Page 53 of Brenna, Brat

“See?” Campbell prompted. “Look how happy they are.”

“Right.”

“Good,” he said. He moved his palm over my back, sliding it up and down. “How did you learn to dance so well?”

“It’s something we did with our dad,” I answered. “He taught us. He’s an introvert but he loves ballroom dancing. My sisters and I tend to get crazy when there’s a fast song.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Hang around long enough, and you definitely will.”

He didn’t answer anything about how long he’d hang around me, but his palm moved on my back again, like how I’d rubbed his arm when he’d slept on my lap. His hand slipped low enough that it was almost on my butt, which must have been by mistake, but he left it there.

“How long do you think this party will last?” he asked, and I felt myself getting worried again as I thought about trying to wrap it up.

“JuJu doesn’t want things to go late. She’s afraid that Beckett will get too tired, and that’s why we had the early dinner. But it was fine, right?”

“It was delicious. Everyone ate like very sophisticated cattle at a trough,” he said.

Good. “We can stay up as long as we want,” I mentioned. We would be sleeping here tonight, as would my siblings and their various hangers-on (children, husbands, et cetera). There were more than enough bedrooms and Juliet had wanted to encourage us to live it up at the party, rather than worrying about driving home late through the city.

“Campbell could stay, too,” she’d mentioned at our last fitting. “One bedroom for you guys?”

“Two bedrooms,” I’d said, and then had poked her with a pin on purpose.

“There will probably be a lot of work to do to get the house back in shape, even with the cleaning crews,” I said now. I realized that my fingers on his shoulder had been creeping up to play in his hair, and I put them firmly back into the appropriate position.

“Or, instead of working, we could have fun running around this mansion,” he said. “My mom and my sister would kill to see it. It’s exactly what they both want in life.”

Neither of them had been invited, of course, but neither was leaving her bedroom, anyway. That was what Campbell had gathered, but any information was filtered between their attorneys since they still wouldn’t talk to him.

“I like your house better,” I said.

“You do?”

Maybe it was my imagination, but it felt like he pulled me closer.

“I like mine, too,” he agreed. “Although, it comes in handy to have twenty bedrooms when your wife has six siblings who need to sleep over.”

I was thinking about him saying that, how nice those words about his wife having six siblings had sounded as they came from his mouth. I opened my own mouth to encourage him to talk more about the subject, but then I saw my sister. Juliet was walking quickly toward the doors that led out of the ballroom, and it may have seemed to the guests like she was heading to the bathroom or maybe she needed to fix her hair, but I could see that wasn’t what was going on. There was something wrong, because she was moving in exactly the same way as she’d left the pool deck when she was twelve and she’d been pulled out of the freestyle relay by our old coach, because he was stupid and mean. I had told him so at the time, too.

“I need to go talk to Juliet,” I said, and disengaged from Campbell’s arms. My skirt swished as I made my way quickly to the front of the room and out into the wide hallway. We’d decorated all the public areas with the same gorgeous flowers and it was lovely, and there were enough people milling around that it took me a moment to realize that she was already gone. I walked past the guests and saw that one of the doors was ajar, and I peeked into a room I recognized as Beckett’s office. I entered just as a billowing dress disappeared through the French doors on one wall, then I saw her through that glass and I kept following.

“JuJu, what are you doing outside?” I asked as I closed the door behind myself. “You’re going to get your hem dirty.”

She turned and in the silvery moonlight, I got a clear view of her face. She resembled me when I’d seen myself in Campbell’s mirror after the fire: her skin was dead white, her eyes were huge, and she looked terrified.

“I can’t do this, Brenna. I thought I could, but I can’t.”

“If you don’t want to be married to him, we can leave right now. The valet will give us someone’s keys,” I said. “Monday morning, we’ll return their car after we get this annulled.”

“No, I want to be married to Beckett. Of course I do! But all of this, all this ceremony and all the speeches about love and being together forever…” She stopped and swallowed. “It only reminds me that I might not have him for much longer. Bren, I can’t,” she told me, and her voice broke. “I can’t lose him. I can’t go back in there and pretend that everything is ok when he might...” It broke again, but she finished with a word that emerged as a whisper: “Die.”

I also swallowed hard as emotion rose up in my own throat. If she did this, if she fell apart, she would never forgive herself later. “You know what, Juliet?” I asked. “I think you’re behaving awfully. How dare you try to wreck your makeup after all the time we spent on your face?”

“What?”

“You’re going to ruin it and then Beckett will see and know that you’re upset, and that will ruin his wedding after he spent so much money and was so worried about you enjoying it!” I accused her.

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