Chapter Thirty-Five
ON THE morning of Stacy and Alang’s wedding, Lewis’s alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m.
He jolts halfway out of bed before he’s fully awake, not remembering he’s at Tad’s apartment until he slams his foot into the radiator that’s not near his bed at home, but is very much within toe-stubbing distance of Tad’s if you leap out of bed like the smoke alarm just went off.
“ Fuck! Shit shit goddammit ahhhhh oh my god ,” Lewis hisses, falling back on the bed. His elbow smacks something warm but hard, and there’s a yelp of pain.
Fumbling for his phone to turn off his jangling alarm and turn on the flashlight, Lewis says, “Shit—sorry baby—did I just hit you?”
“Mmph,” Tad replies. When Lewis swings the light toward him, Tad throws up a hand in front of his face. The other is clapped over his mouth.
“Oh my god, what did I do? Stacy’s going to kill me if you have a split lip. Or OH GOD I didn’t break a tooth, did I? Okay, it’s fine, it’s fine , totally fine, we’ll just find an emergency dentist, they can put a cap on it, shit okay let me google it. This is New York! There’s definitely probably like, hundreds of emergency dentists open on Saturday—”
Tad, his face scrunched into a half-awake squint, pushes Lewis’s phone so the flashlight isn’t shining directly into his eyes. Lowering his other hand from his mouth, he says, “I think it’s fine.”
He’s poking at his lip and his teeth experimentally with his tongue, so Lewis scoots closer and holds the flashlight up to inspect the damage. Tad bats at him. “I’m fine! God, do you seriously think Stacy would care?”
Given the way Stacy has become increasingly reliant on iced coffee with ever-more-numerous extra shots of espresso in recent days, with the corresponding altered mood that comes with caffeine overdose and lack of sleep, Lewis is not at all confident that she wouldn’t freak out about her maid-of-honor’s plus one having a chipped tooth. He got up in the middle of the night to make sure some kind of freak cartoon violence accident hadn’t befallen his tux and that it was still safely in its plastic sheath and hanging from the shower rod in the bathroom.
Lewis flexes his toe. If it’s broken, he’ll tape it. Hell, if the whole foot is broken, he’ll tape it.
Rubbing his face, Tad says, “I can’t believe y-y-you”—a huge yawn overtakes him—“managed to convince the NYBG to let you in this early to set up.”
“I deal with lawyers all day. This was easy.” He pulls on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. “Get some more sleep. Remember, don’t leave Hetty alone in the same room as my tux, and if you have to use the bathroom—”
“I’m going to have to use the bathroom.”
“Okay, right, if you absolutely have to, put my tux in a different room first.”
“I will not splatter toothpaste or pee on your tux.”
“Or anything else,” Lewis says, hunting for socks.
“You realize I’m not looking for loopholes in a legally binding clause, right? Like I’m not going to spill bleach on it just because you didn’t specify that I shouldn’t.”
Lewis freezes in horror. “Okay, that joke didn’t land,” Tad mutters. “I’ll take good care of your tux. See you in a few hours.”
By the time he arrives at the New York Botanical Garden, Lewis’s anxiety has done all the prep and setup for the Myers-Tran wedding in his head about three dozen times. He readies Stacy’s dressing room, directs the placement of the seating and the decorations for the ceremony (lots of red and gold to honor Alang’s Vietnamese heritage, plus candles and incense placed in artful and non-fire-hazard spots around the room), and makes sure there’s space for the musicians. Stacy forwards him an email from the lion dancers—all she wrote was I CAN’T HANDLE THIS PLEASE HELP. He breaks into a cold sweat but texts her, I’ll deal with it . Don’t stress. Send me anything that comes up. This is your day!!!!
She sends him back a string of heart emojis. Even if she wasn’t up early to get ready for the tea and candle ceremony this morning, Lewis knows she’d be up. This is it—this is The Day. The Day they’ve both been dreaming of since they were little kids, raised on Disney movies and rom-coms. Every time the two of them staged their future wedding (if it was Lewis’s wedding, he made Stacy pretend to be a boy), this was what they were preparing for.
Lewis deals with the lion dancers and the rest of his list of pre-wedding tasks, until it abruptly runs out. Work continues around him, but he’s exhausted his usefulness for the moment.
His mind goes back to all those play weddings. When they were really young, they swore they’d have a double wedding. When they got a little older, when Lewis realized he was gay, Stacy swore she wouldn’t get married until he could get married too. Through it all, there’s been this… assumption? Feeling? That they’d get married around the same time, even if it wasn’t a joint ceremony. Neither of them ever questioned that when one of them found love, the other would too.
And it kind of worked out that way. So, yeah. Just like they talked about.
It would be nice if Lewis could remember his own wedding.
He pushes that thought away. Today is about Stacy and Alang. His friends making it official official, standing up in front of their family and friends and swearing to love and take care of each other forever.
Did he swear that to Tad in Vegas?
Lewis tries to remember. Just like all the other times he’s tried, it’s a blank spot in his memory. He remembers bars, he remembers karaoke, he remembers sex. He can’t remember the wedding.
Melancholy washes through him. His wedding was supposed to be the ultimate romantic moment. The final Grand Gesture. And it’s just… gone.
The alarm he set for himself to wrap up his prep work goes off. Time to head back to Tad’s place.
TAD LOOKS amazing in a suit.
It’s three piece, dark green, and fits him perfectly, cut to accentuate those legs for days and his tight ass. The waistcoat hugs his slim torso and the jacket hangs perfectly, skimming along his ribs to his hips. The shirt he paired with it is white and the tie is brown and subtly patterned.
When Lewis tells him he looks amazing, Tad blushes and says, “There’s cat hair on it.”
