grew thicker than the humidity of a Vietnamese summer, and memory struck him like a blow to the jaw— what he remembered most about war was the interminable dread, the waiting around for nothing in particular to maybe happen. In the seconds-long wait for the other shoe to drop, with the way Dan's eyes cut towards her, their silence said more than words could. "Steve, let's go… take a walk," Faye said abruptly, already rising from the table with a noisy screech of her chair legs. "I'll show you the library, you'll love it, c'mon." She didn't leave room for anybody to question her, not the fiancé with his hand lingering on the small of her back, least of all Steve himself.
Of course these fuckers had a whole separate library in their house, hell, the only real surprise was that they hadn't organized it by the Dewey decimal system yet. He fought the urge to sneeze as she led him through the labyrinthine shelves; clearly, it hadn't seen much use in recent years. Aqueous sunlight streamed in from the high windows, making Faye, still dressed in her tennis whites, look like a budget angel in a nativity play— no, scratch that metaphor, he could do it one better. She already looked like a bride.
Steve had never been renowned for his ability to beat around the bush— he leaned back against one of the shelves, kicking his boot up, and gave it to her straight. "You dropped out of your PhD?"
A single year out of contact, and she felt unrecognizable to him already— the one thing you could always be certain of with Faye Randle, the axis her life revolved around, was her genius. It was obvious to everyone who met her, even in the most fleeting moments. She tilted her chin up and looked him dead in the eye. "Last month. Not that that's any of your decision…"
Defensiveness surrounded her like an electric forcefield, but he wasn't about to let that deter him. There was too much on the line. "And you're really fixin' to throw three years of work in the garbage for this guy? What the hell happened to you?"
"Dan would've let me—"
"He would've let you?"
She crossed her arms under her tits and stared out the window, at the— God help him, they probably called them 'the grounds'. "We had a conversation about it, and if I wanted to finish it, he would've supported me— you like that verb better?" Snootiness slipped into her tone like it had always belonged there. "We came to the decision together— and is it really too much to ask that you not mean-mug him the entire time you're in his house? You're not subtle, and nobody made you come here, last I checked."
"Reckon next you'll be askin' me to walk you down the aisle," he sneered.
"As if." God hadn't given the Randles much in the way of social airs and graces, sure, but they'd certainly gotten more than their share of biting condescension when He was handing out talents. She tipped her head ever-so-slightly to the side, before she went in for the killshot. "I asked Uncle Frank."
Oh, Faye Randle was back, all right. He had to give her some grudging credit for her ability to hit below the belt, and the fact that Frank was much fonder of his orphaned niece than he'd ever been of his only son, that still hurt years after they'd last spoken. Get fucking sober, and we'll see if you ever get to meet your granddaughter. Frank had stayed on the wagon long enough to earn his red chip, before the allure of dollar whiskey just proved too strong to resist. "By all means, tell me more 'bout what ol' Frank's got to say," he drawled, careful to keep his voice steady and incurious. He was desperately curious, not least of all if he was really fixing to play father of the bride.
"You could always pick up the phone and call him yourself. He's still at the same house, same number."
The corner of his lip turned up, almost imperceptibly, but he knew she'd notice it. "I asked you."
"He's been real supportive, he thinks it's great that I'm marrying rich before there's a baby in the picture, sealing the deal better than Mama did." She pretended to study her nails. "It's a nice change from some family members I can name."
Steve's teeth ground against each other like tectonic plates. "Frank's definition of 'support' was always a hell of a lot closer to enabling." So was Soda's, but there were more pressing matters. "Look, marry him, fine, see if I give a shit. But what are you thinking, giving up your whole career for him? What is he, jealous that his wife's smarter than him, that you'll have a fancier degree? That you get to leave the house and be out unsupervised all day?"
"You ain't my dad, last I checked, ain't my boss neither." The angrier she got, the slangier her speech grew— aim a few more barbed arrows at her, and a little diluted southern accent might just come out to play. "You haven't so much as sent me a postcard for more than a year, now you think you deserve an explanation for all my choices, hell, veto power? Maybe I want to open my own pottery studio. Maybe I developed an anaphylactic allergy to Derrida. Maybe it was never any of your business in the first place."
"What kind of role model are you for Lisa, huh?" Steve's mouth had always worked a hell of a lot faster than his brain, and when he knew he was wrong, he sure loved to double down. "Puttin' out for some rich guy, becomin' his trophy wife, that's really the most a woman can hope for in this day and age?"
The slap came as a complete shock. Even as seven-year-old kids, they'd never really fought before; Faye was too prissy, and Frank would've interrupted with a hard pat to the behind before he could've connected, even as a 'he'll seize without it' drunk he'd tried to imbue some sense of chivalry into his only son. Steve topped six feet, a big man by most definitions, but starbursts of pain still exploded across his cheekbone and made him take half a step back. "Go fuck yourself." She had to shake her hand out, like the recoil had hurt her worse than him; it probably had. "I hated every fucking minute of that PhD, if I could put it on a driftwood boat and light it on fire, I would. If that makes me a disgrace to the name of feminism, you know what, I don't care anymore. I don't fucking care at all."
The fucks, three in rapid succession, somehow came as even more of a shock— Faye wasn't the kind of East side girl who used it to signify that a noun was coming up, or really said much of it at all. He'd pushed her to a breaking point he didn't even know she was capable of reaching. When he opened his mouth to speak again, she was trembling, a bomb ready to go off. "Do you think it was real empowering or something, for me to grow up the way I did, Ms. Magazine-worthy? Bein' raised like a show pony that'd be taken out back and shot if it ever stopped doin' new tricks? I used to wonder, if I got a head injury or if I was born wrong in the first place, if he would've even stayed in my life at all."
