by Scott, J. S.
Zeke and I were friends. Good friends. Best buddies. And the line I’d crossed the night before was horrifying to me the following morning, once the liquor wasn’t taking away all of my inhibitions anymore.
I stuffed the adolescent emotions I’d revealed the night before back inside me so forcefully that I knew I’d never bring up the subject again. Like it or not, I had to accept that Zeke and I weren’t meant to be anything other than best friends. Ever.
I had Zeke’s friendship, and because he wanted nothing to do with a more intimate relationship, our friendship was always going to have to be enough.
I couldn’t say that I didn’t feel a little awkward after my drunken confession, but a week later, Zeke’s college break was over, and he headed back to Harvard.
I threw myself into work, hyper focused on my own goals.
Luckily, the mistake I’d made on my twenty-first birthday was soon just a crappy memory that I didn’t allow myself to think about, and my friendship with Zeke remained solid.
Staying in the friendship zone was enough for many years. I managed to successfully convince myself that my carnal feelings for Zeke had just been the product of a very painful crush that went away as I got older and more mature.
I fooled myself with that perfectly rational explanation until a time, many years later, when I just couldn’t lie to myself anymore…
Zeke
The Present…
I looked at my watch impatiently for the sixteenth time in the last five minutes, and tried not to hate myself for giving in to that urge.
It was exactly eleven forty-eight a.m., and ten damn seconds.
It had been exactly fifteen seconds since I’d last checked the time.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
“Son of a bitch!” I cursed under my breath, and scowled at the dials of the Rolex I was wearing.
Jesus, Conner. Relax. It’s not like your dad’s vintage Rolex Submariner is making that sound.
I let out a massive breath that I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding, and put my hand back on my thigh, assuring myself I would not check the time…again.
Maybe my late father’s cherished watch wasn’t actually making those daunting sounds, but the action of looking at the time seemed to be the trigger that set off that unnerving noise in my head.
I’d heard it seventeen times now, every damn time I compulsively checked to see how much longer it would be until…
Shit! I had twelve damn minutes before my best friend started to saunter down the aisle on her way to the altar.
The ceremony might be…what? Twenty minutes…tops? Possibly less since it was going to be a community church type of ceremony?
Lia Harper was my best friend, and had been for approximately fourteen years now. I could manage to get through the next thirty-two minutes without doing something completely irrational, right?
I looked around the church, hoping for some kind of distraction. It was impossible not to notice how sparsely populated it was on the bride’s side compared to the groom’s side of the church.
Since Lia had no close relatives who were still living, it made sense that the only people present on her side were some of her friends.
Had it really been necessary to do the whole bride’s side/groom’s side thing, though? It seemed pretty ridiculous that none of the people packed like sardines on the other side of the church were willing to do overflow on Lia’s side.
Apparently, Stuart’s relatives and friends would rather sit on each other’s laps than get comfortable on an empty bench over here.
I wasn’t exactly surprised since Lia’s fiancé was, quite honestly, a pretentious prick. It wasn’t a shocker that Stuart’s family and friends were exactly the same way.
It just pissed me off because doing things this way seemed like a direct snub to Lia in my eyes, and the bride-to-be could hardly avoid noticing the lopsided seating arrangement when she walked down the aisle.
Fuck! Had I known that Stuart was that insensitive to Lia’s feelings, I would have found plenty of guests to fill up the empty seats on this side.
“Bastard,” I grumbled, forcing myself not to look at my watch again, and trying to think about anything else except the guy my best friend was about to marry.
Nope. Don’t think about that!
I was far better off just thinking about Lia, and not the jackass she was going to meet at the altar in approximately…eleven more minutes?
Don’t do it, Conner! Don’t look at your damn watch again. Focus, man. Just think about Lia and not the damn wedding.
I shifted positions in my seat, feeling edgy as hell as I pictured Lia’s killer smile.
When she was younger, that radiant grin had always made me feel like I was her hero.
As an adult, it affected me somewhat…differently.
Oh, hell no. It was better to think about how it was with Lia when we were younger, when I’d still looked at her like she was a kid.
I tried to relax as my thoughts went back to those early, much more innocent times during my long friendship with Lia.
I’d been a senior in high school, and Lia had been a freshman the first time we’d met.
Some bastard had been trying to feel her up in the hallway next to her locker at school.
One broken nose later—his, not mine—had generated that very first smile Lia had laid on me, the one that had changed my entire world from that day forward.
I took a deep breath, and forced myself to keep my mind in the past as I swiped a bead of sweat from my forehead.
After I’d left her attacker on the hallway floor holding his bloody nose, I’d taken Lia home to her grandmother’s house, and we’d been tight friends ever since.
The following year, I’d gone away to Harvard, but we’d never lost touch. We’d talked a lot on the phone, and we’d always spent as much time as possible together on my college breaks.
Our worlds had been different back then, but it had never seemed to matter.
College drama. High school drama. They were similar enough, and after all Lia had been through, she was a hell of a lot wiser than most of her high school classmates.
