Chapter 4
FLYNN - TWO WEEKS LATER
“What are you doing here?” I asked Beckett as I stood in the door, and didn’t offer him a chance to come into my place.
“I came to take you to your bachelor party.”
“My bachelor party?” I asked, completely taken off guard by the thought.
“You’re getting married in two days. Every man needs a bachelor party before he gets hitched.”
“My marriage isn’t real,” I reminded my cousin.
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. You still get a bachelor party. Besides, everyone is already waiting for us.”
“Everyone?” I was confused because the way Beckett was talking, this had been something that was already arranged and I should have known about.
“Well,” He hedged and then laughed. “It was supposed to be my bachelor party, but now it is yours.”
“I never got an invite before.” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but since I had, it took Beckett by surprise.
“Oh, I didn’t know. Maybe Grant forgot to tell you?” I could tell he was lying. Grant, one of the assholes Beckett worked with, wouldn’t have missed an opportunity to exclude me if he could. For some reason, I thought maybe I’d been left off the guest list for another reason.
“Look, I’m not really feeling a bachelor party, man. Go, enjoy without me.”
“Nope. We’re not taking no for an answer. Even your sister’s bestie will be there to hang out with you.”
“Ky is coming?” That wasn’t something Ky would have done for Beckett. I didn’t think they liked one another.
“Yeah. As soon as I told him that it was your bachelor party now, he said he’d be there. Your sister’s boyfriend couldn’t make it though. Something about a work trip.” Beckett shrugged his shoulders. It was honestly for the best that Law couldn’t make it. He wasn’t a big fan of my sister having a male best friend, so putting him and Ky in the same place, with alcohol, and where Bea wasn’t around to stop a fight would have been a horrible idea.
“I have to get dressed,” I told him. He pushed his way inside.
“I’ll wait.”
“Are you sure you still want to do this? It’s not too late to back out,” I called out to my cousin as I made my way to my bedroom.
“Hell no, I’m not backing out of a bachelor party.”
“I meant the wedding. Me marrying your Courtney. If you stood up and said you weren’t okay with this after all, she might forgive you.”
Beckett threw his head back and laughed. “Dude, you don’t know Courtney as well as I do. Trust me, the girl has been in love with me since we were in first grade. There isn’t a damn thing that will change the way she feels about me. This is just a momentary pause in our life-long relationship.”
“I don’t think she sees it that way.” I glared over at my cousin before I ripped my t-shirt over my head and grabbed a nicer button-up shirt out of my closet.
“She’s a little miffed that her ‘dream wedding’ was hijacked and that it will have to be different when we eventually get married. Courtney will get over that and come up with an even better theme for our wedding.” I wanted to punch him for the way he put the words ‘dream wedding’ in air quotes, as if it was a trivial thing.
He sounded so confident, but the asshole hadn’t seen the way she broke down in my arms. The poor thing hadn’t even realized she was in my lap when I sat on the couch with her in my arms a couple weeks ago when I went to talk to her about everything. She was having a hard time wrapping her mind around the situation, not that anyone could blame her. It wasn’t every day that the man you were supposed to marry offered you up to someone else instead. Part of me still wanted to call everything off, but Courtney needed to go through with it. I was certain that she wanted to see if Beckett would eventually step up and stop it from happening. Unfortunately, for her, I didn’t think that was going to happen. My cousin seemed pretty eager to get to my bachelor party, and I could only imagine why.
I was shocked that the bachelor party wasn’t being thrown in some downtown Atlanta strip club. Instead, we went to a bar closer to home that most of us frequented when we wanted to go out. In all honesty, that should have been my first indication that things would go to shit by the end of the night.
“Hey man,” Ky, my sister’s best friend, said as he clapped me on the back. “This is weird, right? It’s not just me?”
I chuckled in response. “No, man, it is definitely not just you. I had no clue this was even going down until Beckett showed up at my door.”
Ky stepped back and looked shocked. “What the fuck is he thinking?”
“No clue. He ruined a good woman, though. Courtney is holding it together, but she’s heartbroken.”
“I can see that. It’s a complete betrayal. This was supposed to be their wedding, and that asshole has been in the bar for five minutes and he has a woman in his lap.” I turned to see where Ky pointed his beer bottle.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I growled before I glanced around to see who else was in the bar who might eventually make sure the news got back to Courtney.
“You had to know. Bea told me you suspected that he had a wandering eye months ago.”
