by Kait Nolan
When everyone stood in anticipation of the bridal march, Zach grabbed the camera he’d stashed in a potted fern before the ceremony. He wasn’t looking at the back of the aisle. Instead he zeroed in on Jace, capturing his face when he saw his bride for the first time. Awe and joy and gratitude suffused his face, captured in a single tear rolling down one cheek.
Click.
Money shot.
“Dearly beloved—”
As the ceremony proper began, Zach split his attention between the pastor and Lexi. She moved like a ninja, silently slipping in and around the group clustered at the altar to document each step of the occasion. She pulled back when the vows began, swapping to a second camera with a longer lens to capture the moments without intruding.
Zach found himself watching her as his friends spoke words of promise and fidelity, and he knew that this simmer in his blood wasn’t just some passing fancy. He wanted to hold Lexi. Wanted to slide his fingers into the heavy silk of her hair and lay his lips over hers. And he wanted to follow that with a whole host of other things that should have shocked him. Because this was Lexi. But having her come back into his life was like looking at an old photograph and seeing something he’d never noticed before. Some detail that changed the whole composition.
She looked over at him, catching his gaze. For just a beat, something passed between them. An awareness. He couldn’t read her eyes at this distance, but he’d have sworn he could feel the same knowledge in her—that they were both grown up now.
And as she looked away, lifting her camera to catch the first kiss, he thought maybe…maybe, it wasn’t just him.
Chapter 5
In the normal course of things, Lexi found shooting weddings to be a lot of work. They were long, intense days, typically around a lot of high-stress people. She knew how to wade into that and still manage to make art out of those memories, and she was good at it, as her growing list of happy clients attested. But shooting Jace and Tara’s wedding was different than what she did in Austin. Because she knew him. She knew most of the people standing up there with him and his bride. And that imbued the whole thing with more meaning.
This, she realized, was the value of doing this at home, for people she cared about instead of strangers. Did Zach even realize how lucky he was to get this privilege? Did he feel this way about what he did? Catching sight of him, camera in hand as he coaxed Tara and Jace through the cake cutting on the opposite side of the table, she knew that he did. And for that moment, she envied him. She envied what he’d fallen into here, what he’d made of it, and she found herself wishing she could be a permanent part of it.
He’d let her. He’d make a place for her, as he’d made a place for her in his friend group, all those years ago. But that was taking a temporary situation and turning it into something it wasn’t. She was being very careful this go-round not to do anything but accept the status quo. And the status quo was pretty damned good. Reconnecting with Zach was healing that bruise on her heart. She had friends in Austin, but no one like him. No one like the rest of their zany crew. She already knew she wouldn’t let the miles cut her off from them—from him—again when she went back. And it would be enough. It would have to be.
She was relieved when the toasts began. It meant she could get back to work, get out of her head.
The groom kicked things off, warming up the crowd with humor before turning to lace his fingers with Tara’s. “It’s amazing the little moments that can change your life. If I hadn’t finished my take-home exam early. If I hadn’t met my friends up at The Grind that day, I might not have met Tara. I can’t even imagine what that life would have looked like, and I’ve wondered, would things have turned out the same if we’d met somewhere else? Somewhen else?”
Jace lifted his wife’s hand to his lips. “I like to think we’d have ended up here no matter how we started.”
Lexi took the shot, but her brain was still turning over what he’d said long after he’d ceded the mic to others. That was the ultimate question, wasn’t it? She thought back all those years to that first bonfire. If she hadn’t gone, if she hadn’t met Zach that night and had the chance to bond with him over photography the rest of the summer, would they have become friends? Or would they have circled in parallel groups for the rest of high school? Would he have seen her at some other time and place and thought of her as a girl instead of as a friend? Or would things have turned out exactly the same?
Unsettled, and not at all sure which version of “What if?” she preferred, she lost herself in the focus needed for the work.
After the first dance, she finally got to relax her vigilance for a moment. She wandered over to the bar set up in the corner and asked for a bottle of water. Her throat was parched. She’d been working steadily for hours and her feet were aching. She couldn’t wait for the end of the night, when she’d get to go home and take a long, hot bath before falling into bed and crashing.
“Helluva day.”
Still guzzling down the water, she inclined her head to Zach as he ordered a beer. He’d shed his tux jacket and rolled up his sleeves. The top edge of what she recognized as a folded tie peeked out of one of the shallow vest pockets.
He held up his drink. “To teamwork.”
She tapped her bottle to his. “Seems we make a good one.”
“We always did.” There was an intensity in his gaze as he looked at her that made her skin come alive. She wanted his hands on her.
Don’t be stupid.
She finished the water and thought about asking for another. Was it getting hotter in here?
Zach took a sip of his beer and set it on a nearby table before lifting the camera she wore up and over her head. “Watch these for a minute, would you, Joe?”
“No problem.”
Lexi narrowed her eyes. “What are you doing?”
