The Wedding Sisters Read online

  “Yeah, good luck with that. It’s human nature. You can’t fight it.”

  She thought of the surge of desire she had felt for the wedding planner. It was shocking she could feel something so strong, when she felt so broken, and it dismayed her that she had so little control over her impulses. Jo realized her biggest fear wasn’t what she’d told her mother—that she’d never fall in love again. It was that she would.

  “I can fight it,” she said.

  “Well, I can’t,” said Toby, looking at her with naked longing.

  Before she could say anything to neutralize the moment, he leaned forward and kissed her.

  Jo knew it was wrong—but he was such a good kisser, and his arms around her made her feel safe and cared for, and so even though she knew she was being weak, she let him tug off her T-shirt, and when she felt his mouth on her breasts, his hardness through his jeans as he pulled her into his arms, she gave in to the animalistic need for skin on skin.

  Toby pulled on a condom, and she watched the process with a detached fascination. When he moved back on top of her, she found herself eager for the sensation of being filled by him. The sensation of him entering her, the hardness of his cock, was so different from Caroline, which was exactly what she needed, and undeniably satisfying. There was no question this was just fucking—it was clean and simple, and if he had messy emotions about it, well, frankly that was his problem. He was a grown man and he knew the deal.

  At least that’s what she told herself as he kissed her neck, moaning her name as his body trembled and she drew him closer. She wouldn’t come this time, she could tell. But the closeness felt good.

  “My God, Jo,” he said, her body tensing, his hips bucking. His eyes were closed tight, his face tense with the orgasm that rocked through him. Jo watched him, touched by the intensity of his experience and struck with a sudden pang of worry. Be careful, she told herself. Be careful.

  * * *

  City Bakery was a two-story, cafeteria-style food mecca for the Union Square professional crowd.

  Scott texted her that he was already there, at a table on the second floor.

  Meryl ordered a coffee—for once not even tempted by the pretzel croissants, and walked up the narrow metal staircase.

  She was nervous. Judging from that brief encounter at the 7-Eleven, Scott Sobel made her feel like a starstruck fifteen-year-old girl all over again. What were they even going to talk about after all this time?

  He spotted her and rose from a corner table. She smiled and headed toward him, letting him embrace her.

  “You made it!” he said.

  “Scott, I’m so sorry about last night.”

  “Oh, I’m just teasing,” he said. “Don’t even give it a second thought. I’m just glad we were able to fit this in before I head back to the West Coast.”

  Meryl shrugged off her coat, draping it on the back of the chair next to her, and sat down facing him across the table.

  Scott was the physical opposite of Hugh. As a teenager, he’d been dark and exotic looking—almost Mediterranean. He had thick, shiny dark hair, a little lighter now but still brown, not gray. He had an aquiline nose and a full upper lip, dark eyes with heavy brows and thick lashes—bedroom eyes. When she was younger, she’d heard the expression on one of her mother’s shows, and though she didn’t know exactly what it meant at the time, when she saw Scott for the first time, she knew instantly what it meant.

  “So how the hell have you been, Meryl Kleinman?”

  This was crazy. She was still attracted to him. It was absurd—like her brain synapses were stuck back in 1975. She could practically hear the Barry Manilow song “Mandy”—God, how she’d loved that song. It made her so sad and so happy at the same time. It had been magical.

  “Becker,” she said. “I’m married.” Yes, Meryl—you’re married!

  “I know. I remember. It just feels good to say your old name. God, when did I see you last? Before the other night, obviously. That party at Columbia?”

  “Probably.”

  At the time, she’d already been dating Hugh a few weeks. She and Scott had said hello. He had been with an attractive woman—of course. They were still young then. They didn’t matter to each other yet. Nostalgia hadn’t set in, making them golden to each other.

  “You look exactly the same as that night on the boardwalk,” he said.

  Oh my God. He remembered. “I don’t feel the same,” she said, blushing.

