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“Why are you dressed like a great white hunter?” Jim asked. Gavin grinned and said, “Mason Briggs is one of my clients.”

Jim laughed. “Oh no, I wonder if that’s what I’m getting as a wedding present.”

“It’s not so bad. He had the hat and flannel shirt and even the jeans tailored especially for me. The shirt is lined with fleece so it’s warm as hell and I think my ass rounds the denim out nicely.”

Jim was laughing so hard he had tears in his eyes. It wasn’t that Gavin never wore jeans but while he was married, his wife would have never let him get by with wearing jeans that were actually faded and fraying...and a plaid flannel shirt and ball cap would have sent her into convulsions. Part of wearing the outfit his old client Mason had brought him was to thumb his nose at what his ex-wife would and would not have liked about the outfit. When Jim stopped laughing he took a drink of his beer and said, “Stand up and let me take a look at that ass.”

Gavin shot him a look, “I don’t think so.”

Jim Michael’s had been Gavin’s best friend since middle school. It was always easy for Gavin to forget his problems and relax when he was with Jim. It was like time stood still and they were back to being those fun-loving boys they used to be. Now Gavin was a billionaire businessman and Jim a high-powered attorney so there wasn’t much time left for any fun. There would be even less after Jim married Sadie, the love of his life. Gavin had actually considered begging Jim not to go through with the wedding, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. Jim was head over heels in love with his fiancé Sadie and Gavin really liked her too. It wasn’t Sadie that Gavin had a problem with anyways, it was just marriage in general. He never used to feel that way and he hated that he felt that way now, but life experience definitely changes things. 

Gavin spent the first sixteen years of his adult life building his fortune. He graduated from NYU with a master’s in business and from that point on he began investing in his future. Gavin grew up poor. He was raised by a single mother in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn New York. They didn’t have much by way of material possessions but the things he learned from his mother had turned out to be much more valuable than even a trust fund might have been. His mother worked two jobs and she never passed up on an opportunity to tell Gavin that the path to getting ahead in life was to work hard and always keep your dreams in sight. Gavin’s Mom had gotten pregnant right out of high school and while the man who had been partially responsible for her plight went on to an Ivy league college and never looked back. His mother had gotten a job in a restaurant, rented a studio apartment and began building the best life for her child that she could manage. She was never bitter about his father leaving and she had even offered to help Gavin find him. Gavin couldn’t imagine what use he would have for a man that would leave a young pregnant woman alone, let alone his own child. 

Gavin adored and respected his mother however his main goal had always been to make her proud of him. He worked hard in school and with straight ‘A’s’ on his report card from kindergarten through high school, he was able to write his own ticket as far as scholarships went. He chose NYU because it was close to home and his mother.

As soon as Gavin graduated he got a job as a tech in an investment firm in Manhattan. Over the next five years, before he was even thirty, he worked his way up to the position of senior associate. Throughout those early days in his career he didn’t spend much money. He kept what he needed to live on, did whatever he could to make his mother’s life easier and invested the rest. Because of his innate sense for business and the tools he had learned from his job, he made some really good investments. By the time he did turn thirty he was a partner at his firm, but no longer needed that income to survive. His investments were paying off ten-fold and he decided to switch tracks. He took his money out of the ‘safe’ investments it was wrapped up in and he began to make riskier choices with the stock market. Those choices paid off in a big way. Gavin had made his first billion dollars by the time he was thirty-three. In the meantime he tried to buy his mother an upscale apartment on the Upper East Side, but she refused to let him. They were both stubborn and after a series of passionate conversations she had finally agreed to let him buy her a house, as long as it was in Brooklyn. He wanted her out of that neighborhood, but at least with the compromise he could get her a house and an alarm system, so he agreed.

Not long after his mother moved into her four bedroom brownstone home, Gavin had fallen in love with a Canadian girl named Annie. He met her at a club on one of his trips to visit Jim who lived and worked in Vancouver by that time.

