Page 3 of Now That It's You
Why the hell was he here, for that matter? It’s not like he and Matt had been close. They’d fought like ill-tempered badgers more often than not, caught in a weird web of competition and jealousy with a dash of reluctant fondness thrown in for variety. It was just a fluke that he’d come to see Matt in the hospital today, just in time to learn they’d never spend another Thanksgiving bickering over football and sweet potatoes.
“Dead,” Meg repeated, and Kyle realized it was the first word either of them had spoken in three minutes. She sounded like she was testing it out to see how it sounded.
Not good, apparently. Her eyes filled with tears and he watched her throat working to swallow a lump that probably matched the one lodged in his throat for the last twenty minutes.
“Dead,” Kyle confirmed. “So now’s really not a good time.”
“My God, Kyle—I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I heard it was just a simple procedure and I thought?—”
She stopped there, not vocalizing what she’d thought, but giving Kyle a pretty good idea just the same. Tears spilled down her cheeks in earnest now, and part of him wanted to pull her into his arms, to offer her some small measure of comfort or to claim some for himself.
But this was Meg, for God’s sake.
Meg.
She was still beautiful, even with red-rimmed eyes and her nose running like a faucet. He should offer her a tissue or show her the door but he just stood there like a moron noticing the way her dark auburn curls tumbled in chaotic ringlets around her shoulders and her pale-blue T-shirt clung and dipped and curved around breasts he’d always done his damnedest not to look at.
Dammit, what kind of jerk was he? Was he seriously ogling his brother’s ex-fiancée while the man himself got wheeled to the hospital morgue by an orderly who looked like Napoleon Dynamite?
It’s not like this is the first time you’ve had inappropriate thoughts about Meg.
Which was true, but now was hardly the time to do it again.
“Look, I don’t know what to say,” he said.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Meg choked out. “If I’d known?—”
A door burst open at the end of the hall, and Kyle swung his gaze away from her and toward the stampede of relatives descending upon them like a pack of bison. Aunt Judy, Uncle Arthur, a cousin whose name escaped him at the moment but he felt pretty sure rhymed with snot. Scott? Lamott?
Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you?
He spotted his mom at the head of the pack with puffy eyes and a crookedly-buttoned blouse. She wore one navy shoe and one black one, and the sight of his sophisticated mother looking so undone made Kyle’s heart ball up like the wad of Kleenex she clenched in one fist.
Meg gave a muffled cry beside him, and Kyle turned to see her gripping the balloon ribbons hard enough to carve deep grooves in her fingers. Her mouth fell open and she took a step back as the mob drew closer.
Kyle looked back at his mother, not sure whether to hug her or get out of her way. He was saved from doing either as his mom’s gaze landed on Meg and she thrust one manicured finger toward her former-future-daughter-in-law.
“You!” she barked, her eyes glittering with fury and tears as she swung her gaze from Meg to Kyle. “What is she doing here?”
Ten minutes later, Meg sat sobbing in the driver’s seat, her hair glued to Kendall’s lip gloss as she tried not to get snot on her best friend’s cashmere sweater.
“Oh, sweetie,” Kendall soothed. “You couldn’t have known. I’m so sorry.”
“I just—dead,” she repeated, not able to come up with any word more suitable than that.
But that one pretty much summed it up.
“I’ve spent the last two years hating him for sleeping with Annabelle,” she choked out. “Just when I was ready to stop hating him?—”
“I know,” Kendall soothed, petting Meg’s hair. “I know. Two years of hating him and a few days of trying not to hate him is still no match for nearly ten years of loving him.”
Which was true, Meg knew, though it was hard to categorize exactly what she felt now. Grief? Loss? How could she feel those things for someone she hadn’t seen in two years? Someone she’d actively despised, then gradually forgotten, or at least tried to forget. They could have even become friends again, in a perfect world.
“I never got to say I was sorry,” Meg said. “For leaving him at the altar like that. I never apologized.”
“So you’re even,” Kendall said, “for the fact that he cheated on you and didn’t think to tell you about it until the night before the wedding. And the fact that you’ve spent the last two years working your ass off to pay for the wedding that never happened.”
“It was my choice.” Meg drew back from the hug and mopped her nose with a stiff Burger King napkin. “No one else should have been stuck with the debt when I was the one who called off the wedding.”
