Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Jeremy
“ J uliette, you home?” Asher calls as we walk through the front door.
“We’re back here.” Julie’s voice comes from the direction of the sunroom where the girls have been holing up lately to plan Hallie and Ben’s wedding.
“Groom in the house!” Asher calls. “I hope that wedding dress is packed away, Hal. It’s bad luck for Ben to see you in it before the wedding.”
“Says the guy who didn’t even have a real wedding.” I smirk at Asher, knowing exactly the reaction I’m about to get. Hoping for it.
“Shut the fuck up, asshole. See this?” He holds up his left hand, which sports a platinum band on his ring finger. “This means I’m fucking married. My wife didn’t need to wear a big white dress for us to be legally bound forever and always.”
“Goddammit,” Jordan says, while Ben immediately starts laughing.
I spin around with a grin, holding my hand out. “Pay up, buddy.”
Grumbling, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a twenty-dollar bill, slapping it in my hand.
I was lucky enough to come out of college with two best friends, which is more best friends than I ever had at any other time of my life, and Jordan is the second one. He’s a pediatric surgeon and a dedicated shit-stirrer, so any time I get to beat him at something is a satisfying occasion.
Asher looks at us through narrowed eyes. “What is happening right now?”
I snicker, giving myself a metaphorical pat on the back. Asher is the most cheerful guy on the planet, basically the human equivalent of a puppy dog. There is only one thing that can get him good and riled up, and it’s the mere suggestion that Julie is anything less than perfect or that their casual backyard wedding last month wasn’t the most amazing wedding in the history of weddings. And I needed him to be riled up because I know what happens when he is, and I hate to lose.
“I bet Jordan twenty dollars I could get you to say ‘my wife’ at least ten times today before we lit the grill for dinner. I just won.”
“By like ten minutes,” mutters Jordan.
“Ten minutes or ten hours, fair is fair,” says Ben, pushing past us and walking directly back to the sunroom to, I’m sure, find Hallie and attach his lips to hers.
Asher just shrugs, cheerful expression back in place, and the three of us follow Ben into the sunroom. “I mean, she is my wife. I like calling her that.”
Julie looks up from where she’s bent over a pile of what looks like folded up tablecloths, eyes full of humor. “I’m assuming you won the bet?”
“Bet your ass I did.” I slap a hand on Asher’s shoulder. “Your man just can’t stop calling you his wife. It’s like he forgot you have an actual name.”
“Nah, he didn’t.” She comes over and slides an arm around Asher’s waist. “He just likes the reminder that we’re married now and married means forever. It’s a whole thing.”
Asher wraps his arm around Julie’s shoulders, bending to kiss her. “Juliette, you know what the word forever does to me.”
“Oh, I know.” She grins up at him.
My stomach gives a little twist at the word forever—at the reminder that there is now another wildly happy and stupidly in love couple in our little group of friends. Uncomfortable with thoughts I usually only allow myself to have when I’m alone, I look away from Asher and Julie and force my eyes to skip over Ben and Hallie, sitting on one of the couches with their heads close together.
Unfortunately, when I do, my eyes land directly on her .
It’s always Emma’s hair I see first. And every time I do, the eight-year-old memory of the red strands tumbling over her pillowcase like flames flashes through my brain, followed immediately by the memory of her face flushing in anger, her cheeks almost matching the color of her hair, as she told me to leave.
And as it always does, shame floods me.
It’s the shame that propels me over to where she’s sitting on the couch. Trying, like I always do, to be close to her. Hoping that maybe today is the day she’ll talk to me without embarrassment. Without acting like every time she looks at me, she’s remembering that night too…and what happened the next morning.
I don’t deserve it, but I want it all the same.
When she’s in lawyer mode, with a desk between us and a job to do, she has no problem looking me in the eye and having a conversation. Putting me in my place. Ordering me around and telling me what’s best for me and my foundation. I am stupidly grateful for that, and it’s more than I deserve after the way I treated her.
I was young and dumb and hurting and had no idea what to do when something good walked into my life. Or how to keep it. Now I’m older and hopefully less stupid, but I still don’t know what to do with the good things. How to have them. Treasure them. Keep them. When you have seen as much bad as I have in my thirty-seven years, it makes the good seem unattainable. Fleeting. Temporary. Like something that isn’t meant for me. Something that won’t stay.
Emma is one of the good things, and being around her makes me think that maybe, one day, I could be one of the good things too. Wishful thinking most likely, but it doesn’t stop me from taking the seat next to her where she’s talking to Jordan and Molly and sliding into the skin of the happy and cheerful Jeremy that even most of the people closest to me never think to look past.
“I’m here! Finally!” I’ve barely sat down before Jordan’s fiancée, Allie, runs in, a little breathless. “I’m so sorry I missed the dress fitting. I had a surgery that ran long.” Her eyes search the room and land on Jordan. She heads straight for him, plopping herself in his lap and kissing him. Allie is a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon. She and Jordan met years ago when he was a resident, and she started at the hospital as his attending. They are perfect together. Just one more epic love story in our increasingly paired off circle of friends.
“No problem, baby girl,” he says, running a hand down her blonde ponytail and kissing her temple. “We haven’t even lit the grill yet.”
“We missed you earlier, but we took pictures.” Hallie bounces over to hug Allie before sitting back down with Ben.
“We’ll show them to you while the men handle the grill later,” Julie says, giving Allie a hug.