The first year Gavin and Annie dated was amazing and he was truly happy. Annie hadn’t had much growing up and every new thing he introduced her to while they traveled or attended various functions in the city held an almost magical appeal for her. It gave him a great deal of pleasure to see her smile and know that he was the one that had put the pretty smile on her face. It wasn’t until he had proposed and they were planning their wedding and where they would live that Gavin began to get a sense that Annie wasn’t quite who he had thought she was. She became almost obsessed with everything Gavin’s money could buy and suddenly she was attending every charity benefit, joining every club and making herself “known” both in New York and Vancouver high society. Gavin wasn’t interested in impressing anyone and he wasn’t easily impressed so they had more than one disagreement where money and status were concerned. That worried Gavin but not enough for him to give up. He mastered the art of compromise and he probably compromised a lot more than she did, but he truly wanted her to be happy and he was willing to do almost anything it took to see her smile. The ‘almost’ anything revealed itself the day he found her birth control pills by accident.

The only regret Gavin ever had about his childhood was that he hadn’t had siblings. He wanted a big family and Annie had told him she wanted the same. After over two years of marriage and almost four years of being together he was beginning to worry that there was something wrong with one of them. He went to his doctor and found out that it wasn’t him. Annie told him she had done the same and he would just have to be patient. About a month after all of that he was in the kitchen one day when Annie’s phone began to ring. She called out from the other room, “Gavin can you grab that for me please.” He reached into her purse just about the time she rushed into the kitchen saying, “Never mind, I’ve got it.” He saw by the look on her face as soon as he pulled the pills out that she had remembered too late that they were there.

“What’s this?”

“You’re not stupid,” she smirked. “You know what they are.”

“If you don’t think I’m stupid then why have you been lying to me? Have you been taking these all along?”

“Yes.”

Gavin had dropped down into a chair and with the pills still clutched in his hand he looked up at his wife’s guilty face. “Why? I don’t understand.”

“I’m just not ready Gavin. I don’t want my body all stretched out of shape and a baby drooling all over me...”

“Now...or ever?”

“I can only speak for now,” she replied.

“Why didn’t you just tell me the truth? You pretended like you wanted the same things out of life as me.”

“I wasn’t pretending,” she said. “I grew up not knowing anything else. You get married and you have kids and you spend the rest of your life in sweatpants and your hair in a ponytail. I just realized that wasn’t me.”

“After you started wearing designer clothes and having your breasts enhanced?”

“Don’t make this about money.”

“What else could it possibly be about?”

“Me Gavin! You never think of me and what I want.”

He had actually laughed out loud at that. He had given up a lot of his wants and needs to make sure that she was happy and she actually had the nerve to tell him that he didn’t think of her. “Please tell me you’re kidding.” She wasn’t. Gavin decided quickly that a woman who would lie about something like that would lie about anything. He wasn’t going to be able to trust her again. It almost killed him to admit that he couldn’t fix it, but he had to at that point. He couldn’t live with someone that he didn’t trust. He filed for divorce days later and even though he had his attorney draw up a substantial financial settlement for her she took him to court to fight for more. The prenuptial agreement she signed before they got married was iron-clad however. Gavin’s attorneys were some of the best in the world and his friend Jim was one of them. Annie ended up getting a lot less than what she would have gotten had she simply settled. 

“Sadie’s not going to screw me over the way Annie did to you,” Jim told him.

Gavin smiled. “What makes you think that’s what was on my mind?”

Jim laughed. “I’ve known you more of my life than I haven’t. Trust me man, Sadie is nothing like Annie.”

“I believe you,” Gavin replied. “But...we all thought Annie was pretty great to begin with.”

“Mmmmm....no, not really.”

Gavin was surprised. Annie never liked Jim but from the start Gavin made it clear to her that he wouldn’t tolerate her being rude to his best friend. She thought Jim was “beneath” him and she actually tried to get him to get rid of him as the best man at his wedding. Gavin wondered later if he should have walked away back then, but if he had he would have always wondered if it was a mistake. At least by the time he did end it he knew there was no other choice.