He grabbed her hand and began towing her toward the dance floor. “In most circles I believe it is referred to as dancing.”
But the song playing was slow and romantic, not one of the big group line dances. Which meant they’d be dancing together.
“Why?” By some miracle, she managed to keep the panic out of her voice. They didn’t do this. Ever.
“Because it’s what you do at weddings.”
“Do you regularly dance at the weddings you work?” Was his way of doing this job so much different from hers?
“Sure. I’ve gotten some great shots from the middle of the line dancing. And believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen the Casserole Patrol doing The Whip and Nae Nae.”
The notion of Wishful’s favorite trio of busybodies—who had to be in their seventies or eighties by now—taking over the dance floor distracted her for long enough that Zach managed to spin her into his arms, fitting her against him without a struggle. She’d been pressed up against him before. He was an affectionate guy. A hugger. But this was different. He was different, somehow. More…focused on her. Which was utterly ridiculous. But she was so very aware of every part of him touching every part of her as he smoothly moved them to the rhythm of the song. She wanted to sink into him and revel in the feeling of having his arms around her. Not daring to give in, she did her best impression of a fence post.
“Relax. We’ve covered all the important stuff. It’s smooth sailing until the bouquet and garter toss and the going away shots.”
“I don’t know how to relax at a wedding. I’m always working.” It wasn’t a lie. She took her job seriously, and she couldn’t imagine what her clients would think if she suddenly took to the floor.
“When was the last time you were just a guest?”
“Some of my friends from college got married in the last few years. But I shot their weddings, too. I can’t actually remember the last time I was just a guest.”
He studied her. “Tell me something. Do you actually do anything besides work out in Texas?”
“Of course I do.” Though she was hard-pressed to remember what, right this second. Or rather, he
was hard pressed. Had she realized how leanly-muscled his body was before? What did he look like beneath the starched shirt and dress pants?
“What’s keeping you out there?”
She had a hard time focusing on the question. “What? My business is there.”
“Your new business that you’re still working to establish. You could do that somewhere else.”
Lexi bristled. Was he criticizing her slow start? Did he think she was a failure? “And lose the money for breaking my lease and all the time I’ve put into building my reputation?”
Zach’s thumb stroked over the back of her hand in a gesture he probably meant as soothing but tied her guts in knots.
“You can do your art anywhere. If you were talking about friends or how much you love it in Texas or the theoretical guy you’ve already said you don’t have time for, that’d be something else. But you didn’t say any of that.”
She stiffened, more because he’d hit too close to the truth of her bare-bones existence. “What are you getting at?”
“I’m just saying, you’re not so enmeshed out there that you couldn’t decide to make a change.” His eyes were so very intense as he looked down at her.
She forgot about the insult as she really focused in on what he was saying, her heart starting to pound. “What kind of a change?”
“Do you ever think about coming home?”
All the time since I got back. “No.”
“You could, you know. Your mom would be over the moon.”
Her mom. Was this really about her mother? He wasn’t wrong. Lexi knew her mom missed her. But Leandra understood why she’d built her life so far away, even if they’d never overtly discussed it.
“My life isn’t here, Zach.”
His hand squeezed hers and there was a weight to his voice as he murmured, “It could be.”
She couldn’t even let herself think about this. The idea of it was too seductive, too appealing. He was too much of both, and he wasn’t even aware of it. “Where is this coming from?”
“It’s been so great having you back here. I didn’t realize how much I missed you, and now I can’t imagine you not here again.”
Lexi didn’t know what to say to that.
He looked down at her, into her, as they circled the floor. His eyes darkened again with that look she couldn’t read, and he shifted his hold on her, drawing her closer. Her heart stuttered. Part of her wanted to relax into him. To slide her hand across his shoulder and up his nape, into his hair. But that wasn’t what this was.
“What happened to us, Lex?”
You broke my heart and didn’t even know it.
She swallowed. “The same thing that happens to everybody eventually. We grew up, grew apart.”
“I don’t want to be apart.”
He didn’t—couldn’t—mean that how it sounded.
Except…his gaze dropped to her mouth and he was bending his head.
Ay Dios mio, is he going to kiss me?
Her pulse went slow and thick, and time turned elastic as he slowly, inexorably began to close the distance between them.
The “Cha Cha Slide” began to blare.
Lexi jolted reflexively back as the moment shattered. “I need to get back to work. Thanks for the dance.”
Pulling free of his arms, she made a beeline for her camera and didn’t even care if he thought she was running away.
She couldn’t face him. Couldn’t face what had maybe almost happened. It was better this way. She would just have gotten everything wrong again and ruined what they were managing to rebuild. He was too important to take that risk.