“So, how’s it going, besties?” I ask once Allie is settled in.
My thigh is pressed to Emma’s on the couch, and she shifts, trying to move closer to where Molly is sitting on her other side. But there isn’t much room left, so her fidgeting just presses her closer to me. Her face is flushed, and she looks down at her hands, her hair falling forward to cover her freckled face.
As usual, she mutters a quiet “hi” but doesn’t say much else. Instead, it’s Molly who talks first.
“You know, it’s pretty disconcerting when a thirty-seven-year-old man uses the word bestie.”
I shrug, waving my hand at the three of them. “That’s what you are, isn’t it? My besties.”
“Damn straight we are,” Jordan says, reaching his hand up for a high five. We slap palms and Molly rolls her eyes.
“Men. You really are all just overgrown children.”
“Yes, but is that such a bad thing? You know, childlike wonder and all.” I’m talking out of my ass. I never had an ounce of childlike wonder. The closest I ever came was the first time I put on an old pair of hockey skates I found in the closet of one of my foster homes and stepped out onto the frozen pond behind the house, but that’s about it. My childhood was not all that wondrous.
“What you call childlike wonder, I call immaturity.”
“Potato, potahto, Molly my dearest.” Emma stiffens at the “my dearest,” and I don’t hate it at all. I like any time I can get a reaction out of her. Makes me feel like she still sees me, even when we’re not sitting across a desk from each other.
“So how was the big wedding dress fitting?”
“Great, as expected. We may only have a couple months to plan this wedding, but it’s going to be perfect.”
“Hey, why are you guys doing the planning?” Jordan asks. “Isn’t that usually the kind of thing Hallie would do with her mom?”
Emma makes an irritated sound and Molly scowls.
“Care to share with the class?” I ask.
To my surprise, it’s Emma who answers, her voice full of irritation and disdain.
“You would think, wouldn’t you? Except Hallie’s mom refused to listen to anything Hallie wanted, so Hallie told her to fuck right off and called Julie.”
“Right on,” says Allie. “Don’t let anything steal your joy, Hal.”
“And anyway, hasn’t Julie basically been training for this her whole life?” I nudge Emma with my knee, pressing our legs even closer together, and I’m surprised again when she doesn’t move away.
“Fucking right I have,” Julie says from across the room where she and Asher have been deep in conversation over something that looks like a vase of fake flowers. I don’t know what the hell that’s about, but she has her Lawyer Julie face on, so I assume it must be important.
“No one gets to make my best friend feel like she doesn’t have a say in her own damn wedding. Especially when she’s marrying my brother. Hallie’s mom will ruin this day over my cold dead body. And then I’ll come back and haunt her from the afterlife.”
“Preach my girl.” Molly holds up a hand Julie immediately high-fives.
I look over at Hallie, perched on Ben’s lap on an armchair in the corner. I expect to see her looking sad, but instead she’s snickering at Julie, clearly unbothered by her mom acting like an asshole.
“I don’t think that will be necessary, Jules. After you grabbed that wedding binder away from my mom and told her you knew a judge who would sign a restraining order if she so much as whispered the word wedding, I think she got the hint.”
Everyone laughs, and I hear Asher whisper something about “claws-out Juliette” being his favorite Juliette, and Ben ducks his head and whispers something in Hallie’s ear that makes her face go soft, and his arms tighten around her. They’re all so happy, and happiness is what I want for my best friends. But I wonder again what it would feel like to have someone who is in your corner like that. Who knows you the way Julie knows Asher and Hallie knows Ben.
I have my friends, but I’ve never had a Person . Not that way. I wouldn’t even know how to. Growing up without parents, bouncing from one foster home to another, and losing my hockey career before it even really got started doesn’t teach you how to keep people. It teaches you that people don’t stay. That nothing is permanent, and you shouldn’t expect it to be. I’m old enough to understand that this isn’t exactly a healthy way of thinking, but knowing that and knowing how to change it are two entirely different things.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Emma murmurs.
It takes me a second to realize she’s talking to me. I’m used to Emma talking around me, or to someone else near me, but rarely directly to me.
“What’s nice?”
“Seeing them this way. Together. Happy. Even when everything isn’t perfect, they’re still just so happy. Can’t you feel it?”
If my feelings had a look, it would be the expression on Emma’s face, and it punches me right in the gut. It’s like my insides match her outside. I know a little bit about Emma’s past and how she lost her parents, and I’ve always felt like a part of me recognizes a part of her, but I’ve never known what to do about it. The one time I tried, I fumbled it so badly that we’ve barely recovered eight years later. After the way I left her house that morning, I’m lucky she even speaks to me at all.
“Yeah, Ems, it’s really nice.”
I don’t quite understand what she means by can’t you feel it and I want to ask, but that’s all I can manage through my roiling emotion. I feel like I should say more. Take advantage of her actually talking to me for once. But between the happy couples and the reminder of all the ways my childhood and my early retirement fucked me up, and Emma and I having what passes for a real conversation, my brain is a five-way intersection at rush hour, and I can’t grab onto a single thought.
Instead, I stretch my arm across the back of the couch, just barely making contact with Emma’s shoulders. And I don’t think I’m imagining it when she moves a little closer to me, tucking herself just the tiniest bit under my shoulder.
And I’m definitely not imagining the fact that it’s only with her closer to me that my brain finally quiets.