Elin Hilderbrand - Beautiful Day

“You’re right,” she said. “I should go.” She collected her wrap and her purse and plunked thirty dollars on the bar, which Griff pushed back at her.

“Please,” he said. “My treat.”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

“I insist,” he said.

She reclaimed her money and said, “Well, thank you for the drinks. And thank you for listening.” He had been attentive, he hadn’t tried to offer platitudes or advice. He had been a capital L Listener. Every family wedding, Margot realized, needed a Listener.

“My pleasure,” Griff said.

Margot slid off the leather barstool. She felt even more conflicted than when she had walked in here. On top of her other avalanche of emotions was regret about having to leave Griffin Wheatley, Homecoming King.

Griff said, “Margot, are you dating anyone?”

She said, “Oh, sort of.” Then she laughed because those three words had to represent a situation so complex she couldn’t begin to explain it.

He said, “I figured I had some kind of competition, but I wasn’t sure what form it took.”

He walked her home, holding her arm as she crossed the cobblestones of Main Street. As they walked up Orange, Margot began to wonder about the rest of her family. Would they be home? Would they be awake? Margot had, essentially, vanished, and her phone didn’t work, so no one would have been able to reach her. She couldn’t believe how liberating it was to be untethered.

The next thing she knew, she and Griff were standing on the sidewalk a few doors down from her house. There was a fat gibbous moon above them, and the clock tower of the Unitarian Church was illuminated.

Margot said, “Really, I can’t thank you enough…”

Griff put his hands on either side of her neck and held her like that for a second, then he kissed her softly on the lips. Then again, then again, more urgently, then there was tongue, and a flood of desire. Margot was breathless. She thought, This is the best first kiss I’ve ever had, and this is the worst first kiss precisely because of how good it is, because once he finds out what I did, he will never kiss me again. Therefore she had to be greedy now. Margot kissed him and kissed him, tongue, lips, hands, hair, she pulled on him, she could not get enough. She thought, Edge who? Kissing Edge had never felt like this. Kissing Edge had been like kissing an old man, sometimes their teeth clicked, sometimes his breath was sour. And yet Edge had such a stranglehold on her, he held her captive, so much so that she had been willing, eager even, to wrong this man right here. It was the secret of Edge that was addictive, it was his beautifully cut suits and his expensive watch. It was the fact that he should rightfully treat Margot like treasure, but he treated her carelessly, and the more carelessly he treated her, the more obsessed she became.

Griff pulled away, and Margot thought, No! She worried that he wasn’t enjoying the kissing as much as she was. Was insane desire and electricity like this ever one-sided?

He said, “I have a confession to make.”

She believed he was about to admit to a girlfriend, or even a fiancée, although his pursuit of her had been zealous to say the very least. She thought, I don’t care if he is married or engaged or if he’s been dating someone a year or three months or a week.

“What?” she said.

He said, “I’ve had a crush on you since the first second I saw you.”

Her feet in her silver heels turned icy. They were suddenly so cold that they hurt; she couldn’t move her toes.

“From the minute you first shook my hand,” he said. “I thought you were so pretty then. But pretty was the least of it. You were smart and capable, and… so tough on me. You asked the most exacting questions. It was a turn-on. I couldn’t ask you for your number then, obviously. I thought about calling you at work after I’d been signed off, but I wasn’t sure if… well, I thought it might be awkward for you. I didn’t expect to ever see you again, especially not on the ferry to Nantucket.”

“Oh,” she said. She flooded with shame, with panic. Smart, capable, tough… exacting questions… a turn-on. Jesus!

“And please don’t worry about the outcome of all of that,” Griff said. “I’m sure the other guy was a better match.”

Margot said, “I… I can’t talk about it.”

“Of course not,” Griff said. “Obviously. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry! Margot thought.

He said, “Can I see you tomorrow?”

Tomorrow? Margot thought. Tomorrow was the wedding. She would be busy all day and night, and Edge was coming. She had liked kissing Griff, she had liked it a lot, but she hated herself for what she’d done. Griff was such a good guy. Margot had always thought of herself as a good guy… until that phone call with Drew Carver, when she had become a not-good guy. Margot could never confess to it. But she also couldn’t see Griff again, or kiss him again, without confessing to it.

