Chapter Twenty-Eight - WEST
I have to wake Ethan up in the morning. He’s dead asleep, snoring loudly in the second bedroom. Tory left an hour ago and put me in charge of wrangling all the guys together into some coherent group because the women were busy. “We don’t have time to make sure you guys get to the altar, Weston,” she said. “We had a wedding-dress crisis last night and we’ve all got to pull together to make this the best day ever.”
So I mumbled out a sleepy, “You got it,” and rolled back over, trying to forget the fact that I went lobstering yesterday without gloves and my hands are stinging like fuck.
But now that I’m fully awake, this shit is real. “Ethan,” I say, shaking him for like the tenth time in nine minutes. “Get up. We’ve got things to do. We’re getting married today.”
I look down at my hands and realize I’ve got little pinpricks of blood all over my palms. So I go into the bathroom, looking for a first-aid kit so I can wrap them up.
He yawns cavernously, rubs his eyes, and says, “I can’t be your best man, Dad.”
“What?” I stop applying ointment to look over at him. “Why not?”
“Because then I’ll be standing by you instead of Mathilda and Louise.”
“OK,” I say, not really understanding. Mathilda and Louise are the flower girls, I know that much. But… “Is that a bad thing?”
“Yeah,” Ethan says, sitting up in bed. “Because we’re kids, right?”
“Right.” I still don’t get it.
“Well, if I’m the only kid standing up there with you, when no one else has a best man, then I’m not really a kid. So I’m gonna carry the rings like little boys are supposed to.”
Hmmm. I think about this for a second as I wrap my hands in gauze—if I get blood all over my shirt, Tori will kill me. None of the other guys have a best man because… well, we’re all getting married on the same day. I’d always have had Ethan standing with me. But I’m pretty sure if we weren’t all getting married on the same day, Pax and Oliver would be each other’s best man, and Nolan and Mac would be each other’s best man. And Five would probably ask his little brother Wyatt or his brother-in-law Jax, or his crazy Uncle James. But since none of the other guys had a best man, he’s opted out too.
I realize we’ve all become pretty good friends over the last year. Sure, we spent a lot of time apart since everything happened back in college, but this last year was good for us. We’re kind of a team now and that means we can’t be both groom and best man to each other on the same day. So we decided Ethan would stand with me and no one else would have a best man because we just don’t have enough people. And the parents didn’t want to fill in. They wanted to be sitting in the front row watching.
“And,” Ethan continues, “I kinda like Mathilda. She’s fun.”
“Oh,” I say, laughing through my smile. I get it now. He wants to stand next to her, not me. “Well, I’m OK with that.”
“Yeah,” Ethan says. “I knew you would be. Plus…” He stops to look up at me. “Now you know for sure, right?”
“Now I know what?” I ask.
“That I’ve decided to be a kid again. I’m gonna hang out with Mathilda all the time now. She said she’d show me the ropes.”
“Did she? Well, that’s gonna be challenging, since she lives here and we live in Colorado.”
“I’m not worried about it,” Ethan says, jumping up from bed.
I ruffle his messy hair and say, “Me either, sport.”
We grab our tuxes and head out, banging on all the bungalow doors as we make our way past. Pax is next door, so we grab him first. He’s got tape across his nose. I think Five broke it last night because of the whole Charles Vance thing. Then Mac comes, with a huge bandage over the side of his neck.
“What the fuck is that?” Pax mumbles, pointing at Mac’s neck.
“Fucking mutant bee stung me yesterday at the cave you told me to take Ellie to.” Perfect glares at me for a second, but then points to Paxton’s taped nose. “You deserved that.”
“Fuck you,” Pax grumbles.
We grab Nolan next. “What the fuck?” I ask him. “What the hell is wrong with your face?” He has a huge lump on the side of his head near his ear. A proper goose-egg with an ugly blue-green bruise that leaks onto his cheek.
Nolan touches it, winces, and says, “Got hit in the head with a rock while I was chasing down that baby pig.”
We can’t help but laugh as we picture how that must’ve went down.
I bang on Oliver’s door and he comes out swinging his garment bag over his shoulder. His lip is split from where Five elbowed. He dabs at it with a tissue and says, “Don’t say a fucking word,” as he takes up the lead.
We meet Five up at the main house and take up residence in his living room to get dressed. He’s got a beauty of a black eye from where Ariel clocked him.
We’re a bunch of fuck-ups because we’re gonna look like hoodlums in tuxes with all our injuries.
But… this might turn out to be the most awesome wedding picture ever.