23. Blake
23
BLAKE
G etting hard in a room full of your best friends is not ideal.
But that’s what’s going to happen if I can’t get the thoughts of last night out of my head.
We’re in Cam’s suite, getting ready for the wedding. It’s ironic that none of my best friends—not even my brother—know the whole situation with Kat. Jeremy and I are friends at work, but we don’t have the same deep bond I do with these guys, and he’s the one who knows how everything started.
I yawn, doing my best to hide it behind my hand, but I’m not quick enough for Miller, who smirks in my direction.
“Late night?” he asks, fiddling with his cuff links.
“Something like that.” I slip my own cuff links into the holes of the dress shirt and fasten them.
“How come they can’t just use buttons for these monkey suits like normal people?” Miller grumbles. “We should see if we can get someone to go get us coffee. Becca kept me up late last night, too.”
Probably not as late as Kat and I were up. We barely slept, just napped here and there between having sex. Plus this morning in the shower, before I headed to Cam’s suite to get ready and Kat went off with the girls. It was fucking amazing, better even than the first time we were together, and even though it’s been less than an hour since I saw her, I’m craving her already.
It’s not like the fact that we’re sleeping together is a secret. If anything, the fact that we weren’t fucking before this weekend is the secret. It’s calming in a way to know that we won’t have to pretend today. Our relationship is real.
The thought scares the fuck out of me, and I’m still uncertain it’s a great idea. I’m sure something will happen to fuck this up. Isn’t that what always happens in relationships?
Maybe I shouldn’t mention that to Cam, who’s grinning like an idiot in his tux.
“Getting cold feet?” Miller elbows Cam.
It does nothing to dim Cam’s smile. “Hell no, man. I’ve been looking forward to this day for as long as I can remember.”
“Probably not as long as Addie has.” Miller wiggles his eyebrows.
Maddox looks murderous. Maybe fair, since Cam first met Addie when she was thirteen, and I’m pretty sure Maddox’s little sister used to write Mrs. Camden Allen on her notebooks throughout high school.
Talk about manifesting your future.
“Can we not talk about my sister like that?” Maddox asks. “I might need a beer for this.”
Lawton abandons his efforts at tying his bow tie for a minute to cross the room to the mini fridge. “Who else wants one?”
He pulls out two bottles of Kalik, the favored island beer, opens them, and hands them to Miller and Maddox before grabbing his own.
I shake my head. My thoughts are jumbled enough without adding alcohol to the mix.
Lawton lifts the bottle to his lips and takes a long swig before he looks at me. “How are things with your girl?”
I want to growl at him. I’m trying my best not to think of her at all right now, and that’s a losing battle. There’s no chance I want to talk about my relationship with Kat .
Maddox claps me on the back. “I’ll admit, I never thought I’d see the day you went out with a woman more than once, let alone you in a relationship. But maybe you just needed to find the right one.”
Miller eyes me over the top of his beer. “I’d say he found the right one. Have you seen the way they look at one another?”
Lawton chuckles. “I’ve seen the way they can’t keep their hands off each other.”
“That’s not—” My denial dies on my lips as I realize that they’re right.
Even when we were convinced we were just pretending , there’s been an undercurrent of something there, the electricity simmering between us.
“What’s she doing today?” Cam straightens the collar of his shirt.
It seems crazy that we have to put on these penguin suits so early in the day. Why can’t we just get dressed half an hour before the ceremony, you ask?
Because pictures.
They want plenty of time to get posed photos of the bride and groom, the bridal party, all of it.
I’m not as annoyed by the outfits as Miller seems to be, but I’d much rather be in a pair of swim trunks, sitting around the pool.
“Kat’s hanging out with the girls. ”
Kat seems to have fit in perfectly with Addie, Holly, and Becca. Addie’s best friend, Annika, is here as a bridesmaid, as are Addie’s sister, Josie, and her wife, Chris. Every time Kat wasn’t with me last night, she was chatting with one of the women.
I’m glad she’s enjoying herself. I just worry that they’re going to fill her head with their opinions of me. And now that this is something real, I don’t want someone else to mess this up.
I can do that all on my own.
Maddox, Miller, and Lawton finish their beers just as someone knocks on the door. I pull it open to find a short woman with red hair that rivals Addie’s, a determined expression on her face, and far too much energy.
“Let’s go, boys!” she says, clapping her hands.
Her tone manages to hit the unique cross between a cheerleader on helium and a drill sergeant.
