The Fates (Book I) - 2014 Watty Award Winner!

4.7 - So Distant

Dear Readers: Let's hop to the Campions' hotel room, to see Ryder and Lacey on the first night of their honeymoon...

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Scene 7: So Distant

A.D. 2015

“Ryder.”

Her husband’s face spontaneously twitched, a little bit, to hear her say the name. It sounded like a foreign language, from her lips.

Lacey propped herself up on an elbow in their king-sized bed. She should have looked like an angel, here and now in their honeymoon suite. An angel in a bed of cloud, crowned with a pale gold halo of perfectly groomed hair, smooth skin aglow beneath barely-there lingerie against the billowy white sheets. An absolute angel.

But that was not what Ryder saw. At the moment, at any rate, he wasn’t looking. He was replying to an email from Noelle—touching base with his sister about the smooth landing in Athens, sumptuous hotel, and plans for sunny days of island-hopping up ahead.

He should’ve been excited, thrilled, delighted. Should’ve been. Noelle had thrown in lots of exclamation points, as per usual, which should’ve helped. Ryder replied with very few.

Lacey was ignoring emails from her own sister, for now, because such messages threatened her post-marital bliss. Sure, Madeline wanted her little sister to be happy on her honeymoon. But she was also silently holding her breath, along with Bentley, till the day the Campion marriage fell apart. Lacey knew this, but she was quite determined not to think on it tonight. She couldn’t let the honeymoon phase end before it started.

“Ryder,” she repeated, savoring both syllables and smiling at the sound. “Do you think I could call you Ryder, from now on?”

He swallowed. Stopped typing for a second, turned halfway in his chair and smiled back at her. “Where’s this coming from?”

Her shoulders lifted in a nimble shrug. “It’s just, I don’t know… it’s always been the name that you prefer. With everybody else. Only the Weavers ever call you by your first name.”

“Because anything else would be improper—‘going by an edgy middle name is such a crass and childish trend,’ after all,” Ryder reminded her, with a direct quote by Katherine, from some time ago.

Lacey blushed, embarrassed on her mother’s behalf. “It just might be the only thing my mother doesn’t like about you…”

“Oh, I doubt it,” he countered. Ryder was sure that Katherine had a running list, but that she kept it on lockdown behind sealed lips, for reasons that he couldn’t fathom. Mrs. Weaver had always put on a show of favoring him, with a fondness that frankly freaked him out. The other members of Lacey’s family—besides Grant, who hadn’t even lived to see his wartime friend and little sister get engaged—made no secret of their unpleasant feelings toward this union.

Honestly, he couldn’t blame them for a second.

“Well, I don’t doubt it,” Lacey insisted, porcelain face lit up with a loving grin. “What is there not to like?”

Ask everyone else who cares about you, Ryder responded in his mind. A response kept on lockdown behind a forced smile of a frown. “A whole lot, trust me,” he muttered aloud instead.

“Then you must be hiding a lot from me…” she playfully replied.

He turned a full hundred eighty degrees in his seat, to look at her in earnest. Unable to stomach the joke. He had promised her, from the start, that he would keep no secrets between them. And he had kept that promise, every aching day since he’d accepted her proposal. Her umpteenth proposal, informal and indirect but nonetheless desperately serious, as all of her previous ones had been.