  “Who does?” he said, smiling at her. “Except, I have to say, sitting here with you—it’s the closest I’ve gotten in a long time.”

  She glanced down at his ring finger. Bare. Of course, a lot of men didn’t wear wedding bands these days.

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No. Never got married.” He said it almost apologetically.

  “You never found the right person?” She paused. “I’m sorry,” she added. “It’s really none of my business.”

  He laughed. “This is what friends do after decades—they talk about their lives, right?”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Thirty years.” It sounded outrageous, even to her.

  Scott whistled. “Wow. Meryl, that’s impressive.”

  Was it? There had been times when she thought about leaving. Likely they both had. But the feelings had passed. So the fact that she was still married wasn’t necessarily impressive. She wanted to be happily married. Or at least to feel content.

  But she didn’t. Not lately.

  “It’s not, really,” she said.

  “You’re so self-deprecating. I love it. Usually I’m surrounded by complete narcissists.”

  “I guess it takes a certain amount of that to want to be on a reality TV show.”

  “I’m sure what I do seems pretty crazy to you.”

  “Not at all! It’s interesting. In fact, I watched your first show. The rodeo housewives.”

  “Really? I’m flattered.”

  “Well, don’t be too flattered. I grew up watching The Young and the Restless and As the World Turns. Not exactly highbrow entertainment.”

  “Highbrow, no. But they serve a purpose. We need narratives about love and family to make sense of our lives—just like centuries ago we needed myths to make sense of the natural world.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “So what else, Meryl Kleinman Becker?”

  “Well, I have three grown daughters.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  Had he Googled her? Did that mean something? Did he think about her?

  He smiled at her, a knowing, intimate smile as if he knew exactly what she was thinking.

  It took her breath away.

  * * *

  Amy dreamt about her wedding. Every night since the engagement, her sleep was filled with vivid images of white gowns and six-tiered cakes and flowers—oh, the flowers! Purple was her signature color, and the arrangements of dark eggplant calla lilies, anemone, hydrangeas, purple zinnias, and poppies and roses—she could smell them, feel their velvety petals.

  In the morning, she would jot down notes from her dreams, a wedding coming together piece by piece from the place of her deepest fantasies.

  So far, she hadn’t shared any of her wedding brainstorming with her mother, who had been disappointingly absent since the Friday night dinner. She had barely called Amy even though there were obviously a million things to talk about. Amy tried to fight the knowing feeling that her mother was simply too caught up in Meg’s wedding planning to start getting Amy’s off the ground. Typical.

  Amy shrugged off the vestiges of her fantasy wedding slumber and the rising panic that—as always—she was being eclipsed by the bright and shining star that was Meg. For years, with Andy by her side, it had seemed like she was finally catching up. Meg might have been born with innate style and Grace Kelly good looks, but Amy had the fashion b
ona fides. By senior year in college, her social calendar included New York Fashion Week, the European shows in February, Art Basel parties in Miami, the CFDA awards. Meg seemed uninterested in it all, but their mother loved hearing all the details—who wore what, the kind of food that was served. For the first time, Amy had felt like the special one.

  And then came Meg’s new boyfriend, Stowe—and his family, the Campions. Fashion was exciting, fashion was important. But it wasn’t political power.

  Amy showered and got dressed. Andy was already gone, an early meeting. The apartment was filled with flowers, well wishes and congratulations from friends—Jeffrey Bruce’s friends. Marc Jacobs alone sent an arrangement that was lavish enough to be a centerpiece at their wedding.

  Over coffee, she opened her laptop. Andy’s mother, Eileen, had given her a list of potential wedding planners. “To use or not to use, whatever you want,” she had said, and Amy knew she meant it. Eileen had also made it clear that they were happy to pay for whatever “you kids” need, but that she didn’t want to “overstep.” From what Amy had seen from the preliminary planning of her sister’s wedding, her parents did not want anyone else paying for the wedding—any part of their wedding. Her father was very old-fashioned, and her mother was prideful and, let’s face it, a bit of a control freak.