“That’s the wedding coordinator,” Cam mutters to me, seeing my perplexed expression at the tiny dictator. “Zinnia.”
He has got to be joking. Zinnia?
I don’t have time to contemplate her name, though, as Zinnia herds us toward the door. Apparently, it’s time for pictures. She’s mentioned this three times in the span of two minutes .
I can see how Addie would get along with this woman. But while Addie is bubbly and chatty, Zinnia is more…like a mosquito, if one could bark orders at you.
Not in the mood to get scolded by Zinnia, the wedding dictator, I follow the other guys toward the door, Lawton and me bringing up the rear.
“Lawton,” I say, motioning to him just before we exit the hotel suite.
He pauses and turns to me. “Yeah?”
“I told the other guys this already, but don’t bring up poker.”
His eyebrows pull together in confusion. “Don’t bring up poker ? It’s not exactly a taboo topic. And in this group?”
I pull on the back of my neck, the starched collar of the shirt already starting to bother me. “I’m not trying to be shady or anything. It’s just that Kat’s dad had a problem with gambling. So poker and any talk of things like that could be a trigger for her.”
Understanding washes over his features. “Got it. That makes sense. But how are you going to keep this from her forever?”
“I won’t. Really. I’m planning to tell her when we have time to talk about it. I want her to be secure in what we have.” As I say the words, I realize they’re true.
I want Kat to know everything about me, including how I started playing poker to make ends meet and realized I could make a living doing it.
Lawton moves toward the door then hesitates, turning back to me. “For what it’s worth, I think she’s good for you, Blake. You seem happier.”
Deep inside, I think he may be right.
As expected, the bridal party is an interesting collection.
On Cam’s side, we have his best friend, Maddox, who is also his soon-to-be brother-in-law. There’s also me, Miller, and Lawton. Rounding out the group is Julio, Addie’s newly adopted brother, who turned twelve last week. Standing next to Addie are Holly, Josie, Chris, and Annika.
I’d always thought the tradition was for the groom to not see the bride until the ceremony, but Zinnia assures me that this is “how things go nowadays,” with a staged photo shoot of Cam seeing Addie in her wedding dress and then pictures with the wedding party “before things get crazy,” she says .
I’m not sure there’s such a thing as before crazy with this crew.
James and Leo, Josie and Chris’s twins, are rolling on the sand in front of us, completely ruining their tuxes. I gather that Zinnia told Addie she needed either a ring bearer or a flower girl, and she went with the only little kids she knows, the two-year-old terrors. I can only imagine what they’re going to do with the baskets of flower petals they’re going to carry down the aisle, let alone the rings.
I’d trust an actual bear to handle the rings before I’d trust these two. Or a hyena.
Holly and Maddox are taking turns holding their son, Rhys, who is maybe…half a year old? She told me his age in months. I’ll just give him credit when he hits one year old, and we’ll call it good. As far as I know, he has not been entrusted with any wedding duties.
Kat stands with Becca, Miller’s fiancée, the two of them next to Zinnia, who has a clipboard in her hand that she consults every two minutes.
Kat sips from a glass of champagne while she watches the antics, her expression somehow staying between neutral and mildly amused.
It’s impressive, especially when Leo feeds James a mouthful of sand.
The photographer takes shot after shot of the group in every possible permutation, Zinnia directing us into position. All the guys with Cam. The guys with Cam and Addie. The girls with Cam and Addie. The girls with Addie. And so forth.
Zinnia finally waves most of us aside to get family photos, Cam and Addie with her siblings, then with the couple with Addie’s parents.
Cam’s parents aren’t in the picture. But Judy, Addie’s mom, has known Cam since he was in college and will be standing in while Robert, Addie’s father-in-law, walks her down the aisle.
It’s the perfect mash-up of natural and found family. Adding in the fact that Addie and her siblings are all adopted, it’s a beautiful mix.
A pang hits me deep inside. I’ve never wanted to get married, so it’s never been a problem that I won’t have parents at a wedding. It’s been me and Lawton on our own since high school. So why does it suddenly seem to bother me?
Zinnia clucks at me to move, and I make my way toward Kat.
“How are you holding up?” I slip an arm around her waist. “This dress is gorgeous. Are you wearing this to the wedding?”
Kat leans into me, just enough that I can feel her touch all along my side. “I’m having fun, actually. Maybe it’s the champagne, but the girls are fun.” She takes a sip. “And no, this is just for now. I’m going to change before the ceremony.”
I look down, enjoying the view of her cleavage from this angle. “You can keep this dress if you want. I like its assets.”