"I didn't know—"
"He used the switch, he used the garden hose, he used the end of the belt with the buckle—" She cut her gaze down at the floor, no longer willing to make eye contact. "Like I need your pity. I know what you always thought, as if you ever bothered to hide it—poor little rich girl—"
"I don't—"
"I told myself I'd get that doctorate if it killed me, out of spite, if nothing else. Prove I wasn't a quitter, that I could take anything he threw at me— you can't say three years wasn't giving it the old college try. You want to tell me I'm worthless if I can't perform on demand no more? Get in line. I'm sure Lyle would agree with every word if he was still here."
"I don't think you're fucking worthless." If he managed to say anything to her, he wanted it to be that. "And I didn't… hell, I didn't know you hated it like that."
It was a pathetic attempt at an apology, even for him. "Yeah, you seein' two inches past the end of your own nose is always remarkable." When she sighed, it sent stray flecks of dust flying. "Jesus, I need a goddamned cigarette." She didn't have a purse on her, or any pockets on her skirt; she stuck her hand out expectantly. Steve pulled out his pack, and lit the smoke for her once she'd placed it between her teeth. "Don't tell Dan," she said on the first relieved exhale. "He probably wouldn't be thrilled if I set his ancestral home on fire."
"So long as you don't tell Evie," Steve said, lighting a smoke of his own. "I was supposed to be quittin' the cancer sticks sometime around Lisa's birth."
Her smile looked like it was happening against her will. "You are such a bastard," she said. "And yet you married such a sweet girl. How is that possible?"
"I'm a lucky man," he said, and didn't add that Evie wasn't always half as sweet as she thought. The nicotine soothed him like shoving a pacifier in a baby's mouth, slowed the frenzied motion of his thoughts. "Faye, he's Bob's brother."
"It's occurred to me." She grimaced, hovering in place for a moment, before deciding to ash the cigarette on the windowsill. "We were together for one summer, if you could even call it 'together'— we were just kids—"
"He's Bob's brother."
"He didn't shove Ponyboy's head into that fountain, either." She took a harsh, deep inhale she was too stubborn to cough on, though her cheeks flared out in protest. "Do you think it's been easy for him, having a dead brother he can't even really mourn, wondering if he could've prevented it? He tried to stop him, for all the good it did— he was never part of that Soc and greaser stuff, even back when he was in school. They needed parents. All the money in the world, but that's what they never got."
So did half the fucking East side and what about it, spread like a banner attached to a blimp across Steve's brain, but something stopped him from saying it. Bob Sheldon had died at eighteen, a high school senior, still more wet clay than a real person. Would he be serving time upstate if he'd lived, finally gotten himself into the kind of trouble all the money in the world couldn't have bailed him out of? Learned to channel all those sadistic impulses into something more socially acceptable, like surgery, one of those jobs where cold-blooded sociopathy was an asset? Most unbelievable of all: managed to straighten himself out?
"I wish you'd tell me what I actually did wrong, instead of playin' all these head games. You don't have to come to my wedding— I know it'll just kill you, but you can always forever hold your peace."
"You didn't do shit." That was what it really boiled down to— not the fact that Frank was only her second-worst father figure, not her quitting school, not even the lousy fiancé. He lit another cigarette just to have something to do with his hands. The chasm between a thought and its expression had never seemed harder to bridge. "I'm the one who came back all wrong."
It was easier to just compartmentalize it all— to divide his life into before during after the war, a perfect triptych— and the only person he'd allowed to overlap was Evie, he'd grabbed her and run. He wasn't the kind of vet who cried in a shrink's office about it, or shot up dope, or ranted on street corners with a whiskey bottle in hand, a public temper tantrum that still signaled the desire to be saved. He was the kind of vet who'd let it sit inside of him for twenty years and then hang himself in a high school gym.
For the second time that day, she hugged him; her entire body felt fragile, breakable, in his grip, like a glass ornament that'd embed itself deep into his skin if it shattered. "I thought you might die in Nam, Steve." Her eyes were limned with tears when she pulled away from him, which shocked him more than anything she'd said. He'd only ever seen her cry once before, the summer she'd come to visit after Aunt Lenore died. She had a quiet strength to her, the ability to retreat deep inside of herself and keep on going, that they both shared— less charitably, you could call it an allergy to human emotion. "You didn't reply to any of my letters, so for all I knew, you already could've. Then you finished your tour and dropped off the face of the earth altogether."
The story of Steve's life was causing accidental offense; he was brilliant at coming up with some sarcastic remark on the fly, a lot worse at judging its impact. His lack of affective empathy was an asset on the battlefield and a nightmare in civilian life. Likewise, the fact that Faye cared enough about his existence to have resented his disappearing act shocked him to the core. He was his mother's son, maybe, more than he'd ever been his father's and more than he'd like to admit: great at leaving people behind. "Do you want me to apologize?" he asked the crown of her head. "Should I?"
"You'd probably choke on it first," she said with a snort, into the hollow of his chest. For someone whose ability to read people was usually iffy at best, she sure had him pegged. "He's good to me, Steve, I promise. Real good. You don't have to try to scare him off with a sawed-off shotgun like some East side dad."
"I am an East side dad— and I'm not sayin' any fucking sorries to Frank." That was non-negotiable. So was going to the wedding. "He better be able to walk you down the aisle in a goddamn straight line."
"Just don't start some redneck brawl with him in the middle of the ceremony, is all I ask."
Her heart beat against his, a hard, persistent thump. He wanted to run bad enough to shatter the library windows in his wake, but he stayed. That had to count for something.