Chapter One #2
With one last turn and glance at my outfit, I sighed, shutting off the bathroom light and making my way downstairs to face the music.
I had to get it over with at some point.
Morgan and her parents were in the kitchen, her dad putting the final touches on dinner while she and her mom sat at the kitchen island, each with a glass of red wine in hand. As soon as I joined them, Morgan poured one for me, too.
“How long’s it been since you had a proper lobster roll, Jasmine?” Robert asked.
“Too long.”
“I’d say,” Amanda chimed in. “By the way, what’s with your accent? You turning valley girl on us now?”
I chuckled. “I live in Oakland, not LA. And just because I’ve learned to pronounce my r’s doesn’t make me any less of a New England girl.”
“A New England girl would be back to visit more than one time in seven years,” a deep voice said, and I closed my eyes, my entire body tensing at the sound.
Tyler strode into the kitchen with the same brooding arrogance he’d always had, leaning against the refrigerator and crossing his arms as he took in the sight of me.
I avoided his eyes for as long as I could, but when I finally looked up, he was staring right back at me in the most unapologetic way.
His gaze even dropped slightly, taking in my full frame, and he cocked a brow in appreciation before a smirk found his stupid, full lips.
“Nah, you’re a leaf peeper now.”
Morgan said his name in a chastising tone, but it earned a chuckle from his father.
I just narrowed my eyes, doing everything in my power not to notice how tall he’d grown, how his toned and tanned arms crossed over his built chest, how his russet brown hair was still a bit long and boyish, making him look so much like the boy I left behind that I nearly doubled over at the sight.
“It’s summer,” I pointed out. “If I was a leaf peeper, I’d be here in October.”
“I’m just saying, you can’t call yourself a New England girl when you talk and look like that ,” he said, eyeing me. “And when you haven’t set foot in New Hampshire in almost a decade.”
“I can call myself whatever I damn well please.”
He surged forward with a challenge in his eyes, leaning over the kitchen island until his stupid grin was right in my face. I leaned back in the same instant.
“Hmm… let’s test it. How do you pronounce the scenic highway all the leaf peepers like yourself drive through every fall?”
I crossed my arms. “Kancamagus,” I answered, putting emphasis on the mog. “But most of us don’t pronounce it at all, since we just refer to it as The Kanc.”
Tyler smirked, leaning in a little closer, his dark eyes fixed on mine like he saw every single thing I was trying to hide. “Now, say, ‘ wicked .’”
I flipped him off, and the entire family laughed, Robert pointing the wooden spoon covered in lobster salad at me. “I always loved that you had moxie, kid.”
Tyler licked his bottom lip, eyes roaming over me for longer than necessary before he shoved back from the island again, dipping into the fridge and grabbing a Sam Adams Summer Ale and popping the top off on the edge of the kitchen counter.
That earned him a slap on the wrist from his mother, but he just winked at me before putting the bottle to his lips and taking a long, slow pull.
I flushed, tearing my eyes from his just as Robert said it was time to eat.
I managed to calm down during dinner, mostly thanks to Amanda and Morgan filling any empty space in the conversation.
Every now and then, one of them would ask me something, like how California was (beautiful as always), how work was (wonderful, the podcast is growing more and more every day), or, my favorite, how Jacob and I met (at a networking event for local influencers, he was the most charming man I’d ever met — and I made sure to say that last part loud and proud).
But, for the most part, the conversation hinged on the upcoming wedding.
The wedding that would take place on the Cape two weeks from today.
It should have surprised all of us when Morgan said she was marrying a guy she’d dated less than a year, and in two weeks, nonetheless.
But, the fact that no one in this family batted an eye is a testament to how well we knew our girl.
She had always been impulsive, and not in the way that she’d buy a pair of three-hundred-dollar shoes on a whim.
No, for Morgan, it was always the big things — huge changes that she’d make up her mind about overnight and no one could ever talk her out of it.
She cut off all her hair without ever looking back.
She changed majors her senior year of college, just because she felt in her gut that it was the right thing to do.
She got her first tattoo at a basement party in Boston and bought a horse she kept at a stable outside of town without ever having ridden one in her life.
