we're smiling but we're close to tears,

even after all these y e a r s

〰️〰️〰️

My sister was marrying a smart man, there was no doubt about that. I couldn't create her a better future husband myself.

But god damnit, it was infuriating sometimes how optimistic he was.

As the designated mediator of our family, ideally in his mind he wanted Gus and I to start working on things. Right away. While I was more of a I'll-get-to-it-when-I-get-to-it kind of person, Koa operated more along the lines of why-waste-more-time?

I forgot how to walk the second that my eyes connected with Gus'. Every other person in the spacious hotel lobby faded away like someone took an eraser to a drawing. Every sound became muffled, every emotion heightened, every single thing that wasn't him became irrelevant. It was almost like we saw each other for the first time all over again.

Now I was a People Pleaser, but I was also a Master of Procrastination. The former was off the table for the time being. I had come so far to get through this wedding, so I was putting my relationship on the back burner. Procrastination mode was in motion and there was nothing anyone could do to change that.

After a few seconds, Koa noticed I had dropped back and was no longer walking in step with him. He whipped his head around, his eyes rolling when he saw my frozen frame as he traipsed back to me.

"Come on," he tried coaxing me along, reaching for my arm. "Let's go say hi."

I recoiled from him and spluttered, "A-are you crazy?"

He cocked his head at me skeptically. "No. Are you?"

I was clutching the straps of my beach bag so tight that I had no feeling in my fingers. My eyes were bulging out of their sockets, gaping at my almost brother-in-law like he just asked me to commit murder. To a stranger, I definitely looked like I was off my rocker.

"I-I haven't seen him in like, a month. What am I supposed to say?" I spat.

A hundred frantic questions bounced between my brain. Do I wave? Can I make a run for it? What's he thinking about? Is he bitter that we were supposed to share a room but now he has to get his own? Is he happy to see me?

Despite my obvious reluctance, Koa draped his lanky arm around my shoulders and dragged me along his side as we took our time crossing the lobby.

"Maybe, like, hi? Thanks for coming? Good to see you? I love you?" He quipped.

I shook my head. "You and Sutton are so meant for each other," I grumbled to myself.

The Monahan's were at one of the designated kiosks for check in. Mrs. Monahan was chatting up a storm with the concierge while her husband was expectedly on the phone looking like the sharpest dressed man in the room, maybe on the whole island. Gus stood right next to them, in the fur-lined denim jacket he only wore when it was freezing outside (which at home it was), his prized gray joggers, and those old sneakers he resorted to wearing after Ziggy got his paws on his favorite pair. His sisters were behind him, engaged in their own sleepy conversation and oblivious to anything around them.

"Fuck," I hissed, "Koa, I hate you right now."

"You'll thank me later," he rushed the words out, lifting his arm off of me and extending it towards the group before us. "The Monahan family! It's awesome to see you all. Sutton and I are stoked you guys could make it."

At the declaration, all of them turned to us. Gus' sisters were ogling the man next to me; rightfully so because Koa was undeniably an attractive individual. Mr. Monahan was glancing between the two of us with the best poker-face I'd ever seen, his phone still attached to his right ear. Mrs. Monahan's jaw nearly hit the floor.

Gus didn't move. Sapphire eyes just barely widened in astonishment and aimed at me, a crease between his eyebrows, lips glued shut. He seemed like he had every intent not to look away.

"Bayla!" His mother squealed, the first to break the silence and my concentration. She threw a dismissive wave over her shoulder at her husband and said, "Honey, finish checking us in. Oh my goodness!" She practically skipped towards me, her hands latching onto my shoulders when she got within reach, a wistful smile on her face. "You... I-I don't know what to say. It's just... really good to see you."

I swallowed what felt like a shard of glass in my throat and tried not to fall to the floor in a heap of sobs at the look she was giving me. The line was starting to blur between who I missed more out of this breakup.

"It is," I managed to say with a small nod. "It's been too long."

She peered back at her family for a moment, her hands still holding my shoulders. A death grip like if she let go, I'd run away. When she looked at me again, she whispered, "Can I talk to you?"