Giving me a playful shove, she snorts. “I can imagine which assets you like.”
“I’m a simple man.” I shrug, grinning.
Still smiling, Kat tips the rest of her champagne past her lips and swallows, making her delicate neck ripple.
God, I want to bite that neck. Right where her neck meets her shoulder. Brand her as mine.
She looks at her watch. “Speaking of changing, I should get going.” Kat hands me her empty glass. “I’ll see you after the ceremony.”
The remainder of the picture taking is much the same, like a game of musical chairs.
At one point, Josie kicks off her high heels and hitches her dress up to wade into the water after Leo, who has decided to take a dip in the ocean.
At another, James tries to climb beneath the full skirt of Addie’s dress.
I thank God that no one has asked me to babysit. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that I could handle those two hellions.
Zinnia, for her part, seems unfazed, continuing to direct the poses and at one point, holding Leo under one arm like he’s a sack of potatoes to keep him from running into the frame. Her ease with the toddler makes me think she has experience with kids. I wonder briefly if they teach those kinds of moves in parenting classes.
“I think that’s good,” she says, finally. “There’s enough time to touch up your makeup before the ceremony starts, and then we’re on!”
I don’t have makeup to fix, nor do I want to shotgun a beer with Miller and Maddox, so I sit in the lounge with Lawton.
As he sinks onto the couch next to me, he blows out a breath and pushes a hand through his hair, leaving it just slightly disheveled.
Time to address the elephant in the room, then. Or the elephant that’s conspicuously not in the room.
“So. What happened with Kristina?” I ask.
He flinches at her name. “Nothing good.”
Normally I don’t pry, but “nothing good” doesn’t seem to cover it when you’ve moved across the country to a small town together, and she just seems to disappear .
“Did you…break up?” This seems like the obvious question.
He leans back on the couch, shoulders slumped. “You could call it that. I came home from pulling a double shift, and she was gone. Didn’t answer my calls. I just got a text a few days later.”
Ouch. “Did she say why?”
“Fuck if I know. Something about not feeling like High Lonesome was the place for her and how I was holding her back.”
My heart aches for him. Between the two of us, he’s always been the hopeful, optimistic one. The one who believes in love, even when he saw just how shitty things can end up.
Looks like he’s seeing it again.
“When?”
Lawton’s jaw clenches. “Last week. So I had the pleasure of sitting next to an empty seat on the plane that she should have been on. And now I’m sleeping in a huge suite alone. Her timing is impeccable.”
This is the point when most people would offer some kind of support or consolation. Tell him that he’ll find someone new, that everything happens for a reason, that something good will come out of this.
I have no such words of wisdom.
“That sucks, man. ”
“Yeah.”
We sit in silence until Zinnia pops her head in to tell us to line up.
The ceremony itself is taking place on the beach next to the resort, and then we’ll head back inside for the reception.
Most of the ceremony flies by in a haze. It’s simple and beautiful, with white folding chairs arranged in rows and a flower-covered arch at the front where Cam and Addie stand.
I search the small, gathered group for Kat, finding her in the third row. She was right about changing her dress. The white sundress was gorgeous, but what she has on now is radiant.
A pale-teal strapless gown, showing off her toned shoulders. The silky material reflects the light, and next to her deep-tan skin, it’s the perfect color palette for the Caribbean, the blue almost matching the color of the ocean.
“Addison and Camden, please read the vows you have written for one another.” The officiant’s voice pulls me back to the ceremony as he looks at Cam.
Cam clears his throat. “I, Camden Joseph Allen, take you, Addison Jane Anderson, to be my wife. To love you through thick and thin, in good times and bad. To always order pineapple on half of the pizza and to ensure that nothing you want is ever out of reach.”
Addie giggles as he slides the ring on her finger, then she sobers as she holds her vows in front of her and reads.
“I, Addison Jane Anderson, take you, Camden Joseph Allen, to be my husband. To walk with you through the pleasures and trials of life, to stand by your side when fate leaves us stranded, and to love you for who you are, from this day forward.” Her smile is radiant as she slips a ring onto Cam’s finger.
I steal a look at Kat. Her eyes are bright, a small smile on her face, her head tilted to the side, and a lump grows in my throat.
My breath hitches as I look at her among the flowers and wedding guests.
I can see this with her. Not today, not for a while, but someday.
When I look back at Cam and Addie, their hands are clasped, their gazes locked on one another.
“You may now kiss the bride!” the officiant announces.