Chapter 2: Craig

Cecilia folded her hands on her lap daintily and looked at Craig from beneath fanned lashes. Craig offered her a meek smile.

“So?” she asked.

“So…” Craig trailed off. “I think you did a good job. I don’t think there’s anything really out of place.”

Craig’s phone sat on his thigh, the screen still on. His conversation with Jack was active. He looked away from Cecilia to look down at his phone, waiting to see if Jack would message him back. The little typing icon at the bottom of their conversation appeared. Craig’s smile brightened.

“Craig?” Cecilia asked, the pitch of her voice growing shrill with thinly veiled irritation. “Hello?”

“Craig,” Craig’s mother, Catherine, rebuked. “We’re talking to you.”

“I know,” Craig said. He looked up from his phone. “I answered you, didn’t I?”

“You did.” Cecilia’s face betrayed her emotions—her lips were tight with frustration. “But you’re not invested in this conversation at all. All morning you’ve been sitting there on your phone texting when you should have been contributing. This is your family I’m trying to accommodate.”

“Cecilia is right, Craig,” Catherine said sternly. “She’s doing everything she can to make sure that this wedding goes off flawlessly, and all you’re doing is sitting around on your phone. These are your relatives. You’re the one who knows best who gets along with whom and who needs to be separated. Just because I’m here doesn’t mean you have license to check out.”

“This is our wedding,” Cecilia snapped. “I can’t plan something that’s ours alone.”

Craig understood their train of thought, and he knew that he was being unfair to both of them, but he couldn’t keep focused. Wedding planning bored him. Eighty percent of the people his mother had forced his hand into inviting didn’t mean anything to him. Fifteen percent of those remaining were people he abhorred. The five percent leftover were the only ones he cared about. Craig envied that his cousin, Roman, had been able to worm his way out of a huge ceremony when he’d tied the knot with his husband, Lane.

It had been one of the smallest weddings Craig had been to, but it had also been one of the best.

He’d met Jack there, after all. And Dylan and Brad.

For the first time in Craig’s life, it felt like he’d found people who valued him for himself instead of his relation to the Hawthorn family.

It made it hard as hell to devote his attention to something as shallow as planning a wedding that was more about prestige than a devotion of love.

“Craig?” Cecilia piped.

“I’m listening,” Craig promised. “I understand where you’re coming from. It’s just… I don’t want this.”

“What are you saying?” his mother asked, aghast. “Craig, you apologize this instant.”

“No, I don’t mean it that way.” Craig held out his hands, trying to calm his mother and his fiancée down. “I just mean, all the glamor and glitz. All the guests. The exclusive venue. The fancy cake… it’s not what I want. I still don’t understand why we can’t have something smaller.”

Both Cecilia and Catherine looked at him like he was crazy.

In their eyes, he probably was.

“With your family?” Cecilia asked. “Darling, there’s no way we could do something small without insulting everyone. There are too many of them not to invite.”

“And Cecilia’s family as well,” Craig’s mother reminded him. “There are already few enough of them as it is. How would they feel if they were suddenly uninvited?”

Craig ran his hand through his hair. He’d locked it in place earlier that morning with a misting of hair spray, but he couldn’t stop himself from messing it up. He was nervous, he realized. Maybe anxious. The crawling feeling of dread in his chest wouldn’t give up.

“I’m not saying that we’re going to do that,” Craig said. “Not at all, especially since we sent out the invitations. It’s just… it isn’t what I wanted, and both of you know it.”

“Who doesn’t want a wedding like this?” his mother asked. She pinched her shoulders together and shifted her weight from side to side like a bird ruffling her feathers. “Cecilia is going to be beautiful. The venue is going to be the most stunning one the Hawthorn family has ever had the privilege to visit. The food is going to be talked about for years, and the photographer and videographer are among the best in Los Angeles. This is going to be a fairytale brought to life.”

For Cecilia, maybe. For Craig it was another obligation, another mask. He’d spent a good portion of his life doing everything he could to fit into his elitist family, but it had never done him any good. No matter how successful he was, no matter what he accomplished, and no matter who he sucked up to, nothing was ever good enough for them. All his life he’d lived in his Cousin Roman’s shadow, spiteful and angry that this was the hand that he had been dealt with. All his bitterness had ever brought him was more reason to be jealous.

But since Roman had come back home from overseas and settled down with the right man, Craig was starting to come around. All Roman wanted was a simple life free from Hawthorn family drama. Craig realized that they weren’t all that dissimilar.

So Craig was doing his best to turn over a new leaf. It was a shame his family didn’t see it the same way he did.

“So you’ve finalized the seating arrangements, then?” Craig asked. He didn’t want to hurt his mother by telling her he wasn’t invested in the wedding at all. “That’s all taken care of?”

“No thanks to you,” Cecilia pouted.

Most times she was a sweet girl, but times like these she grated on Craig’s nerves to no end. “What do you want my help with, then?” Craig asked. “What else is there to be done? I know I dropped the ball on seating arrangements, but I can help with something else.”