It was as if she mulled on what her next move would be constantly, and once she decided, that was it. There was no other option.
So, when she met Oliver Bradford during her girls’ trip to the Cape last summer and told me with the utmost confidence that she’d be marrying him before her twenty-sixth birthday, I didn’t doubt it for a second.
And when she called me last week to tell me he’d proposed, it didn’t surprise me at all that she wanted to get married on June twentieth.
Four days before her birthday.
I didn’t fight her on it, didn’t try to talk her into waiting or taking her time to plan. I knew my best friend well enough to know there was no use in even trying.
So, instead, I hopped a flight.
And I came back to the town I swore I never would.
After dinner, we all gathered in the backyard around their stone fire pit, and Morgan handed out binders about an inch thick with Wagner/Bradford Wedding Itinerary printed in perfect script on the cover.
“Christ, sis,” Tyler said, shaking his head as he turned the binder over in one hand, inspecting.
“Like you expected anything less from me,” she teased back. Tyler murmured something under his breath, and she bonked him on the head with her own binder before taking a seat next to him.
He was directly across from where I sat, and his eyes lingered on me over the flames from the fire before they fell to the binder in his lap.
“So, I know this is extra,” she admitted as we all flipped through the binder.
There was a schedule of events for every single day leading up to the wedding, and an even more in-depth schedule for the day of.
“But, I’ve been working with the wedding planner all week to get this set up.
And we still have a LOT to do.” She shrugged.
“Turns out it’s kind of hard to plan a wedding in two weeks. ”
“You don’t say,” her mom mused.
Morgan ignored the jab, and I smiled as she ran through everything we’d be doing over the next fourteen days. When she stopped to take a breath somewhere around the day we’d be doing centerpiece design, I raised my hand like I was in class.
“Yes, Jazzy?”
“Um… I will have time to work during all of this, right? I’ve got two episodes to edit for And All That Jazz , and I’m doing a guest appearance on another big podcast based in New York.”
“Oh, absolutely. Anything not on here is totally free time.”
She answered so confidently, but when I looked at all the time that was planned out, I struggled to find where the off time was.
“I’m sure your fans will survive if you go a week or two without an episode,” Tyler said, the first words he’d spoken directly to me since before dinner.
I didn’t bother looking at him, just licked my thumb and flipped to the next page in the binder. “At least my fans aren’t all junior high girls.”
Morgan laughed at that.
“Sounds like someone’s jealous of my four-million YouTube subscribers,” he taunted back.
I met his gaze then. “Do they count if they’re under the age of eighteen?”
Tyler’s eyes burned fierce over the fire, but I held my cocky smirk as best I could.
Tyler was a financial advisor — following his father’s footsteps just like we always knew he would.
He’d had a fascination with money and investing ever since I first met him.
But, where his dad made his fortune by working with the affluent in New England, Tyler was making a name for himself in more of the everyday common people realm.
He’d started a YouTube channel in college, around the same time that I’d started my podcast, and in our own respects, we’d both taken off.
Of course, my podcast grew from content.
His channel grew because he quickly became known online as The Hot Money Guy.
It started slowly, with him dressed in a suit in his dim-lit office rattling off advice on budgeting and managing credit card debt.
But the more videos he did, the more the comments started shifting from should I do a Roth IRA or a Traditional IRA to Oh my God, this guy is so hot I don’t even care that I understand nothing he’s talking about.
More and more, his videos got attention from the female crowd, and his videos got shared, and word spread that there was a hot money guy on YouTube taking the financial world by storm.
He was invited to speak on other noteworthy channels, like one owned by a famous housewife from a reality TV show in the early 2000s, and though I was sure he really did help a lot of people struggling with finances, he was mostly famous for being sexy and rich — a double whammy.
To his credit, he didn’t fight the name. In fact, he embraced it, changing the name of his channel to The Hot Money Guy and even doing some episodes shirtless or while working out.
Not that I watched any, of course.
“I love that you two still bicker,” Morgan said fondly, her eyes wide as she looked from her brother to me. “I swear, it feels like high school, the three of us being together again. The Wagner Kids — Plus One.”
Tyler and I shared a somber look then, because we hadn’t been The Wagner Kids — Plus One since the night he and I crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed.
