Wreck the Wedding

The DJ put on some slow song and the room went soft. Mimi and Heath were doing their first dance out on the floor, swaying like they'd practiced it, which they had, because Mimi practices everything. The lights over the dance floor were these little warm string bulbs and the whole ballroom smelled like flowers and expensive food.

I was at table nine, the singles table, which had four people at it and three of them had left. I was two glasses of wine into the evening and swiping through an app I'd deleted twice this year.

Shari, 23. Looking for something. Not sure what. That was my bio. It had gotten me eleven first dates since my birthday and zero second dates. I put the phone down, picked it back up, swiped left on a guy holding a fish.

"You want the last roll?" the guy next to me asked. He was maybe fifty and had a lanyard on at a wedding.

"No, go ahead."

He took it. I looked back at the dance floor. Mimi caught my eye over Heath's shoulder and did a little wave with her fingers, and I waved back, and I hated that my chest did the thing where it ached. She's my older cousin, by a year, but she's been the kind one at every holiday since forever. Kind but distant, you know? Like she was always leaving for the next good thing.

The song ended and everyone clapped and I drained my glass.

* * *

The bar had a line, so I stood in it, and that's where I saw him. Suit, no tie, top button undone. Dark hair, kind of shaggy, like he'd run his hands through it a few times already tonight. He was watching the bartender make something with a shaker and he looked, I don't know, unbothered. Everybody at a wedding is performing except this guy.

"Is the espresso martini worth the wait?" I asked him.

He turned. He was taller than I guessed, maybe six one, and about 26.

"Honestly? I don't know. I've been standing here a while and haven't ordered one."

"That's bad reconnaissance."

"I'm a terrible spy." He stuck out his hand. "Denny."

"Shari."

"Shari. Like with an S."

"Like with an S, yes. People always go for the Cherie thing."

"I wasn't going to do that."

"You were absolutely going to do that."

He laughed. He had a good laugh, loud enough that a woman ahead of us in line turned around and looked. "Fine, I was. So what table are you, Shari With An S?"

"Nine. Singles table. You?"

"I don't have a table. I'm Heath's plus one's plus one, sort of. Long story. We worked together years ago, I was in town, he said come."

"So you know literally nobody here."

"Except Heath. And now you."

The bartender got to us. Denny ordered two espresso martinis without asking me if I wanted one, which should have annoyed me, and didn't, because he glanced at me first as if he was checking, and I nodded once. That's all it takes sometimes.

We took our drinks to the edge of the dance floor, near the floor-to-ceiling windows. The golf course out there was all moonlight and dark stripes of grass. Very pretty. Very expensive.

"Okay, honest opinion," he said. "Is this the best wedding you've ever been to or are you just polite?"

"It's my cousin's, so I'm contractually polite. But no. The best wedding I ever went to had a taco truck at ten pm."

"See, that's vision. This place has a chocolate fountain and I've watched four people double dip in it."

"Gross. Who?"

"Cannot say. Bride's side."

"That's my side!"

"Then I really can't say." He sipped his drink. "You're on the bride's side and you're at the singles table? That's an insult. They should have you up front."

"There's no up front, it's not a play. And the singles table is fine, it's just me and a guy named Roger."

"Roger."

"Fifty-ish. Lanyard. Took the last roll without asking."

"Roger sounds like a menace."

"He is. He's my competition for the last of the shrimp."

The DJ did a line dance song and a circle of women formed around the bride. Mimi looked over the ring of them at me and pointed, like get in here, and I shook my head and pointed at my drink. She laughed and turned back around. She really did look happy. The whole reason I'd worn the dress I bought for a date that got cancelled.

"So how do you know Heath, actually?" I asked. "Like the real story."

"Startup, four years ago. I did sales, he did everything else. We got laid off the same day and went to a bar and complained for six hours. He's the reason I didn't move back to my parents' house in Ohio."

"That's very sweet."

"It's the most sincere thing I've said all year. Don't tell anyone."

"Your secret's safe. Nobody here knows me either."

He looked at me then, a second longer than the joke needed. "That's a sad thing to say at a party."

"It's a true thing to say at a party." I took a sip to cover it. "It's fine. I've been single for a while, my whole family knows it, my aunt keeps sending me her dentist's son's Instagram. This is just my third wedding as the single cousin."

"Thirteen."

"At least."

"Okay," he said, and set his glass on the window ledge. "New plan. For tonight you're not the single cousin. You're the mysterious woman from table nine who's robbing me at pool in the game room."

"There's a game room?"

"There's a game room."

We did not go to the game room, because on the way there I passed the doors at the back of the ballroom, the ones propped open to the terrace, and past the terrace there was this path. It had one of those little rope things, like a stanchion, and a small sign that said GAZEBO CLOSED. But past the rope the path was worn, like people went anyway. The trees closed in over it and there was an old wooden gazebo at the end, just visible, one corner catching the moon.

"What's down there?" I asked the catering guy who was stacking chairs.

"The old gazebo? Been locked for years, miss. Folks say it's haunted."

"Haunted."

"So they say. Management keeps it shut up." He went back to his chairs.

Denny came up behind me. "There you are. Game room's the other way."

"I changed the plan," I said. "What do you think about a gazebo?"

"I think you want to get me alone."

"I think it's a full moon and there's a haunted building and we're both wearing shoes we hate." I nodded at the rope. "The guy said people go anyway."

Denny looked at the path, then at me. "I feel like you're the kind of person who's already decided."

"I've already decided."

"Then lead the way, mysterious woman."

We ducked the rope. The gravel went quiet under our feet after the first few steps, softer, like dirt and old leaves. The music from the reception faded until it was just bass, then nothing. The trees were thick and the air was cooler in there. His shoulder brushed mine on the narrow part of the path and neither of us moved away.