  Amy had spent fifteen minutes clicking through the Web sites of various wedding planners, when she realized she was in danger of being late. There was no margin for error today—she wasn’t going to the office, but instead to Milk Studios on West Fifteenth Street for the menswear shoot.

  The studio was hip and glamorous, a glass-enclosed space with panoramic views of the Hudson. But for the past week, she was a little less than focused, just a little less awed by her entrée to the workaday world of Jeffrey Bruce International. Now she wasn’t just dating a Bruce. She wasn’t just working at Bruce. She was on the cusp of becoming a Bruce.

  Amy Becker Bruce. She mentally played with the name constantly, chewing it like the most delicious salted caramel. In meetings, she was tempted to doodle it onto her legal pad, but she didn’t dare, in case Stella caught sight of it and became even more wary of her.

  Stella had made it clear that she did not need Amy at today’s shoot. Amy had been prepared not to go. And then the Page Six story broke.

  Amy didn’t know who fed the news of her engagement to the city’s notorious gossip site, but she suspected it was someone from inside the Bruce camp. Jeffrey certainly seemed happy about it, somehow missing the completely pejorative slant of the piece. (Her sister clearly hadn’t.) Amy had long had the feeling that Jeffrey Bruce was probably even better at branding than he was at design; every aspect of their lives reflected the Bruce aesthetic: fresh, clean, sporty, all-American bordering on preppy.

  Andy confided in her that his father worried about relevancy. The advent of social media baffled him. The fact that a thirteen-year-old blogger sitting in the middle of nowhere could somehow matter sent him into a tizzy. Now everyone chased that ephemeral thing that would make them “viral.”

  Jeffrey loved that Amy and her sister had landed on Page Six. He loved that the photo of Meg included Stowe Campion. Blue-blooded Stowe, who embodied the Jeffrey Bruce lifestyle and aesthetic.

  Jeffrey had called Amy into his office that morning, along with Paul Derribond, head of the in-house public relations team, and a petite, blond Southern woman named Camille, who handled the outside PR when Jeffrey Bruce needed reinforcements, like during Fashion Week or for crisis management. Together, they dissected the Page Six piece with an intensity Amy had not seen since her sophomore-year study group had prepped for a midterm exam on Milton’s Paradise Lost. Jeffrey declared that Amy was now a “brand ambassador.” Camille and Paul had clucked approvingly, and the meeting had a high-energy, positive vibe that was both thrilling and baffling.

  The next thing she knew, Stella informed her, with obvious bitterness, that she would be going to the menswear shoot after all.

  Amy dressed in jeans and a gray cashmere Bruce sweater with high black suede Bruce boots. The boots were impractically high-heeled, but she was running so late, she was taking a cab to the shoot anyway.

  The studio buzzed with the self-important energy inherent in fashion, along with Arctic Monkeys playing at an obscenely high decibel, considering it was barely nine in the morning. The stylist, a teeny-tiny waif of a woman who channeled 1960s London, was busy with one of the male models while the other two stood nearby.

  Amy grabbed a soy latte from the coffee bar and took a seat next to Stella, who barely glanced at her.

  After a few minutes of awkward silence, Amy asked, “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No,” Stella said, scrolling through the look book on her tablet. Her one terse syllable said everything. No, there is nothing for you to do because your presence here is completely unnecessary, which is why I told you not to come in the first place.

  Amy pretended to be very busy with her e-mails. When she exhausted that, she looked at the models, three perfect specimens of male beauty. One, African American with bright blue eyes. Another, with tousled sandy brown hair and pouty lips, looked like a male Angelina Jolie. The third had longish dark hair that obscured his face. He was bending down, fixing his twelve-hundred-dollar chocolate brown suede Jeffrey Bruce work boots. When he stood, shaking his hair back, tucking a lock behind his ear, he looked straight at Amy.

  And she lost her breath.

  He was the most magnificent person she had ever seen, in person, in print, on the screen—in her wildest imagination.

