State of Grace

“So,” Sid says as he holds his hand out to help Grace up from where she’s been lying on the grass at Heinz Field, making a Grass Angel.

He’d laughed at her for it at first, but when she had replied with, “When am I ever going to get another chance to do this?” he hadn’t been able to fault that logic.

“So,” she echoes, dusting herself off as she stands up straight.

“We’ve been sight-seeing for two and a half hours now,” he says, fiddling with his hands awkwardly. Grace nods at him, feeling he needs the encouragement to say whatever it is that he’s clearly got on his mind. “And you haven’t once asked me why I didn’t go through with the wedding.”

Grace runs her tongue over her bottom lip slowly, pondering how to proceed with this.

“Well,” she begins, “I figure that if you want to talk about, you will.”

It’s actually more to the fact that she can guess WHY, WHY, WHY is the only question that anyone has been asking him as of late and the only one the media will want answered if Sierra chooses to go public with her story. After last night’s events, she can tell he needs a break. She wants to give him one.

Also, at age twenty-one, it’s not like Grace has never had her heart broken herself, and if she learnt anything from the experience which occurred at High School by way of her ex-boyfriend Rusty Simpson, it’s that nobody talks until they’re ready to, and when they do, you listen. Sure, it’s easy to side with Sierra, who is clearly devastated in this situation, having done most of the wedding planning, but Sid seems to be punishing himself enough for everybody else. Grace is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and stay impartial on the matter.

It could be reverse psychology, or it could be how appreciative he is of the fact that she’s more than happy to let him talk about it if and when he wants to instead of bugging him for an answer like everyone else, Sid doesn’t know. But he feels like he maybe wants to tell her. He obviously needs to say it out loud to somebody because keeping it internalized is only digging him a much deeper hole.

Grace can pick up on the feeling that he wants to say….something. Give a reason why he didn’t go through with it, worry about what Sierra could say about it, talk about the small details of the planned day or recap why he asked her for her hand to begin with, anything. He obviously needs to say something, so with her mother currently occupied by yet another phone conversation with her father, Grace takes Sid’s hand just lightly and leads away him to a bench to sit on.

They each take a seat and she drops his hand, and her gaze, settling her eyes on the soles of her boots, nudging her nose at the brim of her winter coat to shield her face from a cold chill that breezes through. Next to her, Sid focuses on his hands, twiddling his thumbs in his lap.

“I did want to marry her, you know.” It’s said like an offer, like he doesn’t even know where to begin on this whole topic or why it’s Grace that he’s chosen to finally discuss it with. It’s his attempt to throw a pin at the map of the situation, choosing to start somewhere.

Grace really does intend to just let him talk it out and get it off his chest, for not only the good of the team but also for himself. And because really, who is she to give him any advice? Especially when she has never even been close to getting married. But she can’t help herself, and like yesterday when she first met him, the words just tumble out before she can catch them.

“I don’t think you did.”

She winces after she’s said it, wanting to collect up all the words and sounds and stuff them back in her mouth and rewind to three seconds ago when they were having a really fun day. But the look Sid has on his face when he turns to her shows that that ship has sailed.

“Excuse me?”

“I just…..I think that if you had really wanted to marry her, you would have. My parents,” Grace tries to explain, “They’ve always said that when you want to be with someone you just know it. ‘You know when you know.’ And as bullshit and clichéd as that is, it’s what I’ve been taught. My Dad met my Mom while he was on holiday in her town and after that first meeting he swears he knew she was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Three days later he moved to be with her and they’ve been married pretty much ever since.”

Sid thinks about that in silence for a minute.

“I’m not trying to guess your feelings here,” Grace compensates, “Or try to infer that I know anything about your relationship with Sierra beyond what I saw on the internet -which, for the record, was always pictures of you both smiling and looking very happy in each others presence- I just think that to me, if you had really wanted to marry her, you could have postponed it or something.”

Sid nods, mulling the new perspective over. If he had really wanted to marry Sierra, he would have. Why does it all sound so simple when Grace says it and yet so complicated when he tries to?

He shoves his hands back in the pockets of his coat. “Do you….I mean, in your opinion, do you think I’m a total asshole for the way I did it?”

Too worried to look at her face initially and see any trace of a ‘YES’, he keeps his eyes on the ground, watching as he stabs the toe of his shoes into the ground. But Grace doesn’t answer until he looks at her.

“No,” she says quite simply, and very honestly. “No, I don’t. You did the right thing by ending it before it could fully begin. The vow to spend the rest of your life with someone is a big deal and quite frankly, in my personal opinion, to me the only thing worse than someone cancelling my wedding before it can happen would be finding out that somebody I trusted entered the vow with me while unsure about it. I think marriage is something you have to be certain of.”

Sid feels worse, and yet like a little bit of weight has been lifted of his chest at the same time. It makes him frown.

He really has no idea how this marriage stuff is supposed to work. When he had proposed to Sierra, right there on the floor of their kitchen, he had meant it. Every word he had said and the promise itself. He could see them in the future together; always feel her at his side. At the time, he’d been fully committed to the rest of their lives. But then the visions had started fading and every time she made an appointment for him to get fitted for his tux he would find a reason to cancel it. Every time she would talk about flower types, colours and arrangements his head would start spinning and he’d tell her that what ever she picked would be fine, just to end the conversation. When he eventually did try on his tux it felt restricting and itchy and didn’t look even close to right, and he’d felt like the walls of the shop had been closing in on him.