"So," he said, low. "Is this the part where I find out table nine was a trap."

"Roger is going to be devastated when he finds my seat empty."

"About Roger, sure." His hand found mine in the dark. His fingers were warm. "About me too, I hope."

"Depends how brave you are," I said.

The gazebo came up out of the trees all at once. It was bigger than I expected, white paint gone gray, steps sagging a little, and the railing around it was wrapped in vines that had taken years to get that thick. The door was a screen door with no screen left, hanging at an angle. Inside there was a bench in a circle around a center post, and the floor was swept clean, somehow. Not a leaf on it. After all that path, not one leaf.

"No bugs," Denny said. "It's August. Where are the bugs?"

I stepped in anyway. The floor didn't creak. The whole thing felt like a held breath.

"Hello?" I said, stupidly, to an empty gazebo.

Nothing. Just the moon through the vines, making stripes on the bench like window light.

"Okay, that's a little creepy," Denny said from the doorway. "You feel that? Like the air's thick in here."

"I feel it." I turned around to face him. He was still in the doorway, half in and half out, and the moon was behind him so I couldn't read his face. "You can still run. Game room's that way."

He came in. The screen door didn't bang behind him. It swung slow and settled soft, like someone closing it politely.

"That's the last exit," he said. "You know that."

"I counted on it."

He reached out and took my glass out of my hand and set it on the bench, and took his own, and put it next to mine, very careful about it, like the glasses mattered more than anything else in the world. Then he stood there in front of me, close, not touching, waiting.

"Shari."

"Denny."

"Tell me if you want this. Plain, so I don't have to guess."

"I want this," I said. "Stop guessing."

He didn't stop guessing. He leaned down slow anyway, giving me a whole train ride's worth of time to move, and I didn't move, and then his mouth met mine and it was warm and he tasted like coffee and he kissed like he talked, easy, like he'd been doing it all night and just got interrupted somewhere around the appetizers.

My back found the center post. His hands found my hips. Outside, somewhere behind the vines, I heard a branch move.

We both stopped. Listened.

"Catering guy?" he said against my mouth.

"Probably."

Neither of us believed it. We kissed again anyway.

We kept kissing. His hands slid up from my hips to my waist and I undid another button at his collar just to have something to do with my hands.

"Okay," he said into my neck. "This is already the best wedding I've ever been to."

"You say that to all the cousins."

"Only the ones who drag me into haunted buildings."

I laughed and he kissed me again and it was good, warm, real. His chest was solid against mine and I could feel his heartbeat, or mine, hard to say which. I had my fingers in his collar and he had one hand flat on the small of my back and I was thinking very clearly, actually, thinking yes, this, finally, when the cold came.

It wasn't wind. There was no wind in the gazebo. The vines weren't moving. But a cold slid across my shoulders like a hand trailing through water, from behind the center post, around my back, and out again.

I broke off the kiss. "Did you feel that?"

"Feel what?"

"Cold. Like really cold, right then."

"It's August," he said. "I'm sweating in a rented shirt. I felt nothing."

"Okay." I kissed him again. Maybe it was the moon, maybe the air pooling off the golf course. Maybe I'd had more to drink than I thought.

Then I heard it. Not Denny. Not a branch. A whisper, right next to my ear, on the side away from him. Low and dry, like paper moving. I couldn't make out a word of it but I could feel the shape of it, like somebody taking their time saying something they'd said before.

I pulled back. "There it is again. That cold. And something... did you hear anything? Just now?"

Denny looked past me into the dark half of the gazebo, the side with no moon in it. "Hear what?"

"Anything."

He listened. The bass from the reception was gone, the crickets were gone, everything was gone except us breathing. "No," he said. "But the bugs stopped. You noticed that, right? Whole walk over here, crickets everywhere. Not one since we stepped in."

"That's because they're smart," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Unlike us."

"Are we leaving?" he asked. His thumb was still hooked at my waist. "Because we can leave. Say the word and we're back at table nine before Roger finishes his story."

I looked at the dark side of the gazebo. Nothing there. I looked at Denny. Something there, warm and willing and asking me plain. Eleven first dates in one year and every one of them had gone home alone and polite. I was done with polite.

"Stay," I said.

"Stay. Okay. Stay is good."

I pushed him back until the backs of his legs hit the bench and he sat down hard, grinning up at me. The circular bench creaked, finally, like it had just been waiting for somebody to use it. He sat facing the doorway, the moon striping one side of his face, and I sat down next to him, then lower, onto the floor between his knees, the wood swept clean and cool under my bare shins.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, we're doing that."

"If you're good at sharing, yes."

"I share. I'm a very generous..." He lost the sentence when I got his belt open. I worked the buckle and the button and the zipper and he lifted his hips to help me get his pants down, which was considerate of him. He was hard already, straining against gray boxer briefs, and I pressed my palm flat over him and felt the heat of him through the fabric.

"Shari," he said, and nothing after it.

I pulled him out. He was thick and warm in my hand, the skin soft over all that hardness, and I liked the weight of him, the way he jumped a little when I ran my thumb over the head. I licked my palm and got him wet and stroked him slow, twice, three times, watching his face come apart.

"God, your hands..."

"What about them?"

"Keep... just keep going."

I kept going. I leaned in and ran my tongue up the underside of him and his whole body shivered. Then I took him into my mouth, just the head at first, my lips closed around it, my tongue working, and he made a low sound and put one hand in my hair, light, not pushing, just holding.

I went down further. I've always liked this part, liked the fullness of it, liked the way a man goes quiet and helpless when you take your time. I bobbed slow, sucking, my fist working the base where my mouth couldn't reach, and Denny was talking in pieces, "yes, okay, that, right there," like a man placing an order he couldn't