She looked back, expecting him to be guiding her somewhere, but no, he was just resting his hand on her shoulder. Just because.
A few minutes later, Iris found herself sandwiched on the couch between Mari and Tia, a glass of cool rosé in her hand. She realized that it had been over a year since she’d been in a group this large, socializing. And she didn’t think she’d ever been in a group that had this much fun together, or loved one another so much.
There was an excited buzz racing through the group about the ceremony tomorrow. Everyone was beyond curious to see the island where Mari and Jay had met. Iris could tell there was an interesting story there, but she was too nervous to ask. She let Kat and Ryan do most of the talking as they sat across from the three women.
Meanwhile, Jay, Eli, and Marcus stood out on the balcony of the suite, the sliding door closed behind them, to keep the air conditioning inside.
It felt good to Marcus to be just the three of them. It was a baseline for him, their friendship, it had been for as long as he could remember.
“You nervous to tie the knot tomorrow, my dude?” he asked Jay, clapping a hand on his back and shoving a small glass of whiskey into his hand. Jay barely ever drank. But on an occasion like this, he might have a glass or two.
Jay laughed and rolled his eyes. “Well, considering we’re already married, my nerves are pretty settled on that front.”
“Then what are you nervous about?” Eli asked, eyes narrowed on Jay’s tan face. The three of them knew one another well enough to be able to cut through the bullshit and figure out when one of them was feeling the feels.
“Ah,” Jay muttered, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck and staring out toward the ocean. “Just seeing the island again. You know? The last time I was there, I was pretty much dying. And that’s where I lost Mari.” He paused. His love story with his wife had been filled with plenty of pain. He didn’t need to tell Eli and Marcus that. They’d lived a lot of that right alongside him. “It seemed like such a good idea, to have the ceremony there. But now that we’re here, I’m wondering if it’s just going to bring up all that fear and pain we went through.”
Marcus squinted his eyes around him at all the foliage, the ocean glinting like a bright jewel in front of them. “Jay, man, I don’t want to belittle your feelings or whatever. But this is literally paradise. How bad could it be?”
Jay laughed a little, held up his drink in a small toast to Marcus. “I guess you’re right.”
“And if it’s terrible tomorrow,” Eli chimed in. “Who cares? It’s not about the ceremony. It’s about the marriage. And you two are in it for the long haul.”
Jay’s eyebrows flicked up. “That’s the truth.” He turned and squinted back through the balcony glass at Mari’s dark head of hair. Good lord, he loved that woman. And after what felt like a lifetime of waiting, she was his. Good and his. And that was all he needed to concentrate on tomorrow. Mari leaned back on the couch and it brought Marcus’s pretty little friend into Jay’s line of sight. He swallowed his nervous feelings about tomorrow and decided to engage in one of his favorite pastimes. Giving his friend shit. “Speaking of long haul, what’s the deal with Little Miss Wife Material you brought as your plus one?”
Marcus inhaled a little whiskey down the wrong tube and frowned, hard. “Irie?”
“Duh,” Eli said, rolling his eyes and leaning against the balcony railing.
“Don’t lean against that, dude,” Marcus frowned. “You never know how often these buildings are inspected.” His two best friends had been in the hospital enough times for him to have a particularly sharp eye for things that could cause them harm.
Eli straightened up and sat on one of the loungers instead. “Don’t evade. What’s going on with you and Irie?”
Marcus frowned more and sat on his own lounger. “Nothing.”
Eli rolled his eyes again. “For fuck sakes. If you can’t tell the truth to us, then who can you tell?”
Marcus swirled the whiskey in his glass and looked out at the ocean for a second. Eli was dead right. If Marcus kept it inside, it was just going to die there. “Fine. There’s a lot going on between us. But it’s all beneath the surface. Nothing’s happened.”
Jay took another look at the very pretty woman sitting inside the hotel suite. “Why the hell not?”
“First, because of work. And don’t ask, because I can’t tell you more.” They didn’t push. At this point, they were both very used to Marcus having to keep many, many FBI-related secrets from them. Actually, they preferred it that way. Just as Marcus didn't want Eli leaning against a balcony railing twenty stories in the air, they didn’t want to know about any firefights Marcus might be involved in.
“And second?” Eli prompted, though he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.
“And second you already know,” Marcus waved his hand through the air in resignation. “I’m no good for women. So I’m, you know, abstaining.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Jay set his glass down and sat next to Eli, facing Marcus. “This celibacy thing is forever? I thought it was just until you found a girl you really liked.” He yanked his thumb back in the direction of the suite. “Like that one.”
Marcus scraped his hand across the top of his head. “Well, forever wasn’t the fucking plan. But now I’ve got this girl that I…” he didn’t bother finishing the sentence. “And I have absolutely no way of being with her.”
“What?” Jay asked, utterly confused.
Eli, who was a little more in the know about how Marcus was viewing this whole thing, sighed. “Marcus, I still think you’re being too hard on yourself.” He turned to Jay, knowing that Marcus didn’t want to go through the whole thing again. “Marcus thinks that he destroys women when he’s with them. That he leaves them worse off than when he found them. And he, what was it again? Has weird sex hang ups.”