Three times he had managed to get the wedding pushed back, twice due to game scheduling that wasn’t as big of a deal as he had made it out to be -since trying to get married quickly and quietly in between games faced opposition from scheduling no matter what- and once because of a prior commitment Jack had made to something else that was minor and he could have totally gotten out of.

For a long time, Sid had thought this was a normal reaction to getting married. It really is a huge deal. Up until the moment when he knew he had to cancel it, he had thought he would snap out of it and get with the programme, but that had never come about.

If he had really wanted to marry Sierra, he would have. How stupidly simple is that? If he had really wanted to make the commitment with her then he would have gone to the fitting the first time around. He would have picked any kind of flower because the flowers aren’t the most important thing –Sierra is. He would have picked another tux or worn the itchy one or whatever else because the clothes aren’t as important as marrying Sierra would have been. He would have told Jack to get out of his prior engagement and get his butt to the wedding because he couldn’t wait to marry his fiancée.

But he didn’t. He didn’t do any of those things. Which can only mean……

“Maybe I didn’t really want to then,” he admits lowly. “But I did love her. For a while there, I really did think it was what I wanted.”

Grace’s face softens and she smiles just faintly at him. “You did the right thing Sid. Sure, you feel shitty about it right now, but that will blow over and one day you’ll look back and know it was right. It might not be tomorrow, or the next day, and if she does go ahead with a story then it definitely won’t be the day that you read it or have to face questions over it, but eventually you will get there.” She reaches out and rubs his arm. “You did the right thing.”

“How do you know for sure?” he asks. He knows it’s completely ridiculous to ask and discuss this all with her like she is some sort of moral judge or fortune teller, but it feels kind of right. Wait, scratch that. It feels really right. Which is weird, admittedly, but there’s plenty of time to analyse the hell out of it later. Right now he needs to talk, and talking to Grace is feeling as easy as breathing.

Grace laughs a little and points her face up at the sky and releases a big sigh. “Alright, if I promise to tell you something –and purely because it’ll make you feel better and I think you need to give yourself a break- do you promise not to laugh?”

Sid lips quirk with confusion and slight interest and he nods. “Sure.”

“Ugh, okay,” Grace starts, turning her attention back to him. “So, back in High School I was dating this guy called Rusty Simpson right, and he smashed my entire heart. I’m only reliving this embarrassment so that you can stop feeling guilty and punishing yourself so listen up ‘cause I’m only going to drudge it up once, okay?”

Sid laughs, loud and open. “Did he break your heart by being named Rusty?”

Grace isn’t quick enough to stop the amused grin that spreads across her lips but she does reign it in to just a smile and tightens her eyes on him, in what she hopes to be a warning look.

“Not off to a great start on the ‘No Laughing’ concept, Crosby,” she comments. “But, yeah, I guess Rusty is a strange name. Anyway, we had been dating for ages and he was the Captain of the rugby team and I was Head Girl of the school – it was the stuff of fairy tales. Then one night -the night of our School Ball actually- he asked me to join him outside during the last song.”

Sid nods to show he’s following along and Grace continues.

“He said, “Grace, I need you for a minute” which, for the record, is totally unfair because if you’re going to break up with someone it’s protocol to open with ‘We need to talk’, but he didn’t so I had no idea what was coming.”

She closes her eyes for a brief moment and feels back in her ball gown like its yesterday, standing outside of the hotel function room the event was held in, hoping that this is the moment Rusty finally says the three words she’s been dying to hear for the last six months that they’ve been dating.
The horror hits her all over again like a wet fish to the face.

“And then?” Sid prompts at her silence. “Did the clock strike twelve and turn you into a pumpkin?”

He says it with playful humour, but Grace can’t force a smile.

“Pretty much,” she concedes glumly. “I told him I loved him and he said that we needed to break up. He was going to University after the summer and apparently a girlfriend who is a ‘farm girl’ wasn’t good enough for him. Only –and this is the real kicker here- he didn’t say it, he handed me a napkin that had the words on it in a messy scrawl and then went back in to the dance and hooked up with Alyssa Meyer, my Deputy Head Girl.”

“Oh. Shit,” Sid comments, losing the humour. He settles his hand on her knee. “That’s….wow. Grace, I’m sorry. What a jerk.”

“Yeah,” Grace nods slowly, “he was. He is a jerk; he did a jerky, douche bag, fuck up of a thing. But you didn’t, Sid. You did it the right way, do you see now?”

Sid cocks his head. “I’m pretty sure the two things are on different scales, Grace.”

“Same principle though,” she argues. “Rusty, the fucking idiot, he did it like that because he didn’t care about me. You cared about Sierra enough to man up and do it properly. It took me a while to realise that he didn’t care, but I got there, and Sierra will get there too. I don’t think she’ll go ahead with a story because I think she will eventually understand that you cared.”

“I hope so,” Sid says, pressing his fingers in to Grace’s jeans where his hand is still on her knee.
Grace sets her hand on top of his. “She will.”