“You can help by giving me your phone,” Cecilia said.

Craig instantly reached for it, taking hold of it before Cecilia could snatch it from his thigh. “I’ll turn it off and put it away.”

“I want to know who you’re texting,” she insisted. “All you do these days is sit on your phone, smiling and laughing behind your hand. Who are you talking to, Craig?”

“Uh. A friend.” Craig looked to his mother for support, but there was none to be found. Her eyes were hardened coals, her lips thin with her displeasure. “One of the guys I met out in North Carolina when I went to Roman’s wedding.”

“I still can’t believe you didn’t take me,” Cecilia said. She’d worked herself into a fury now, and Craig knew there would be no talking her down. He had to let her burn out. “Is it because you were meeting someone out there? Is ‘one of the guys’ actually some girl, Craig?”

Craig buried his face in his hand.

“It is, isn’t it?”

“No, Cecilia.”

“I can’t believe you’d do this.”

Craig looked at her from between parted fingers. Her cheeks were red with frustration and her brows were knitted together. Most of the time she had a beautiful face, but when she was angry it twisted. “Roman’s mother was at the ceremony. Don’t you think if she saw me so much as look at another woman the entire Hawthorn clan would know it by now?”

“I—” Cecilia frowned. She knew as well as Craig did how rumors spread like wildfire through Craig’s family. “Well, still, it’s not right. It’s not right at all.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Craig apologized. “I swear I’m just talking to a friend. There’s nothing more to it than that.”

Cecilia looked appeased for all of five seconds before Craig’s mother cut in. “He may not be a woman, but is he a gay man? Roman was gay married to that boy, Landon?”

“Lane,” Craig said. Whose side was his mother on, anyway? Definitely not his.

“Lane. Right.” She lifted her chin. “So what? Are you talking to men now, Craig? Do you even stop to think about Cecilia?”

Sometimes Craig thought it wasn’t worth it to keep fighting for a relationship he wasn’t even all that invested in. Cecilia was a nice girl. When they’d met, she’d been sweet and drama free, but the longer she rubbed elbows with the Hawthorns, the more corrupt she became.

“I’m not talking to men like that,” Craig said.

“Why should I believe you?” Cecilia asked, outraged all over again. “All of this is so stressful to me and it’s like you don’t even care. If you loved me like you say you do, then you’d want to be here to help me through this stressful time. Instead, you’re talking to whomever that is.”

“Jack,” Craig said.

“That’s such a fake name it’s not even funny.” Cecilia collapsed back into her chair and looked skyward. Craig saw her beauty in the curve of her slender neck and the angles of her jaw, but he was having a hard time seeing what drew him to her as a person.

Maybe he’d been too hasty to get down on one knee. He’d thought that Cecilia was a different person, but she was starting to show her true colors. Craig wondered what kind of a life it would be with her at his side.

Would he turn into the same bitter person he had been only a few months before?

“Maybe it’s a good idea if we get back to the issues at hand instead of who I’m texting,” Craig suggested. “There’s a lot still to get done, right? We shouldn’t be wasting time on unnecessary things.”

“Unnecessary to you, maybe,” Cecilia said. She folded her arms across her chest, disappointment plainly visible in her eyes. “It feels pretty necessary to me.”

Craig sighed. This was a conversation for behind closed doors—one he certainly didn’t want to have in front of his mother. He already knew she was going to spread rumors about trouble in paradise from the little she’d seen. A full-blown confrontation would only make things worse.

“Cecilia, I’m sorry,” Craig said. He really was. “There’s no one else, I promise. I was being an ass to ignore you when you needed my help. I’ll work on that. If you see me doing it again, can you correct me on it?”

Cecilia looked smug. It made Craig resent her just a little bit—but it made him resent his family even more. They’d taken a fantastic woman and molded her into one of their own. It was sickening.

“I will,” Cecilia said. “So, what else were we going to go over today? The tablecloths and centerpieces?”

That meant another few hours of total boredom. Craig looked listlessly across the room and clutched his phone a little tighter. Talking with Jack always helped the time pass, but now he was apparently banned from having fun, so that was out of the picture.

He’d have to find something else to keep him awake.

Right as he was about to have to explain his stance on lace, an unexpected noise came to his salvation.

The doorbell rang.

“Now, who could that be?” Craig’s mother asked. She stood and whisked out of the room, Craig following right behind her. A break from the monotony of wedding planning was exactly what he needed. He hoped that it was a Jehovah’s Witness he could sucker into talking to him about religion for an hour or two—long enough for his mother and Cecilia to finish up whatever details they still needed to address about the wedding.

A young woman stood in the doorway instead. Craig recognized her instantly.

It was Nadine Little, his ex-girlfriend’s younger sister. In her arms was a baby.

“Nadine?” Craig asked.

“Hi Craig,” Nadine said. She nodded at the baby in her arms. “Meet Isaac. He’s yours.”