Since he used me, then rejected me, and I left, and that was the end of that.
I cleared my throat, drawing Morgan’s attention back to the schedule by asking a question about flowers, and she was sufficiently distracted.
Somewhere around page six, I started to lose focus, my mind racing with how it felt to talk to Tyler after all these years.
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but maybe that was because I never expected to ever see him again — period.
And now, I couldn’t tell if he was teasing me the way he used to when we were younger, or if he hated me.
If he did, I had no idea why.
It was him who ignored me. It was him who said what happened between us was a mistake.
It was him who broke my heart.
He didn’t have a right to be pissed at me, and for some reason, it really bothered me that he seemed to think the opposite.
It was me who should hate him forever, not the other way around.
“… the cake tasting, which I’m not even sure I want a cake.
I mean, yes, it’s tradition, but I love donuts.
What if we did a donut truck, instead?” She gasped, snapping her fingers.
“Could we do apple cider donuts?! I know that’s a fall thing but, I mean, it is a wedding.
I think exceptions could be made. Oh,” Morgan continued, talking just as fast as she always had when we were growing up.
“And we’ll head down to the Cape that Monday before the wedding, so we’ll have to wrap some of this up there…
we can talk about who takes what regarding decorations and such. Oh, my God!”
Her sudden exclamation made me jump.
“Ty, is Azra flying in tomorrow?”
Morgan’s excitement at the mention of whoever the hell Azra was might as well have been a living, breathing thing for how it wafted off of her.
Tyler cleared his throat. “Um, not tomorrow. She’s got two back-to-back shoots this week, and a philanthropy event next weekend. I think she’s going to meet us on the Cape.”
Morgan pouted. “Aw, I was really hoping she’d be here for the bachelor and bachelorette party.”
Tyler swallowed, avoiding everyone’s eyes. “Sorry.”
“Well, it’ll make getting down to the Cape even more exciting,” Morgan decided. Then, she reached toward me with spirit fingers dancing. “Oh my God, Jaz. You will love Azra. She’s so much fun.”
I smiled, but already my chest was tight, a warning sign I should have heeded. “Who’s Azra?”
“Tyler’s super secret, super gorgeous girlfriend,” Mrs. Wagner answered.
She and Morgan giggled as Mr. Wagner chimed in with something, but I couldn’t recall a word of it.
Because my eyes were locked on Tyler’s, and his were watching mine, and there wasn’t a single breath of oxygen to be had in that wide backyard.
“Oh,” I breathed.
Morgan went on about how lovely Azra was, about how she was a model and a huge Instagram influencer, how she was from Turkey, how she was “an absolute blast,” but I barely heard a word.
My chest was so tight now I thought my lungs would evacuate my body for fear of being completely crushed by my rib cage.
He has a girlfriend?
Why didn’t I know that?
Why do I care?
Tyler just watched me, like he was waiting for me to react as my mind raced and whirled, my palms dampening, heart beating loud in my ears.
And with every ounce of willpower I had, I held my expression completely neutral.
“I can’t wait to meet her,” I finally managed, my gaze still holding his.
He blinked, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge that he’d even heard me.
And just like that, Morgan moved on.
I ripped my eyes from Tyler’s, but I felt him watch me for the longest time as Morgan continued going through the schedule. I managed to stay quiet and calm until she’d made it through, and then I stood, making an excuse about being jet-lagged to excuse myself for the night.
“You’re three hours behind us,” Morgan pointed out with a pout. “I thought you’d have loads of energy. I want to stay up all night and gab!”
I squeezed her arm. “I know, I think I’m just tired from the long flight. But we have tomorrow. And I promise, I won’t go to bed before midnight.”
“Pshhh, two in the morning if you’re lucky,” she said, giving me a big hug. “And, you’ll get to meet Oliver!”
I squeezed her back. “I can’t wait,” I said, genuinely.
Amanda and Robert gave me a hug, too, and Tyler stood, staring at me from across the fire.
“Goodnight, Jasmine,” he said simply, his hands in his pockets, the light from the flames dancing with the shadows on his face.
“Goodnight,” I croaked.
And then I made my way upstairs for my first sleepless night back in New Hampshire.