“Okay, okay…so let me get this straight,” Gwen said, setting her beer on the table beside her mostly finished dinner. “Emily, you and Jase have known each other since high school. Sean and Molly since freshman year of college, and Max and Sarah since your last year of college?”
Emily slid her shoulder against Jase’s, giving him a wink that had Sarah letting out a delicate snort. “That look is because they’ve known each other the longest. Don’t mind Em. She just likes to win. A lot.”
Emily tucked one shoulder to her chin and fluttered her lashes. “The most. I like to win the most.” Then after a good laugh, she clarified, “But only about the really important stuff. Like bragging rights.”
Gwen grinned, loving how much fun everyone had together, how easily they could all laugh at themselves and with each other. There was no mistaking how tight this group was.
“That’s a long time. So when you met, did you just know?”
Now Emily was holding up her hand. “Yes and no. Jase and I had some chemistry, and I absolutely had a killer crush on him in the beginning. But things were complicated with us.”
“She hated me,” Jase chimed in, popping a chip into his mouth.
Shooting him an adoring look, Emily shrugged. “He deserved it. But eventually, we found our way back to each other.”
Molly had an enormous piece of cake she’d brought in a Styrofoam carryout box from another restaurant in front of her. Stabbing up a bite, she pointed it at Emily.
“They’re nauseatingly in love. Almost as much as Sarah and Max here.”
Sarah clutched her hands in front of her, beaming back at Molly.
“Aww, you sweetie!” Then turning back to Gwen, she added, “Complicated is sort of the requirement around here. Max and I didn’t see each other for ten years, and when we met back up”—she leaned in, whispering across the table—“I only wanted him for one thing.”
Max crossed his arms, that stern look lost on his wife as she blew him a kiss. Then turning back to Gwen, she confided, “I read on the ladies’ room wall he was good at it.”
Straight-faced, Sean deadpanned, “I wrote it. It’s true.”
More laughter from around the table. This was how it had been all night, everyone joking with everyone else. Brody’s friends sharing their stories with her, making her feel welcome. Making her wish she’d known them as long as they’d known each other.
She loved it.
Brody sat back in his chair, “Your turn, Molly. Tell her about you and Sean.”
Molly looked as though she wasn’t totally comfortable having all the eyes on her, but then she started mushing up a corner of her cake with her fork, an almost shy smile replacing her usually surly expression.
“Ours is the most romantic story of them all,” she started.
Sean choked on his beer, earning him a killing look before the hearts were back in Molly’s eyes.
“I had it bad for Sean from when I was fifteen. He was my brother’s best friend, my roommate, and the dirtiest dog on campus, and I completely loved him, but he wouldn’t let himself see me the way I wanted him to until last year when we started watching the knitting channel. He knocked me up, and I let him marry me. But not right away, because of the complicated business Sarah was talking about.”
Sarah was wiping a tear from her eye, shaking her head. “I love that story.”
Max was muttering about Sean getting his little sister pregnant. Jase was giving his wife a lovestruck smile while she held her hand over her heart as if she’d just heard the greatest love story of all time.
Gwen figured this must be one of those lost-in-translation situations, something you could only fully appreciate if you’d lived through it. Because…knitting?
But when she saw the way Molly reached out to touch her husband’s tie, getting a bit of chocolate on it in the process, and their eyes met? Well, Gwen started getting a little choked up too. Because the love in that look alone was overwhelming.
Next thing, Sarah was tapping the table, leaning in toward Gwen.
“Okay, now you. How did you and Brody get together?”
Gwen’s cheeks started to burn.
“Us?”
Why had she thought they’d be safe in this? “We’ve only really been dating a little while,” she hedged, suddenly anxious about being in the spotlight. Especially when their story—the one where she’d been hung up on another man and barely noticed Brody until the fact that she had suddenly, inexplicably fallen in love with the guy all but slapped her in the face.
She stilled.
Because there it was. The unconscious admission of a truth she hadn’t been willing to let herself accept until that very minute.
She loved him.
But it was too soon for that, wasn’t it? Yes, things felt incredibly right, but she didn’t want to risk saying something that would freak him out or—
Brody’s arm settled across her shoulders, his hand rubbing her arm.
“So I saw her the first time at a wedding a few years ago,” he started, and she rolled her eyes, expecting another one of Brody’s freakishly convincing if-I-were-into-you tales. The man could make up the most believable stuff.
“I couldn’t stop looking at her. I mean, with the hair spilling down over one shoulder and those eyes. I couldn’t do anything but stare.”
He really was good.
He turned to her, giving her his cockiest grin. “She was wearing this deep-chocolate dress that wrapped across the front and left most of her back bare.”
Gwen had stopped breathing, her skin prickling as she turned slowly in her seat.