I released a deep breath, but I lost the fight to keep my brain focused on the past.
Dammit, how could I not think about Lia as an adult? The majority of the years we’d spent as best friends had been after she’d finished high school.
She’d grown up.
I’d tried like hell not to notice how beautiful she was once she’d crossed into womanhood, even though my dick had rarely let me forget it.
And Lia and I had remained best friends for almost a decade and a half now.
I’d forced any and all carnal thoughts about her out of my head for years, chalking up my body’s reaction to her once she was an adult to rampant male hormones. I wasn’t going to be that guy who lost somebody as important as Lia just because I couldn’t control my dick.
Hell, I’d been a guy in my twenties, in my sexual peak. Why wouldn’t my dick get hard every time I saw Lia, even if she was my best friend?
Problem was, once I’d hit my late twenties and then my thirties, my attraction to Lia had gotten worse instead of better.
It probably wasn’t until I finished my law degree at Harvard, and had moved back to Seattle permanently, that I really knew the way I felt about Lia wasn’t going to change. No matter how much I chose to live in denial.
Once we were physically in the same place, and we started doing everything together like best friends do, that damn attraction had morphed into something that was probably perilously close to…obsession.
Hell yes, I’d wanted to take our relationship to another level for years. Sadly, I wasn’t sensing that same desire on her side.
Lia had claimed to be attracted to me…once. Too bad she’d been twenty-one years ol
d and drunker than a skunk at the time. Even sadder, she didn’t even remember that declaration the next morning. Hell, had she given me a single sign that she was attracted to me when she was in her right mind, I would have taken her up on the offer in less than a heartbeat, and gotten her naked before she could change her mind.
Unfortunately, the signal that she wanted anything other than friendship had never happened after that one, very tipsy profession. Not once. Nothing. And when there wasn’t a single ounce of hope, what in the hell was a guy supposed to do?
She’d dated.
I’d dated, hoping to hell I’d eventually find a woman who felt as right as Lia did when we were together.
Yeah. Well. That had never happened.
There had been a time, about two years ago, that I’d gotten so frustrated that I’d finally been ready to put our friendship on the line to tell Lia the truth. I’d been ready to do almost anything to convince her that the two of us should be dating, and burning up the sheets together, instead of looking for that connection somewhere else.
It was shortly after I’d made that monumental decision, but before I could tell her how I felt, that Lia had met…Stuart.
As usual, my timing had totally sucked.
I clenched my fists, and let out a low curse, as I let that critical voice in my head beat the hell out of me.
Face it, Conner, it’s too damn late to do anything now. You should have spoken up a long time ago, but you didn’t. How damn many opportunities did you need? Lia has been an adult and single for almost a decade. And Stuart? What the fuck? It’s not like you couldn’t have fought for Lia when they first started dating. You knew he was a dick, and that he probably wasn’t the right guy for her from the very beginning. You think you’re uncomfortable right now? How are you going to feel when Stuart the dickhead is actually Lia’s husband? Just remember, you’re in this damn position right now because of years of denial and missed opportunities.
“Shut the fuck up!” I mumbled aloud, shutting down the internal lecture.
Yeah, so here I was, in a church, seated on the bride’s side, literally waiting for the woman I loved to walk down the aisle and marry another guy. How fucked up was that?
“If it’s too late, why in the hell am I even here?” I questioned myself quietly.
Dumb question, because I already knew the answer. I was here sweating bullets because I couldn’t not be here for an event that was so important to Lia.
I looked around, trying desperately to find something that felt like Lia, some kind of sign that she’d actually had a hand in this whole lopsided fiasco of a wedding.
I scowled, my eyes narrowing as I noticed the abundance of tulips that were present on the altar, and in the flower arrangements decorating the aisle. “Tulips? Lia doesn’t even like tulips. Where in the hell are the roses and daisies?” I rasped, taken aback by the fact that I couldn’t find a single one of her two favorite flowers.
Hell, even the colors were all wrong.
Gold and purple sure as hell wouldn’t have been Lia’s preference. Had she gotten any say in her own damn wedding?
Son of a bitch! There wasn’t one familiar thing in this whole place that stamped this event as Lia’s, so I wasn’t about to get the reassurance I needed to settle my ass down.
My gut already hurt, so I had no idea how I was going to get through watching Lia say her vows to the man she insisted she loved enough to marry. A guy who wasn’t…me.
I’d run into Stuart enough times to know that he was a pompous asshole with a trust fund who didn’t have a genuine bone in his body. We’d pretty much had a hate/hate relationship from our very first meeting.
Yeah, I’d told myself the feeling that Lia and Stuart just didn’t fit was coming from a place of jealousy, but was it, really? I knew Lia as well as I knew myself. What if the lack of respect toward Lia I always sensed in Stuart wasn’t my overactive imagination?
I squirmed on the uncomfortable bench seat. The necktie that matched my custom suit felt way too tight, but it wasn’t a suit or tie that I’d never worn before. More than likely, it wasn’t the damn tie that was choking me…
It was all my regrets that were strangling me to death.