Marcus couldn’t help but laugh for a second. “I don’t have weird sex hang ups. I just, I don’t know. Women tell me I’m a lot to handle. Far more experienced women than Irie. And I just, I can’t do that to her.”
“Wow.” Jay eyed his friend in a discerning, but non-judgmental way. “Don’t you think that’s something she should decide for herself?”
Marcus flicked his eyes to Jay. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, she might be inexperienced. But from what I can tell, she’s a grown woman. And you’re obviously into her. So you’re not gonna treat her badly. Doesn’t it make the most sense to put your cards on the table and let her decide whether or not to play?”
Marcus clapped his mouth closed. It hadn’t occurred to him to think of it like that. And now that he thought about it, he supposed it was a little condescending that he was so sure what would or wouldn’t be good for her. He was caught, balancing between two ideologies.
The door beside them slid open. “Ready to go?” Kat asked, leaning against the door and scanning her eyes over her three boys. Jay was the only one who was biologically hers. But damn if she didn’t have a real soft spot for all three of them. Her eyes lingered on Marcus the longest. It didn’t take much to see that he was beating himself up about something. But then, Marcus was always beating himself up about something.
The men stood and Kat watched them file inside, her eyes on Marcus. If he was still in this funk at the end of the trip then she was gonna have to pull him aside and make him talk. He wouldn’t like it, he never did, but she’d been taking care of him for long enough to know exactly what he needed.
The younger generation, talking and laughing, left the hotel room, leaving Kat and Ryan alone for just a moment.
“Did you…?” Ryan asked, pointing toward where Marcus had just left.
“Yeah, yup, I noticed,” Kat cut in. They’d known one another for so long, had been raising these boys in tandem for so long, that she didn’t even have to ask what he was referencing.
“My money’s on the girl.” Ryan carded a hand through his hair.
“You think
he’s all twisted up over her?”
“Sure do. I happen to know exactly what all the signs are of being all twisted up over a girl.” He grinned at Kat and crooked an elbow in her direction.
None of their boys had asked, yet, exactly what was going on between them, but as they’d only booked one room, there was quite a bit to be assumed there.
If any of them asked, both Kat and Ryan would tell the truth. They weren’t hiding anything.
“I wonder if I should talk to him,” Ryan mused as they strolled down the hallway, a good ways back from the kids. “Tell him about how things went with you and me.”
Kat raised her eyebrows up high. “You’d do that?”
“If it helped him figure out which way was north, then I would.”
Kat watched the side of his face. “You’re a good dad.”
He grinned. “I know.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
So, turned out, they weren’t a scary bunch. They laughed at her jokes, kept her engaged, told stories constantly, and not once did they accuse her of lying about who she really was. The last of which wasn’t exactly a surprise, but it was a relief to Iris nonetheless.
Because the ceremony tomorrow was on the small island, with no amenities, they were pretty much having the reception tonight.
“This is all out of order,” Eli had cried when he’d found out.
Tia had said, “Mari doesn’t give a shit about that.” At the exact same time that Mari had said, “I don’t give a shit about that.”
The two women had laughed in delight and Iris had found herself charmed. She’d worried, originally, that everyone had known one another for as long as the boys had, but turned out, Tia and Mari were still getting to be friends. So Iris didn’t feel too out of place tagging along with them.
She’d sat between the two women at dinner and had been blown away by the stories of their relationships. Eli and Tia, who’d sort of known one another in high school, were reunited on an operating table of all places. Tia had performed emergency surgery on him one night about a year ago. Their love had grown from there.
But Mari and Jay might have had that story beat in Iris’s view, particularly because they were all just a few miles from where it all started.
“Trapped in a hurricane together?” Iris had exclaimed. “You have to be joking.”
“Nope, not joking. Real hurricane, five years ago. We were trapped for days, over on that little island. We’d never met before. And by the end we were in love.”
“So you’ve been together for a long time then?”
Mari shook her head. “No. Not at all. We got separated before we left the island, and we never found each other. Not until we ran into each other at a party a few months ago.”
“What?” Iris’s eyes were as big as saucers. She didn’t see Marcus watching her from across the table. “You were separated for five years?”
“Yup. And the craziest part was, I thought I was over all of it. Over him. And then I run into him and BAM. It was like nothing had changed. It was always Jay for me. Since the day I met him.”
“Wow.” When Iris looked up this time, she caught Marcus’s eye, but she couldn’t begin to interpret the look on his face.
She was distracted, though, when Tia and Mari groaned at yet another delicious course that had just been brought out to them. The food was so good, Iris and Mari bumped food babies together afterwards.
“Don’t joke about that,” Jay had said, pointing to Mari’s belly. “Don’t tempt me.”
Afterwards, they’d moved on to drinks and dancing and much to everyone’s delight, even Jay got a little tipsy. Iris slipped out to go to the bathroom and on her way back, she lingered at the edge of the dimly lit bar, right by the dance floor. And she just watched them. Particularly, she watched Jay and Eli. The way they were with their girls. So loving, so awed, so into them. She wondered what she and Marcus looked like from afar. If their feelings were clear to anyone watching or if they were hiding it as well as they were trying to.
