Page 38 of I’m Not Yours

“To launch my company, I sewed straight through for weeks until my eyes were burning, my body a limp noodle from exhaustion. I designed a traditional, exquisite white wedding gown, then three nontraditional, eye-popping sorts of wedding gowns, and August, September, my mom, and I modeled them for a professional fashion photographer. I threw a humongous amount of money at advertising, online and in print, and I was, miraculously, soon in business.”

“But why wedding dresses? You were divorcing at the time.”

“I love the love, the passion for each other, the eternal hope that this couple could get married and stay together, possibly for seventy years. They could have a love like my parents’ love.

A love for forever. I want to make a dress for the bride that reflects her, her personality, her new life, and that shining hope. ”

“They’re perfect. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” He closed one of my bridal scrapbooks. He’d studied every dress.

“On my wedding day I was wearing a regular suit.” I tried to sound offhand, but it hurt. Still. I bit my lip. Why did I say anything at all?

“You were wearing a regular suit?” Reece was aghast, his mouth open, eyes confused.

“Yep. A suit.” I thought of that suit. It wasn’t even my favorite suit. It was my fifth favorite suit. It was beige. I had left it behind when I left Grayson behind.

“ Why?”

“Because we were married at the courthouse.”

He hardly knew what to do with that one, his face frozen in shock. “Why did you get married at the courthouse?”

“Because it was convenient.”

“ Convenient? What the hell does ‘convenient’ have to do with a wedding?”

“We were busy. We worked a lot. We were married on our lunch hour.”

“On your lunch hour? You’ve got to be kidding.” Reece’s disbelieving, appalled expression was enough to tell me what he thought about that.

“No.” Grayson had been late. He’d hurried up the steps.

He was in trial, buried in work, didn’t “have time” for a nice wedding.

“And they’re so expensive, June. A fortune.

I don’t want to spend all that money. The result is the same, right?

We’re married. But this’ll cost almost nothing and we’re done. ” Done.

Yep. We were done.

I remembered standing in front of the judge. I knew the judge.

Grayson had forgotten my flowers.

“You forgot the flowers?” Judge Allery admonished Grayson.

Grayson blushed.

I said it was okay.

Judge Allery was absolutely flabbergasted. “It’s not okay. No flowers? ”

And yet, that was the least of what we were missing.

“Do you have the ring?” Judge Allery cocked an eyebrow at Grayson, as if he thought there was a distinct possibility that the brick in front of him had forgotten that, too.

“Of course!” Grayson puffed up and displayed our rings.

Two thin gold bands. Inexpensive. “I’ll buy you a diamond later, June.

I don’t have time now. We’ll shop together,” he’d said.

I never had a diamond ring. It wasn’t the diamond I wanted, it was the care and thought behind it and the fact that he had not kept his word that was the problem.

We were married. It was done.

The judge spoke very slowly during our vows and stared hard at me. He later told me that he knew Grayson, knew me, and hadn’t a clue why I was marrying him. “A pigeon had clearly plucked your brain out of your head without you noticing,” he’d admonished over a shared beer at a bar.

“My parents were appalled,” I told Reece. “So was the rest of our Scottish clan.”

“I bet they were. Weddings are for families. The whole thing is sad, June, and I’m getting all ticked off at your ex again.

” He stood up and stalked around the studio, his cheekbones flushed.

“A court- house! At your lunch break? Damn. He didn’t care, did he?

He wasn’t thinking of you at all.” He ran a hand in frustration over his hair.

“That had to hurt you so much, and yet you make wedding dresses.”

“Late at night, when I was still married to Grayson, I started sketching wedding dresses, dress after dress, with colored pencils. I know it was wedding dress therapy. As the marriage became, for me, more and more sad, I worked out my grief, my loneliness, my anger at him and at myself, through drawing. I lost myself in that marriage, but I’d really been lost for years.

“I drew pages and pages of dresses. The more I drew, the more original the gowns became. They started reflecting the core of the woman, her identity. It was fun. The next day I’d go back to whipping people in court, blasting the other side, inwardly knowing my life was rotting and something had to give. ”

“I’m sorry, June.” Reece wrapped his arms around me, folding me into his warmth as if I’d been there a million times before.

“I’m over it.” My voice wobbled. “I am. It was a long time ago.” I sniffled.

Then he sniffled.

I snuggled into his warmth and sniffled and he sniffled again. I felt a tremor in his chest.

I pulled back and studied those green eyes, through the tears of mine. “Are you . . . you’re not crying, are you?”

He coughed, then wiped a hand across his face and turned away. “A few tears only.”

“What?” I scooted around in front of him. “Why are you crying?”

“Why? Isn’t that obvious?”

“What? What is obvious?”

“You were married in a courthouse, on a lunch break, in a work suit, without your family. That’s sad, June. That’s sad.” He gave me another comforting hug. “He never should have allowed that, June. You deserved more.”

I couldn’t even see through the hot water in my eyes, not because of the lunch-hour wedding but because Reece, my Reece, my friend who I was trying ridiculously hard not to fall in love with, was upset for me.

“You should have had your dress, your family, the whole huge, fluffy thing.” His voice dipped and split, pained.

My shoulders shook. I tried to hold it in, tried to control myself, tried to wrap up the pain and put it back in the sewing box, slamming the lid tight, as I’d done hundreds of times . . . but it didn’t work.

I burst into tears.

Yes, it had been sad.

It was still sad. I was still a mess because I’d caused the mess.

And yet, what was making me really cry was how compassionate Reece was. He understood, he grasped the pain and the loss, and he was upset for me.

He wrapped me up tight again in his arms, his chest heaving a bit, and soon all thoughts of my cold and lifeless past with Grayson left, whizzing out the French doors and into the frothing ocean, where I imagined they drowned in the waves, and I smiled.

Yep. I smiled through my tears.

Leoni, Estelle, and I worked for endless hours on August’s wedding dress, the bridesmaids’ dresses for September and me, and other orders.

We had fittings, calls, e-mails, some frantic, some panicked, some utterly grateful for their beaudacious dresses . . .

And in between the crush and the rush, I smiled.

I felt it. Happiness.

Seven Things I’m Worried About

Since I am still, technically, married, I can only be friends with Reece, but there is no way I can be “just friends” for much longer because he is delectable and that is a problem.

But! I don’t want to be involved with any man. I don’t trust myself. I don’t want to get hurt. I am not all together, I’m still emotionally wobbly.

Besides! He is only here for eight weeks total. I will not get involved with a man for eight weeks and then be discarded. I am not a beach toy.

How poor will I be by the time I get divorced?

What if the reporter giggles in a mean way at my dresses?

Earthquakes. Strange diseases. Weird sounds at night.

Morgan. Leoni. She works so hard. I want her to be happy. I’ll make her and Morgan matching lace skirts.

I played Scrabble. I spelled these words: “ache,” “alone,” “lace.” I lost.

I ate a cream puff. Okay, two cream puffs.