I lifted my arm and looked at my watch frantically.
“Shit! It’s eleven fifty-eight!” I cursed as I jerked on my tie and jumped to my feet. “And there’s no fucking way I’m going to be able to hold my peace.”
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
“You can quit that shit, now,” I grumbled. “I got it.”
Hell, maybe I was slow, but I recognized that sound for exactly what it was meant to be now.
It was a goddamn warning to listen to my instincts that Lia was in trouble, and to move my ass because the window of opportunity I had to help her was closing fast.
In my gut, all jealousy aside, I just fucking knew that marrying Stuart wasn’t going to make Lia happy.
Shit! Her happiness was everything to me, but it wasn’t my only concern. For some reason, I also knew she was in some kind of…danger.
My heart was racing from the adrenaline coursing through my body, adding to the crazy sense that I had to save Lia.
I felt a few more droplets of sweat hitting my forehead as I vaulted over one of Lia’s friends to get to the aisle. “Excuse me,” I rumbled automatically, but didn’t wait for a response.
I didn’t care if my timing sucked, and it didn’t matter that Lia would never see me as a possible love interest. As long as she didn’t marry…him.
Hell, if necessary, I’d toss her beautiful ass over my shoulder and get her the hell out of here before she made the biggest mistake of her life.
Once I’d shoved my way through the closed double doors that led to the hallway outside the chapel, I stopped abruptly when I saw Lia. We were separated by the rest of the large wedding party, but my eyes instantly became laser-focused on her, like all those other people didn’t even exist.
Fuck! Something’s wrong!
Lia was crying, which instantly made something in my gut twist painfully.
We’d been friends for way too long for me to even briefly consider that it was a happy cry. It wasn’t. I knew her, and her sorrow flowed from her to me in a heartbeat, just like it always did.
I pushed through the crowd around her until she saw me, and relief flooded through my body when she promptly flung herself into my arms.
Lia
OhmyGod! OhmyGod! OhmyGod! Stuart isn’t here. He’s not coming to the ceremony. It’s over!
I was still standing in the hallway of the church, my feet feeling like they were rooted to the floor, and watching the retreating figure of my fiancé’s brother as he exited the building.
I hadn’t said a word when he’d told me that my husband-to-be had found a woman who was more suitable for him, and that Stuart was backing out of the wedding.
My entire body was trembling, and I could feel the tears of confusion and relief falling down my cheeks.
I’d woken up this morning with a very heavy, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I’d tried to ignore for way too long, but it wasn’t until I’d pulled on my wedding dress in the changing room that I’d realized I couldn’t get married.
What had started as an inkling months ago had turned into a gut instinct that had started to scream at me this morning.
I’d been in a full-fledged panic by the time my dress was on.
I’d been on my way to find Stuart to cancel the wedding when I’d bumped into his brother instead.
I couldn’t say it wasn’t painful to be totally rejected and left at the altar. The entire wedding party had been listening when Stuart’s brother had calmly broken the news, and then retreated, looking like he was grateful that he’d completed a very distasteful errand.
I heard the murmured expressions of apologies from the
wedding party surrounding me, but I couldn’t decide exactly how I should respond.
Tears were pouring down my face, but how was I supposed to explain that the primary emotion driving all of my emotional turmoil was…relief?
Okay, there was a whole lot of confusion, anger, and sadness mixed in there somewhere, too, but I was far from heartbroken.
How could I even respect a man who had sent his brother to do his dirty work instead of giving me the courtesy of calling off the wedding face-to-face?
I’d just pulled the ridiculous, heavy veil that Stuart’s mother had insisted on from my head when my eyes met a familiar stare.
Zeke.
His startling blue-eyed gaze never left mine as he bulldozed his way through all of the people still muttering their apologies. Mentally exhausted and broken, I vaulted into the arms of the one person who had always been there for me, sobbing out all my bewilderment and relief on his muscular, powerful shoulder as his arms wrapped around me protectively.
God, how I’d needed this man right now.
“What happened?” Zeke’s gentle voice queried as my breakdown started to subside.
“Stuart is marrying somebody else,” I said tearfully. “His brother just told me a few minutes ago.”
And I’m perfectly fine with that.
Granted, it was humiliating to know that everybody would be talking about how Stuart had dumped the second-class woman he’d planned on marrying in favor of someone…more suitable. But those feelings were already fading away, and did I really give a damn what Stuart’s friends were talking about? They’d never been my friends, too.
Honestly, I felt like I’d just dodged a bullet. I was torn between wanting to punch Stuart and wanting to thank him for finding somebody else.
“Fuck!” Zeke cursed. “Let’s get the hell out of here, unless you really want to stay.”
I moved back and shook my head. “I can’t. Not yet. I have to tell everybody—”
“I’ll take care of it, Lia. Go with Zeke.” I felt a gentle touch on my arm as the soft, female voice spoke.
My friend, Ruby, had obviously heard Zeke and me talking. I shook my head. “I can’t just go.”
