Chapter 15 #3
“Thanks! But—” He gasped, as if something had just struck him. “You’re coming to the wedding, right?”
I nearly choked on my own breath.
Oh, he was definitely drunk.
I ran a hand down my face, already feeling heat creeping up my neck. “I’m not sure your brother would want me there, Asher.”
“No, no! He so would.” Asher’s words tumbled over each other, slurred just enough to confirm what I already thought. “I promise! I’ve talked about you before to them, so they know who you are. You have to come!”
Talked about me?
I swallowed. I shouldn’t be allowing myself to linger on that. The last thing I needed was another excuse to let this ridiculous, impossible thing, fester any more than it already had.
Instead, I focused on the part that made the least sense.
“You’re really trying to invite your boss to a family event?” I asked, raising a brow.
Asher huffed dramatically.
“You’re not just my boss! You’re—” He paused suddenly, the sentence hanging as he searched for the words. “Uh.”
My stomach dipped.
What did it matter what he was about to say?
His drunken rambling didn’t actually mean anything. He could say hundreds of things in this state, things he’d never say sober, and by morning, he probably wouldn’t even remember any of them.
It wasn’t real or intentional.
Still, my pulse had no business kicking up that way that it did.
“Wait, hold on,” he said suddenly.
The noise in the background abruptly died. For a second, all I could hear was my own breathing. I pulled the phone back from my ear, frowning as I glanced at the screen, expecting to see the call had dropped or cut out.
But no, his contact name was still there along with the timer on the call still ticking away.
“Asher?” I said, bringing the phone back to my ear.
Silence.
I waited a beat. Then another.
Nothing.
Did he mute me?
Keeping the phone clutched to my ear, I started making my way back up to the main house.
Given that it was well after midnight, I should’ve already been heading to bed anyway, especially since five a.m. would be rolling in whether I was ready for it or not. I’d already been stupid enough for staying out here working this late, and tomorrow, I’d be paying for it.
My body would make damn sure of that.
Right as I reached the edge of the main house’s front patch of grass, the other end of the phone picked up.
“Hello?!”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “Asher. It’s me.”
A long, relieved sigh crackled through the phone. “Okay, cool. You’re still there!”
The background was much quieter this time around, enough for me to be able to pick up the faintest rustle of fabric, the soft shift of movement as he got comfortable wherever he was. He’d settled somewhere away from the chaos.
“You okay?”
“Yes. I’m locked in the bathroom so we can talk.”
Jesus Christ.
Pulling himself away from the party just to talk to me somewhere more private.
Don’t let that go to your head.
“So you’re coming to the wedding with me, right? It’s okay that you’re my boss. I don’t know when the date will be but I’ll let you know the second Gage tells me!”
I cleared my throat, gripping my phone a little tighter. “That doesn’t change the fact that it’s a family event, Asher.”
“It’d be fun!” he insisted. “My whole family’s gonna be there—well, okay there’s only two of them, but still! You’d love my twin, by the way.”
I swallowed again. I shouldn’t be asking.
I should not be asking.
But the words slipped out before I could stop them. “You talk about me to your family?”
“Well, yeah, of course I do,” Asher said, like my question was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. “Greyson teases me all the time. Gage is kind of mad about it but I think that’s because he’s a little salty about our age gap.”
My vision tunneled for half a second, and I barely managed to put a hand out, catching myself against the side of the house as my breathing stalled.
“Why would he care that I’m older than you?” The words came out rough, barely more than a rasp, my throat tightening around them as soon as they left my mouth.
None of this was real—it couldn’t be.
There was no reality that my feelings, the ones I’d spent so damn long shoving down, ignoring, burying beneath every excuse I could think of, were reciprocated in any manner.
That wasn’t how this worked.
This was just Asher being Asher—open, affectionate, recklessly unfiltered in a way that made it easy to misread things if I wasn’t careful.
He was drunk on top of it, his usual warmth amplified by whatever the hell he’d been given, making it even easier for him to say things he wouldn’t normally mean.
That had to be the case.
Because the alternative?
The idea that I wasn’t the only one feeling this pull, this impossible gravity toward something I had no business wanting?
That was something I didn’t know how to handle.
He was quiet for a long moment, the silence stretching so tight it bordered on agonizing.
Then, his voice came through the line, quieter, almost hesitant in a way that made my stomach twist. “You don’t feel the same way?”
“What way, Asher?”