In the two weeks since Lexi had bolted away from him like a scalded cat, Zach had agonized, thinking about that almost kiss and wondering exactly how long it would take for things to go back to normal between them. Trying to kiss her had been an obvious mistake. She hadn’t avoided him, but she hadn’t been herself either. There was a tension between them, and Zach hated himself a little for putting it there. She’d opted to pretend he hadn’t tried to kiss her, and as much as that sucked, he’d gone with it, keeping his hands to himself and putting all his efforts into being the friends they’d always been. As much as he regretted that she wasn’t on the same page, he figured it was worth some discomfort on his part to keep her in his life. The attraction would go away eventually. He hoped.
Not that it showed any indication of waning as he sat beside her in the studio, reviewing wedding proofs on the double monitors at his desk.
“If we can, I’d like to be able to take a flash drive of previews to Jace tonight when I meet him and the guys for dinner.”
“We should be able to get that far. I suppose that’s a downside to two shooters at a wedding. Double the pictures to go through after the fact.”
They’d both individually culled their raw files, cutting out the blurry, the poorly composed, or any other shots that didn’t pass muster. There would still be paring down to the best of the best and a ton of editing to do, cleaning up and refining each one to maximum perfection. They’d already been through the ceremony and the staged shots of the wedding party and the family.
“I’d say the end results are well worth it. Between the two of us, we caught some moments I couldn’t usually get on my own. Jace and Tara are going to be ecstatic.”
“I certainly hope so.” Lexi reached across him, clicking to add some gorgeous detail shots of Tara’s dress and shoes to their folder of keepers. She didn’t flinch away from him this time, and he called it a win.
“I wouldn’t have thought to use this composition. I mean, I usually try to get shots of the dress before the bride puts it on, but they never turn out like this. This is art.”
“It probably helps that my mother is who she is. Much as I am not a girly girl, I was raised to appreciate design. I know what goes into a dress like this, so it’s natural for me to want to highlight the craftsmanship.”
“It shows. You should come tonight.” The invitation was out before he could think better of it, so he barreled on, determined to reinforce the just friends thing. “It’s Trivia Night at Los Pantalones. You love trivia.”
“Uh, no. I’m not going to be the pink wheel.”
“The pink wheel? You’ve never liked pink in your life.” This he knew with unarguable certainty.
“It seemed as good a term as any for the token girl. No, y’all can enjoy your rituals of masculinity unencumbered. Besides, Mom and I have a date for pizza and our annual viewing of Runaway Bride, so I need to be getting on in a little bit to go by Speakeasy to pick up dinner.”
Probably for the best.
“I think that’s the last of the prep shots. Time to start on the reception.” She popped out her memory card.
Zach inserted his last one. “I haven’t done as much culling as I’d like from this one. I focused on getting through all the wedding party shots so I’d be able to go ahead and give them a few to share while we get to the rest.”
They made their way through the cake cutting and the obligatory smashing of cake in Jace’s face. Tara’s expression of satisfaction made Zach snicker because he knew what was coming.
“I think the one where he streaks icing down her nose and she’s laughing is my favorite of this bunch,” Lexi said.
“Same.”
He dragged more images into the edit folder and moved on to the shots of the speeches and various crowd reactions. When the picture of Lexi came on screen, he regretted not finishing his own cull in private. He’d caught her in an unguarded moment. A few tendrils of hair had escaped from the roll at her nape to frame her exquisite face. Her expression was soft and yearning as she looked at…well, he didn’t know what. Or who. But it was how he wished she’d look at him. It was a shot that said as much about the photographer as the subject. Zach felt exposed, sitting beside her, waiting for her to say something. With half a brain he prepared to deflect her questions, to minimize what filled the high-resolution screen as nothing less than a lucky shot.<
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But as the silence drew out, he sensed he wasn’t the only one feeling vulnerable. What did she see when she looked at this? And suddenly he had to know, even if it eroded some of the carefully rebuilt parameters of their friendship.
“What were you thinking about in that moment?”
Lexi was quiet so long, he thought maybe she wasn’t going to answer.
“It was during Jace’s speech, when he was talking about the little moments that change everything.” Her voice was low and thick with some unnamed emotion. “I was wondering how things would have turned out if we hadn’t met out at Hope Springs that summer before high school. If we’d still have ended up friends. Or…”
“Or?” he prompted.
She shrugged, eyes dropping from the screen. “Doesn’t matter.”
But it did matter. Zach was certain of it. “Or what, Lex?”
She still didn’t look at him, and he fought the urge to reach out and cup her cheek, to tip her face toward his so he could see what was in her eyes. If he was wrong, that would tip his hand and destroy the fragile balance they’d re-established. But he couldn’t stay silent, couldn’t just let it go.
“If we’d have ended up friends or something else?”
Other than the subtle quickening of her breath, Lexi stayed utterly still. Like a trapped animal that thought if it didn’t move, it would be safe from the threat. Zach hardly dared to breathe. He didn’t want to scare her. Didn’t want to be categorized as a threat. But maybe these new feelings he’d developed were a threat—to their friendship, at least. To the status quo of what they’d always been. But he’d been thinking so much about that something else, and he didn’t know how to turn that off.