“I had a bulk pack of lint rollers shipped to the venue,” Lewis says. “It doesn’t matter, though; you still look amazing.” He crosses the room to hug Tad, burying his face in Tad’s neck to inhale his cologne—spicy and masculine without being heavy, a hint of something floral brightening it.
Tad’s warmth and scent and nearness is an oasis. “This is nice,” Lewis mumbles. “I could stay like this for the rest of the day.”
“C’mon, today’s your big day.”
“It’s not, though,” comes out of Lewis’s mouth before he can stop it.
Tad gives Lewis a puzzled look. Yeah, that probably sounded mildly insane, considering the time he’s been devoting to Stacy’s wedding.
“Never mind,” Lewis says. “I’m just….” Dozens of adjectives volunteer themselves to complete the sentence, but none are right.
Tad grabs his hands. “What’s wrong?”
Lewis shakes his head. “I can’t say it. I’m the worst best friend ever for even thinking it.”
Tad’s lips thin as he presses them together. “That’s not possible. You’re basically Stacy’s wedding planner at this point. You got up at five in the morning and went to the Bronx to get stuff ready for the actual wedding planner!”
“That was just my job. That’s what we promised we’d do for each other.” He lets out a gusty sigh. “Which is exactly the problem.”
The notch appears between Tad’s eyebrows. “You don’t think she’d do the same for you?”
“She’ll never have the chance to,” Lewis wills his voice to come out less miserably than it sounds in his head. “I already got married.”
Horrifyingly, now that he started talking, he can’t stop. “It’s just, you know, I always dreamed about my wedding day. I have, like, thirty inspo boards on Pinterest for what my wedding could look like. It was supposed to be the most important day of my life. We can’t even remember it. And even if we could, it’s not much of a memory, probably. It definitely wasn’t my dream to get married at a twenty-four-hour wedding chapel on the Vegas Strip.”
When the word vomit stops, Lewis squeezes his eyes shut. He’d cover his face with his hands, but Tad is still holding them. “See? That’s horrible. I’m jealous of Stacy, when I shouldn’t be anything but overjoyed and supportive.”
There’s a silence. Tad’s opinion of him probably just nosedived.
But Tad squeezes Lewis’s hands. “You’d never act on any of that.”
“No! God, no. Of course I wouldn’t.”
“Okay, so.” Tad presses down on Lewis’s knuckles and it’s more steadying than it has any right to be. “All Stacy’s going to see is everything you’ve done for her and what an amazing friend and maid of honor you’ve been.” He pauses. “Why didn’t she just call you man of honor?”
“Oh, that was a joke that we leaned into a little too hard.” Lewis lets out a shaky laugh and meets Tad’s eyes. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Calm me down. It’s like you always know exactly what to say.”
“I’m not doing anything special. I’m just… I don’t know. Saying what seems right. It’s… yeah. Not special.”
God, he’s so wrong. Tad is one in eight billion, and Lewis wishes so badly he could understand that.
With a self-effacing snort, Tad says, “You don’t even need to be sad about not remembering your wedding. We’re getting a divorce, so you can have the big wedding you want to have.”
Something heavy rolls into the pit of Lewis’s stomach and he says the first thing that comes into his head: “I was kind of thinking we wouldn’t bother getting divorced.”
It’s definitely the wrong time to float this half-baked idea. But it’s out there now, hanging between them. Tad’s fingers seem to shrivel.
“Oh,” Tad says. His Adam’s apple jags. “Oh,” he repeats. “So you just… I mean… you think… this is, like….”
This is excruciating. “We don’t have to talk about this now!” Shit, too loud. Lewis takes a breath. “Sorry, I’m all over the place, I’m just saying stuff. I mean, I have been thinking it might be better to not get divorced, but—I shouldn’t have brought it up now. I should stop talking about it. I am stopping. We can talk about it later. Not like, today later. But just sometime. Later.”
Color has drained from Tad’s face. His freckles are standing out starker against his skin. Lewis has a sick, crawling feeling about what that might mean, so he forces a too-hearty smile onto his face. “Anyway, we should probably get going.”
“Right! Right, I just need to make sure Hetty has enough food and water.”
Tad hurries from the room and Lewis tries not to read into it. It could be for anything, right? Sure, Hetty has plenty of food and water because Lewis refilled both when he got back earlier, but maybe Tad doesn’t realize that. Or maybe it’s just an outlet for what is surely a lot of seething social anxiety.
Yeah. It’s probably one of those things.
His chest tightens. He fucked up and he’s going to spiral, because of course he is.
Tad calls, “Do you want me to get a Lyft?”
“Yeah, thanks!” Lewis’s voice comes out tight, so he closes his eyes and breathes deep. Tad’s voice sounds normal. There’s nothing to have an anxiety attack over. Tad knows Lewis is in a weird headspace right now, and he’ll brush off what Lewis said.
This will be like the other week, when Lewis had a panic attack and Tad was steady and strong and pulled him out of it. Everything’s fine.
Tad pokes his head back into the room. “The Lyft will be here in four minutes. You ready?”
He still seems spooked, but nowhere near the way he looked when Lewis said… what he said. “Yeah, I’m ready.” Lewis glances at himself in the mirror one more time. He was so caught up in how fuckable Tad looks that he barely registered his own appearance. His three-piece tux is a smoky black paired with a dusty pink button-down. It’s making his eyes pop, which isn’t something he’s used to thinking about his eyes. Brown eyes don’t pop. And his hair looks like something richer than “brown”—mahogany or chestnut or something.
It’s a good effect, all in all. He and Tad are going to make a striking couple.
A smile breaks out over his face and his jangling anxiety recedes. So does his ugly jealousy and bitterness about Stacy having what he never will. This is a great day. He’s going to his best friend’s wedding with his gorgeous boyfriend. It’s a happy day. And dammit, Lewis is going to be happy.