“No,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“No?” he said. “But…”

She waved good-bye and hurried down the street toward her family’s house, thinking again that some nights had good karma and some nights were cursed, and for a few moments, tonight had seemed like the former, but it had ended up the latter.

And as if Margot needed further proof of this, when she approached the house, she saw Jenna sitting on the top step by the front door, which no one but the mailman ever used. Jenna had her face in her hands. She was crying.

The Bridal Bouquet

I love flowers, this you know. One summer during college, I worked for a florist on Seventy-seventh Street called Stems-it’s long gone-doing deliveries, and later, simple arrangements. Stems had a beautiful built-in flower cooler with huge oak and glass doors, and I would take any opportunity I could to step inside that cooler and inhale the scent. If there is a heaven, it had better resemble the walk-in cooler at Stems, filled with roses, lilies, dahlias, and gerbera daisies in rainbow colors.

Bridal bouquet: Limelight hydrangeas, white peonies (tight, not blooming), lush white roses, jade roses, jade lisianthus, green hypericum. This combination will give a rounded, sumptuous effect with a perfect balance of white and green shades.

Bridesmaids: White hydrangeas and jade roses. Tie those up with matching green ribbon.

Please note that I’ve avoided adding Asiatic lilies, calla lilies and orchids. These flowers are too structured, too citified-they cannot coexist with the softness of the peonies. Trust me.

In the master bedroom, in the king bed, Pauline reached for him. Her hands, with nails newly painted the color of brewing storm clouds, wrapped around his biceps. She pulled herself in close and breathed in his ear. Then the flat of her palm ran down his bare chest, over the softer flesh at his belly, and across the front of his boxers. Nothing.

This wasn’t unusual. Doug was getting older, and he didn’t always snap to attention the way he used to. He had considered seeing Dr. Fraker and getting a prescription, but that seemed like an admission of defeat. The only way he’d been able to sustain an erection with Pauline recently was to imagine her with Russell Stern from the Wee Burn Country Club. This was twisted, Doug knew-fantasizing about his wife with another man. And it couldn’t be any other man, either; it couldn’t be Arthur Tonelli or George Clooney. It had to be Russell Stern. Doug worried that he was somehow attracted to Russell Stern. Perhaps this was an indication of a latent homosexual urge? But further pondering brought Doug to the conclusion that he had been most attracted to Pauline when he’d suspected that Russell Stern was pursuing her. It had increased Pauline’s desirability. That Pauline and Russell Stern had once been a couple made it even better. Sometimes Doug fantasized about Pauline in her short, pleated cheerleader skirt and Russell in football pads taking her from behind in what he imagined to be the fetid air of the New Canaan High School locker room.

But that vision wasn’t working tonight. Nothing would work tonight. Nothing, Doug thought sadly, would work ever again. His sex life with Pauline was over.

He gathered her wandering hand in both of his and squeezed it. He wanted to be kind to her, but so often, kind was mistaken for patronizing.

“Pauline,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I understand, I get it, it’s only natural that you’d be thinking of her.”

“Thinking of whom?”

“Beth.”

“I wasn’t thinking of Beth.”

Pauline rolled over on her side so that her back was to him. “Of course you were.”

He wanted to say, Don’t tell me what I was or was not thinking about. You aren’t a mind reader. But Doug didn’t want to pick a fight. He didn’t want to act like any of his clients. People going through a divorce faced heightened emotion every single day. Just last week, Doug had received an e-mail in which the subject line read “Rough Morning.” The message consisted of a detailed description of how contentious the before-school routine in the Blahblahblah household had become. Mom and Dad both lived in the same apartment building, and little Sophie and slightly older Daniel were shuttled up and down on the elevator in search of clean clothes, breakfast, and homework while Mom and Dad screamed profanities at each other on their cell phones. Doug had read and answered a thousand such e-mails; he had a front-row seat for every imaginable variety of domestic discord. He loathed the thought of anyone-another lawyer, a therapist, or Rhonda-being privy to the inner workings of his relationship with Pauline. He just wanted the marriage to quietly go away. He wanted it to be a soap bubble he could pop with his finger.