He wasn’t making it up.
This wasn’t just some story.
“I finally caught her over by the bar and introduced myself, but then I realized the gorgeous girl who’d blown me away couldn’t take her eyes off this pencil-neck chump dancing with some other woman.”
There was a round of laughter, table slapping, and cries of protest, but Gwen could only stare.
“I knew it that minute. She was into him, and a little charm and a few well-placed lines weren’t going to be enough to get her into me instead.”
“Unavailable.” Jase sighed, shaking his head.
And Sean added, “Brody’s kryptonite.”
“You guys know I’m a pretty practical man. As a rule, I don’t get caught up in stuff I can’t change. But fuck, I was kicking myself after that wedding. I kept thinking about her and wishing I’d tried a little harder to get her attention. Something. Hell, I didn’t even know her name. She was just ‘Gorgeous’ in my head, like some kind of dream girl.”
Sarah had both hands flat on the table out in front of her, leaning forward as if she was literally on the edge of her seat. “How did you find her?”
This time, it was Molly who answered.
“She showed up at the bar like a year later, right?”
Brody nodded. “Turns out she was friends with Bret’s girlfriend, and they all started coming to Belfast once or twice a week.”
Gwen’s heart was pounding so hard and loud, she could practically hear her own whisper, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shrugged, giving her more of that cocky smile of his. “Playing it cool.” But she could see in his eyes there was more. Ted.
Emily narrowed her eyes. “Wait, so what happened between then and now?”
Gwen looked back at the tenderhearted, romantic beast of a man, waiting to hear how much he’d reveal.
“Complications, Em.” Then grinning down at Gwen, he added, “See, baby? We’ve got just as many complications as all these guys.”
Her throat was thick with emotion when she answered, “I guess we do.”
* * *
“You lonely without your man?” Jill asked a few days later, setting the laptop up to do the schedule.
“He’s only going to be gone two days,” Gwen scoffed, passing her a glass of iced tea and then wiping up some imaginary spot so her manager wouldn’t see what a pathetic liar she was. Because there was nothing only about it.
Based on Jill’s disbelieving snort, she wasn’t fooling anyone.
“You guys going to talk tonight?”
Giving in to a heavy sigh, Gwen crossed her arms on the counter, settling into a deep slump. That was the other thing. After an unfortunate incident involving a guy on a bike and a Journey to the Center of the Earth–sized pothole filled with rainwater, her phone was currently sitting in a ziplocked bag of rice in her locker. “I called him from his office line when I got in to let him know about the phone.” They’d talked for all of about thirty seconds, because his first meeting was starting, and she didn’t want to keep him. “The gist of it was, we’ll see each other tomorrow night.”
They’d been spending so much time together that she’d barely been back to her apartment in nearly two weeks. So it felt strange, knowing she wasn’t going to be seeing him for another day. She wouldn’t be sleeping in his bed or spending the next morning with him. And the low rumble of his voice wouldn’t be the last thing she heard before she fell asleep. If she slept at all.
It had never been that way for her before. Not with any of her boyfriends. Heck, she’d usually been itching to get back to her own apartment after a date or the rare overnight. More interested in unwinding with her own friends than killing time with whomever she’d been out with.
Even with Ted, it hadn’t bothered her to go a few days or even weeks without seeing him. They’d text here or there, and that was plenty.
But with Brody, it was different.
With Brody, it was as if he’d started to feel like home.
And with that little ache in her chest, she glanced at the clock behind the bar. Almost four. They’d had a heavy lunch crowd, but now there were only customers at two tables, and she’d checked on them less than five minutes before. This day was never going to end.
The door opened, and she turned, hoping for a party of sixteen to get her through the afternoon.
“Ted?”
He hadn’t been in to Belfast since before the wedding, and aside from seeing him in the stairwell the week before, they hadn’t crossed paths since New Year’s Day. But all it took was one look to know whatever brought him to the bar that afternoon wasn’t about them.
“Jesus, Gwen, you haven’t been answering your phone.”
Ted was crossing the bar toward her, a strained look on his face and an urgency in his step.
“What is it?” she asked, already coming around to meet him, a queasy feeling in her stomach.
“There was an accident at the store. Your dad was on a ladder. Your mom doesn’t know what happened except he fell.”
Jill had come up beside her, resting a light hand at her arm. “Gwen, I’ll get someone to cover you.”
Lips numb, throat tight, she croaked, “Is he okay?”
“They think yes,” Ted started, and she threw her arms around him, forgetting in that moment that he was anything other than her oldest friend in the world.
His hand pressed into her back, holding her against him. “But, Gwen, his leg’s pretty bad. When I talked to your mom twenty minutes ago, he was still in surgery. My parents are with her, but she’s freaking out. We’ve got to go.”