  He didn’t have that one startling declaration of beauty as the other two did—dramatic ice-blue eyes or lips with an almost cartoonish sensuality. And yet he stood out more than either of them because the perfect composition of his face was once in a lifetime. It was a work of art, nature at its most sublime. Maybe proof of the god she barely thought about.

  She could only imagine what his girlfriend looked like. What kind of woman had the self-confidence to be with a guy who was prettier than she was? Andy was definitely cute, but there was never a question that she was the better looking of the two. She remembered reading somewhere that people tended to couple off with partners of the same relative degree of attractiveness. She didn’t remember where she’d read it, but now, thinking about the couples she knew, the theory behind the article seemed to prove true.

  Meanwhile the stylist, Brandi, and the photographer, Rupert, were carrying on about the clothes.

  “This jacket is just … no,” said Brandi, yanking the blazer off the broad shoulders of Mr. Perfection. “Rupert, give me a minute to pull another option. Unless,” she said, looking dutifully at Stella, almost as an afterthought. “You’re totally married to this one.”

  “Let me see what else you have,” Stella said, hopping down from the metal stool, handing Amy her thin laptop to hold and muttering, “Make yourself useful.”

  The photographer busied himself with the other two models whose clothes didn’t offend Brandi.

  “We’re changing you, Marcus,” she called from somewhere behind a screen or a wall or something else making her invisible. “Lose that shirt.”

  Mr. Perfection—apparently named Marcus—began unbuttoning the lavender and gray plaid shirt he wore. Amy averted her eyes, as unnerved as a virginal heroine in one of those turn-of-the-century novels her father loved so much.

  Someone’s assistant handed Marcus a glass of champagne. Amy found herself yearning for a drink herself, but couldn’t. Not on the job. Even if her job today entailed very loud rock music and ridiculously beautiful men. Even if the job was currently making her feel more extraneous and cloddishly unattractive than she’d ever felt in her entire life.

  And then, Mr. Perfection ambled over to Amy’s spot on the sidelines.

  “Guess the jacket’s not working,” he said with a sheepish grin.

  She realized that she was supposed to say something professional. As a rep from Jeffrey Bruce, she was
supposed to assure him that they had plenty of other wardrobe items for him to wear, that they would get what they needed for the ad—not to worry.

  “Guess not,” she said.

  “At least, I hope it’s just the jacket they have a problem with.”

  Did this astonishingly gorgeous creature really think something—anything—could be wrong with him?

  “I don’t think you have to worry,” she said, smiling up at him.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Really.” She tried hard not to look at his chest.

  “You work for them?” he asked.

  Her smile grew wider. He had no idea who she was. This guy just saw her as a staffer, maybe even an intern. He had no idea she was practically a Bruce herself.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Cool.” He smiled at her again, and her knees turned to Jell-O.

  “Okay,” said Brandi, appearing with a T-shirt and leather jacket. “Crisis averted.”

  “Wish me luck,” he said, winking at Amy.

  She watched him saunter back to the other two, under the bright lights, ready for the shoot. She found she was holding her breath. Amy looked down at her engagement ring.

  Pull it together, you idiot.

  * * *

  “Did I Google you?” Scott repeated. “Yes—guilty as charged. I did Google you. But that’s not how I know about your daughters.”

  Crap. Had she said that out loud? “So you’re a New York Post reader.”

  “In a town full of celebrities, they are writing about your kids.” He smiled.

  “Yeah. Well, it’s been a slow news month.”

  “It’s interesting stuff, Meryl.”

  “That’s one way of putting it. Crazy is another. Stressful, yet another.”

  “Who is handling everything?”

  “The wedding? I’m trying to. There’s a wedding planner but—”

  “No, I mean your PR.”

  “Oh. I am.”

  “You don’t want a professional? I’d be happy to put you in touch with a few people.”

  “I have all the publicity I need. More than I need, actually. My daughters—well, my eldest daughter—is very sensitive about this stuff.”