“What do you mean, not really? You never said anything.”

“I never liked her and I definitely never trusted her. But I wasn’t going to tell you that. You were in love and it wasn’t my place. I kicked ass on that pre-nup for you. It was all I could do.”

Gavin smiled. At least he made better choices in best friends than he did wives. “I’m just not sure I even know what love is,” he said, “I felt things for her, yes. The sex was phenomenal right off the bat and she said that she wanted the same things as me. But once the sex had gone stale and I realized she was only pretending to have things in common with me I didn’t feel anything at all. I was sad because I’d screwed up and married her more than I was splitting up with her. So I have to say I’m just not sure it was ever love.”

“Well then you got off easy.”

Chuckling Gavin asked, “How do you figure?”

“If it was love then having to give up on it would have torn you apart. I can’t imagine losing Sadie. If she ever left me she may as well take my heart out of my chest with her.”

Gavin felt happy for his friend and envious at the same time. That was what he wanted to feel and what he wanted someone to feel for him. He held up his glass and Jim held his up too. “To my best friend and his beautiful bride to be. May you both find the happiness that eluded me and keep it in your hearts forever.”

Jim tapped his glass to Gavin’s and said, “Here, here.”

After the men finished their second drink Jim looked at his watch. “Damn, I’m late.”

“What, for today?” The wedding party had been staying at the lodge for three days and nights already and there had been something going on every day. Gavin had planned on doing some hiking around the mountain. It was actually the reason he was in the outfit Mason designed for him. But the weather was beginning to look slightly ominous outside and the last thing he wanted was to freeze to death on the side of a mountain. A long nap was beginning to sound more appealing. This was his first vacation in over a year and he wouldn’t have even taken that much time off if not for the fact that he was honored and committed to being Jim’s best man in the wedding taking place tomorrow.

Jim grinned, “Pre-wedding gift from my lovely fiancé. I have a massage scheduled.”

“Marriage is going to make you soft,” Gavin slapped Jim on the shoulder.

“My skin will be soft at least,” Jim winked. He put his glass down and pulled out his wallet.

“Huh-uh, your money’s no good here.”

“Thanks man. You know as much as this wedding is costing me, I might actually own part of this place by now. At least I should.”

“Wedding planner gouging you?” Gavin asked.

“No, actually that’s the one shining light of this whole thing. She’s come up with some really great ideas for us that actually cost us less than some more traditional choices would have.”

“Well that’s good. This Kimberly Stokes told me she’s the assistant when I met her yesterday.  Have you even seen the owner since your initial appointment? Is she one of those that pops in and out ceremoniously, just long enough to present her employees ideas as her own?”

“No, she’s actually the kind that wears tennis shoes with her business suits in the office so she can run in and out searching for things to make her client’s big day exactly what they want it to be.”

“Wow, then she’s good. That’s all that counts,” Gavin laughed.

“Sadie is extremely pleased with her. She has met with us at least once a month for the past year and we’ve gotten to know her pretty well. I like her. She works hard and she’s a genuinely nice person.”

Gavin laughed. “Good to hear bro.”

Jim shrugged. “I have to get going.”

“Alright, I’ll see you tonight at dinner.” Gavin finished his drink, paid the tab and wandered back into the lobby of the ski resort just in time to overhear a conversation at the desk about the big storm they were expecting being upgraded and moving faster than they expected it to. “When is that storm supposed to hit?” he asked one of the staff.

“They’ve upgraded it from a winter storm warning to a blizzard watch and they’re saying the worst of it will hit tonight instead of tomorrow now,” one of the bellhops told him.

The wedding was inside but a blizzard still might cause a few glitches with people getting in and out. As much as Gavin didn’t believe in happily ever after for himself any longer, he really hoped it would exist for his friend.