All I did was nod again. She did too, then slid one of her hands down my arm and guided me a few feet away for some privacy. Before we got too far, I caught a glimpse of Koa attempting to ignite a discussion with Gus and his sisters. His father was too busy juggling his crucial phone call and speaking briefly with the concierge about checking in.

Mrs. Monahan didn't let go of my arm. A weary sigh left her lips as she adjusted her thin red glasses, regarding me through the lenses. For my sake, I was grateful her eyes were brown and not the same shade of icy blue that Gus inherited from his father.

That was one color that could make me vulnerable in a split second. It could lure me into shark-infested waters or have me soaring through the clouds. Her eyes were more like the wood on an oak door, always open and welcoming me in anytime.

"I'm so sorry about what happened," she started off, keeping her voice low. Even though we were way out of earshot from Gus, she remained mindful about it. "I tried to stay out of it, I really did. Gus called me, I think a couple days after it happened, and just blurted it out. And you know Gus, he never calls me."

"Oh yeah, I know," I chuckled dryly.

"He said never to mention it again, and not to call you. That was it. I got no backstory, I got nothing. And I wanted to call you so bad. You have no idea how hard it was for me not to pick up my phone and call you. I mean, you're on my speed dial!" She exclaimed with an incredulous laugh, as if I didn't already know that. "You're another daughter to me, Bayla. I just didn't want to overstep my boundaries. I hope you understand, because I feel terrible that I never called."

On the outside, Mrs. Monahan appeared to be as put together as a person could be for just getting off of a twelve hour flight. This conversation cracked that façade and brought out a rattled, worn, heartbroken mother. Suddenly I felt like the absolute scum of the earth.

I couldn't help myself but to take her hands in mine and shake my head. "It's okay. Don't feel bad about this, please. It just... happened. We need time apart, we really do," I explained.

"I know. I've been talking to your mother and sister pretty frequently. Well, they were the ones that convinced us it would be okay to still come to the wedding. I wanted to make sure it was okay with you, though," she said, her gaze softening as if she were apologizing for everything that had happened to me in the last month or so.

"Doesn't matter, it's not my wedding." I shrugged with a wry smile.

She frowned. With a hint of hope in her voice, she asked, "Are you kids still friends? Do you talk?"

"We do, sometimes," I admitted, slowly nodding.

She didn't need to know what we talked about. Nonetheless, we did talk, occasionally.

"Good," she said, lifting her lips into a small grin. "I hope you guys can reconcile somehow. If not as a couple... maybe as good friends, or something."

"Yeah," I rasped, "Me too."

Our hands separated when she circled her arms around my back and pulled me in for a hug. She always smelled like lavender. It wasn't too overpowering, just enough where if you caught a whiff, a wave of comfort washed over you instantly. This time, I never wanted to let her go.

The embrace was transient, lasting only until Mr. Monahan's rumbling voice cut through the lobby.

"Audrey."

He barked out her name from where he stood to the side of the kiosk so the next group of people could check in. Mrs. Monahan pulled away from me, and her husband nodded at her once she saw him. "I have our room keys," he added on, flaunting them in the air as if to prove it.

"Guess that's my cue," Mrs. Monahan breathed as she looked at me again. "Hang in there, honey. Friday'll be here before you know it."

"For the sake of my sanity, I hope so," I said, giving her a sideways smile.

She patted my arm and I watched her saunter to her family, in no hurry to get back to her impatient husband, preoccupied daughters, and a son that was still gawking at me.

I lifted one of my trembling hands for a weak wave in his direction. I took off for the elevators before I could see his reaction.

〰️〰️〰️

My dress was in a ball on the floor – a guaranteed way of ruining the blush-colored satin that my mom had steamed for me earlier in the day. Accompanying it on the carpet were my heels and stray flower petals from my dismantled bouquet. Every hair on my head that I meticulously curled just hours ago was now flattened into subdued waves, all tangled and tousled.

