People always ask me how Reginald and I finally happened. I never quite know where to start.
I suppose the honest answer is: my ex showed up.
Not metaphorically. Not in a dream. Tomasz Morozov walked through the lobby of the Magnolia Court Boutique Hotel in Charleston’s historic district on a Saturday in October, and the entire careful architecture of the weekend I’d been building — the composure, the bridesmaid duties, the deliberate not-thinking-about-Reginald — came apart like wet paper.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The wedding was Sasha-Kaye’s. My college roommate, my person, the woman who’d talked me through every bad decision I’d ever made including the two years I’d spent with Tomasz. She was marrying Aldous Harrowgate, a soft-spoken architect from Savannah who wore linen well and laughed at all her jokes even the ones that weren’t funny. I loved him for that.
The hotel was extraordinary. Three stories of Federal-style brick on a cobblestone side street, the kind of place that smells like old wood and gardenias and something faintly mineral, like the Cooper River had been bottled and spritzed on the curtains. Our room block took up the entire second floor. The rehearsal dinner was Friday in the courtyard, strung with Edison lights that made everyone look like they were living inside a painting.
Reginald was Aldous’s best man.
I’d known this for four months. I’d had four months to prepare for the fact that I would spend an entire weekend in close proximity to a man I’d almost kissed at Sasha-Kaye’s birthday party eighteen months ago, a moment that had been interrupted by a waiter and a tray of champagne and my own spectacular talent for retreating.
We were colleagues, technically. Both of us worked in the same graduate research program at the College of Charleston — me in literary history, him in urban heritage preservation. We shared a department kitchen. We’d shared a long, careful friendship that I’d been slowly, quietly ruining by wanting more of it.
Friday went fine. More than fine.
Reginald and I stood side by side during the rehearsal, and he leaned over to whisper something about the officiant’s toupee, and I laughed too loudly and Sasha-Kaye shot me a look that contained entire paragraphs.
At dinner, we sat across from each other. He poured my wine without being asked. I noticed. I catalogued it like evidence.
Afterward, a small group of us spilled into the hotel bar — a narrow, low-lit room with exposed brick and a bartender who made a lavender old-fashioned that tasted like a dare. Sasha-Kaye’s cousin Delia kept steering the conversation toward embarrassing bridesmaid stories. Reginald caught my eye across the rim of his glass every time Delia said something outrageous, which was often.
We were building toward something. I could feel it the way you feel a change in pressure before a storm.
Then Saturday morning arrived, and so did Tomasz.
I saw him from the staircase.
He was standing at the front desk in a grey coat, rolling a carry-on, looking exactly the way he always looked: like someone who had arrived from somewhere more important. He’d gotten a haircut. He was smiling at the desk clerk with the particular warmth he deployed on strangers.
My hand found the stair railing.
I hadn’t spoken to him in fourteen months. I’d thought I was done. I’d been so certain I was done.
He turned, and our eyes met, and his face did the thing it used to do — that slow, private recognition, like I was still his.
“Sherica.”
Just my name. That was all it took to make my chest feel like a room with all the windows open in winter.
He was, it turned out, a last-minute guest. A college friend of Aldous’s, someone nobody had thought to warn me about. Sasha-Kaye found me ten minutes later in the bridal suite bathroom, holding a mascara wand like a weapon.
“I didn’t know,” she said immediately. “I swear on my dress, I didn’t know he was coming.”
“It’s fine,” I said. The mascara wand was not fine. My hands were not fine.
“Sherica.”
“I’m fine, Sasha-Kaye. It’s your wedding day. Let me do your eyeliner.”
She let me. But she watched me the whole time with those careful eyes of hers.
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