“I didn’t think it would go further than that. Now, I wonder if that was why he pushed for her to marry me instead. The asshole had cold feet and wanted it to look like there was another, more noble, reason for backing out of their wedding.
Ky and I watched in complete disgust as my cousin and the woman sucked face. It was obvious, by their comfort level, that this was not their first time together.
“That’s not hard to watch at all.” I spun at the sound of her voice and turned to see Courtney there with my sister, Bea.
“Ky told me where he was going and why,” Bea said automatically as she threw her hands up in surrender.
“I made her bring me here. I needed to see for myself.”
Just as I was about to usher my future wife and my sister out of the bar, we heard a woman shriek. I turned to see the woman Beckett had been making out with scream as another woman yanked her off his lap by her hair. “You crawled out of my bed this morning and now you have some other skank in your lap at the bar for everyone to see?” The second woman yelled at him. His eyes lifted and searched the area, maybe in an effort to find someone to help him out of his situation. When they landed on me, he looked relieved until he noticed who was with me. What color was left in his face drained as he realized Courtney was there to witness everything.
“It’s not what it looks like,” He shouted to her.
“Who in the hell are you talking to?” The second woman yelled as she followed the direction of Beckett’s eyes. The minute she noticed Courtney, she growled. I took that to mean she knew exactly who Beckett’s former fiancee was. “You told me you were done with that bitch.”
That got Beckett’s attention. “Don’t talk about her like that.”
“Screw you, Beckett Robeson! You made promises to me that you wouldn’t go through with the wedding. I thought I could trust you when everyone started to talk about how she was going to marry your cousin instead, but then I found you here with someone else.”
“Oh shit!” Ky muttered.
Courtney stomped closer to them, despite me trying to grab for her, so I could get us all out of the club and spare her more hurt. “Just how long have you been screwing Beckett, Ashley?” She asked the woman.
The woman, Ashley apparently, turned and grinned. “For a month.”
“A month?” Courtney whispered, but the bar had gone so quiet that we all managed to hear it. Courtney turned to Beckett and repeated the two words louder. “A month, Beckett?”
“We weren’t screwing for a month. We were talking and then after…”
“You were talking about screwing her and didn’t bother to go through with it until you dumped me onto your cousin?” Courtney asked. Beckett didn’t even bother to answer besides the slight nod of his head.
“Good to know.”
“I swear, nothing happened before,” He hurriedly explained again.
“He’s not lying about that,” Ashley confirmed as she threw a shitty look his way.
“You hadn’t done anything, but you talked about it, made a plan, and then followed through the minute you passed me off to be someone else’s problem.”
“It’s not like that,” Beckett argued.
“It was exactly like that,” Ashley taunted.
“Okay, that’s enough!” I growled at her as I pulled Courtney back away from them.
“What the fuck were you thinking telling her to come here?” Beckett asked me.
“I didn’t. I wouldn’t have wanted her to see that shit, even if I had known you were going to publicly start dating other people instead of waiting.”
“What did you think would happen? You marry my fiancee and I sit around waiting until the day you can divorce her?” He scoffed. “I have needs.”
“Funny thing about needs, Beckett,” Courtney taunted him. “I have them too.”
“What?” He asked, and for the second time that night, I watched as the color drained from his face.
“You heard me. I have needs, and I’ll be married, so I guess it will be okay for me to see to those needs with my husband.” Courtney grabbed my arm and pulled me back further as I watched my cousin’s face transform with rage.
“He won’t fucking touch you!” Beckett demanded.
“Fuck you, Beckett Robeson! You’re going to stand there and pretend that you have a right to say anything to me? YOU CHEATED!” Courtney called out as we turned to leave the bar.
“No, I didn’t.”
“We never broke up, so if you slept with her, that means you cheated on me.” Beckett opened his mouth to argue the point and then closed it. This happened several times in a row, and made him look like a fish trying to breathe out of water. “I have loved you literally my whole life and you couldn’t wait to get rid of me.”
“No, that’s not true!” He tried to deny it, but the truth was staring us all in the face. He had pushed Courtney off on me to marry, but they had never officially broken up. “I didn’t realize you thought we were still together,” the asshole had the nerve to say.
“Why the hell would I think we were broken up when you were telling me we would still get married and that you’d have the cabin and the money to help pay for our three children’s college funds?”
“Shit,” Beckett huffed out as Courtney continued out the door without another word.