I couldn't get myself to care about it. Any of it. Not my wrinkled dress, not anyone else's whereabouts, not what day or time it was. No one probably missed us, and we didn't miss anyone else. Except for maybe Collin, but he was too wasted to notice we were gone anyway.

I didn't care about anything that wasn't my legs laced around Gus, or his mouth locked on mine, or our bodies rocking back and forth in the hotel bed. Throaty moans and creaky mattress springs were our soundtrack, his name on my lips like a mantra. That stupid fucking "Sexy and I Know It" song was blasting throughout the entire building, so close by that the bass reverberated in our room. Had I not been delirious from spiked punch and waves of newfound pleasure, it would have aggravated me. Instead, it somehow added to the atmosphere, like the pivotal point in a movie with poorly chosen background music.

When Gus whispered in my ear about how beautiful I looked on the dance floor, his hands that had been bound to me all night like the tie around his neck tightening around my waist, my chest expanded in a way I'd never felt before. The disco ball above us illuminated him like some divine spirit I'd sell my soul to just for him to glance at me. I was drunk, but I was in fucking love and I knew it. I wanted him to know it, too.

I asked him if he wanted to leave. He didn't even pause to think about it. So we sprinted out of the ballroom, took the elevator up to the tenth floor of the hotel that everyone was staying in for the night, and never felt better about ditching the after party that followed our junior prom.

We didn't know what we were doing. We were just kids, inexperienced and nervous as hell, navigating the parts of each other we hadn't seen before with silent trust and naivety. Somehow that didn't matter. I knew it'd be a night I remembered for the rest of my life, for better or for worse.

Our room had become a blended aroma of leftover hairspray, my perfume, his cologne, and sweat. Gus held me in his arms as we laid together in the lumpy queen-sized bed, under the covers with all of our limbs intertwined. My cheek was nuzzled against his bare chest while I listened to his rapid heartbeat start to subside in my ear.

Neither of us had spoken in quite some time, so his husky voice and the question he asked both came as a surprise to me.

"You wanna make this real?"

"What?" I asked, stupidly. I was too giddy to think properly.

"Us," he murmured.

The fog in my head finally evaporated when I comprehended what he meant. His arms unclasped around me when I shifted so I could look at him, one of them lingering on my hipbone as I propped myself up on an elbow and stared back at his crooked smile.

"You mean like..." I started to say, but fell short. I didn't want to assume. I also wanted to hear him say it.

He nodded a little. "I want you to be my girlfriend. I've wanted you to be for a while now, just never knew when the right time to ask was."

"Right now," I grinned.

I watched as the smile on his face began to ebb away in an attempt at hiding it. He matched my pose and leaned up on his elbow, and I eagerly watched his every move with a surge of adrenaline coursing through me. I had sobered up a little, but now I was totally drunk on love.

"You know neither of us have been with anybody else since we started this," he said, a subtle way of asking if I'd been faithful to him over the past year.

Of course I had. He was the first guy I ever had real, life-changing, all-consuming, is-this-really-happening feelings for. He was the only guy I'd ever given my body to, from head to toe and everything in between, as of tonight. He was the one guy I could and wanted to love. I didn't want to give that up for a goddamn second.

"Obviously," I purred as my answer.

"I didn't offer you that beer last summer as a mistake," he confessed even though I was well aware of that. "To be honest, I didn't have any intentions other than needing an excuse to talk to you because I thought you were hot. I wanted more than just being on the same volleyball team in gym, or in a group project in trig. I never would have thought a lukewarm beer from the keg at Quinn's party would be the right kind of bait to get a girl's attention, but I guess that was how I knew you were my kinda girl."

I snorted in amusement because it was so true. It wasn't a romantic grand gesture, it wasn't a profession of emotion, or a soliloquy in front of the whole school. It was exactly what I didn't know I needed.

His sapphire gaze darkened in the slightest. He looked utterly enraptured with me; his eyes like an invitation to drown in them.

"With all that being said... Bayla Barclay, will you do me the absolute honor of being my girlfriend?" He asked in about the most composed, nonchalant manner I'd ever heard.

I hummed to myself as I gazed down at my manicured nails, pretending as if I was thinking about the answer. I heard his tongue click in annoyance, so I looked back up at him with a terrible, sad excuse of a coy expression. I couldn't pull it off no matter how hard I tried.

"Yeah. Why not?" I smirked.

He just blinked back at me, clearly unamused by my response. I bit down on my lip as an uncontrollable giggle bubbled out of me.

Then another lopsided smile split across his face as he said, "You are so the one for me." His lips were on mine again as I took the plunge.

What I needed was a breath of air, a lull in the maelstrom that I dove headfirst into. I learned pretty quickly I'd get neither because in this case, I got what I already had. The ability to navigate the swell and stay afloat.

The memory hit me out of nowhere. In full detail, just like I was reliving it all over again. I still remembered exactly how the room smelled that night, how stiff that mattress was, how godawful the lighting was. It wasn't hard at all to remember how in love I was.

Now, sitting alone in my stunning hotel room in Honolulu, on a bed that was much more comfortable with the faint smell of coconuts in the air and natural lighting, that all felt like a lifetime ago.

It was like a splash of cold water, and I came crashing back down to reality with a hard smack on the pavement. That son of a bitch Koa really was right.

It was a strange parallel I realized as I stared at my bridesmaids dress, that could've been a dead ringer for my prom dress, hanging on the door of the dark wooden closet. The recognition of the similarity was what kickstarted the flashback, to a time when Gus and I were just a couple of kids falling in love with life and each other.

I had some spare time to myself after I finished getting ready for the rehearsal dinner. It was a happy occasion in itself – it meant the wedding was tomorrow. It meant I could see the finish line, that I was so close to freeing myself of the hell Sutton contained me in for the last two years. I should've been on top of the world and instead, I felt like I was being crushed somewhere in the middle, caught up in reminiscing about a night that happened almost seven years ago.

"Shit," I exhaled as if that were my last breath. My last dying thought.

I skimmed my hands along the cotton comforter underneath of me, tucked tight into the bed from when the maid cleaned my room this morning, and twisted the glimmering band around my right ring finger thoughtfully. It caught the light a little differently in the darkened room with only pure Hawaiian sunshine filtering in through the blinds.

For our fifth year of dating, Gus had gifted it to me. Not as a promise ring or anything like that, because we weren't that kind of couple and our idea of romance was convoluted compared to most people. Just a token of appreciation for me, or a way of beautifully marking his territory. But ring or no ring, he knew I was his.

It took two months to get custom made by a jeweler in New York City, because Gus was hypercritical about every detail that went into it. He told them it needed to be "fucking perfect" and to "make it look like the ring you'd give to a girl you'd die for".

It was nothing outrageous; just simple, clean, and classic. An "eternity band" is what they called it. A teeny, tiny, 14-karat yellow gold band with diamonds encrusted all around it, alternating in shape from round to rectangular. The idea was for it to look cohesive when stacked with a wedding band and engagement ring, but I wanted it to be set apart from those. I wanted it to be a reminder of everything we had gone through pre-marriage, if we ever got there. A symbol of what felt like an eternity spent together.

It was absolutely fucking perfect. I knew it cost him a pretty penny and I'd never taken it off except to shower. I could never take it off, no matter what happened with us. It had become a part of my right ring finger. I felt naked without it.

When I got up and dragged myself to the full-length mirror on the wall, I still felt naked, despite being fully clothed and proudly wearing the ring. Dressed in a little strapless baby blue number that put all three miles of my legs on display, I'd never felt so out of my own skin. The girl in my reflection looked balanced, stable, and chic, but she couldn't feel a damn thing. I'd kill to be her.

I shuddered at myself as if that'd shake away all thoughts that weren't about Sutton or her wedding. If I was late for the rehearsal dinner, that'd be one more ass-reaming from my sister that I really didn't want to deal with. So I tousled around my loose curls, chucked my phone into my clutch, and left my room.

As soon as I began my march down the hallway, my gaze lifted to meet with someone else that was leaving their room a few doors down.