She sighed, pushing the thoughts from her head and rejoining the group.
As soon as she was back to their little knot of people, Mari, a little tipsy herself, tugged Iris by the elbow. “You’ll never guess what I just did.”
“What’s that?” Iris asked.
“I booked us that.” Mari pointed across the dim bar toward a closed door.
Iris squinted through the dim lighting, past the bodies on the dance floor. “You booked us a… private room?” Iris grimaced when she thought of some of the things a private room in a bar like this had seen. She’d rather the walls didn’t talk in a place like that.
Mari laughed, drunken and bright.
“I booked us a private karaoke room,” she clarified, as if that made it better. “And everybody has to do it.” Mari pointed around at the group. “I’m the bride and I say so.”
Iris let herself get tumbled along with the tide of the group and she was having fun, but she was also extremely relieved when she found herself seated next to Marcus in the karaoke room.
This whole night had been a lot to take in and he’d been a buoy in a storm for her. Every time she’d looked up, there he’d been, searching for her eyes, checking on her, keeping an eye on her. It had made her feel safe at any minute. And now, pressed thigh to thigh on the creaky leather couch, she felt more than safe, she felt downright cared for. Marcus pressed a cold bottle of water into her hand and winked.
She leaned forward. “I haven’t had very much to drink,” she whispered in his ear. “I stopped at dinner.”
“I know,” he nodded. “Just thought you’d be thirsty.”
Maybe it was silly, but somewhere, she couldn’t help but wonder if the bottle of water was a love letter of sorts. The way the rug in the kitchen had been. The watch on her wrist. Giving her the shower first. She wondered if Marcus was trying to tell her something without actually telling her.
Regardless, she gulped it down, spraying some by accident when Eli started in on his very off-key rendition of “Standing Outside the Fire.” He was boisterous and completely owned every moment of it. They were all laughing by the end.
“Celebrity crush officially dead,” Iris laughed into Marcus’s ear and he turned to her and grinned. A real grin, a true grin of utter and complete relief.
“Thank god,” he replied, running his arm along the back of the couch in a move that felt familiar and thrilling to both of them. “I’ve been worried about having to beat the shit out of my best friend.”
She was still smiling to herself when Mari rose up from the couch, scanned the group, and pointed at Iris. “Your turn.”
“Me?” Iris asked in disbelief. “I thought it was just, you know, family.”
“Stage,” Mari said, brooking no argument whatsoever.
She knew it was ridiculous, considering she wrote music for a living, but Iris never, ever performed in front of people, besides Owen. She honestly couldn’t remember the last time she’d sung for a room of people, maybe 7th grade?
She took a deep breath as she rose. She hadn’t even picked out a song. And sure enough, Mari was already pressing play on one she’d chosen for Iris. “Since You Been Gone.”
Yeah. Not happening. Majorly not happening. Iris snatched the remote control out of Mari’s hand and stopped the song. Looking over her shoulder, she spotted a keyboard in the corner of the room.
She could see that there was no graceful way to not sing, which would have been Iris’s first choice, so instead, she picked the lesser of two evils. Rather than butcher some pop song, publicly no less, she chose to perform an original. At least they wouldn’t know for sure if she messed it up.
Iris grabbed the mic and walked it over to the keyboard, saying a silent prayer of thanks when the dang thing flipped on. “I’m not going to sing karaoke,” she started and the whole group booed, making Iris grin and roll her eyes. “But I will sing a song that I just recently wrote. I think it’s particularly apt for our newlyweds.”
She tested a few notes on the keyboard as the group quieted down. She didn’t look up. She didn’t have to. She could feel Marcus’s gaze burning into her. His dark eyes were like a touch on her skin, too hot and too tight. Part of her wanted to squirm away from that gaze, and the other part of her just wanted to lie back and let those eyes have their way with her.
She adjusted the mic, took a deep breath and played the opening chords. “This song is called ‘You Again’.”
Iris raised her voice and sang.
Aaaaaaaaaand Marcus was a goner. He was such a fucking goner. He’d never heard her sing before and it was a good thing. Because if he had he would not have made it out of that beach house without begging for… everything.
Her voice was perfect. Strong and husky, but she had range, true range. The song fluttered and floated, both filled with flirty temptation and deep, earthy desire. Her voice blew her brother’s right out of the water and Marcus wondered why the hell she wasn’t the famous one. He would pay hundreds of dollars to see a voice like this in concert.
And there she was, the dim, crappy lighting of the karaoke room turning her blue and then green and then red as the lights alternated. The keyboard was quiet and obviously very old, but it didn’t matter. She shined. She effervesced. She absolutely glowed up there.
It took a minute for some of the lyrics to make it all the way to his brain. She was already on the first chorus.
I say to myself
kid, let it go
cuz that man is top shelf
and he’s so damn grown.
Move on, move on, girl.
Move on, move on, girl.
Get a crush on somebody else, girl
Quit livin’ your life in hell, girl
Just when I think I’m over it,
I turn that corner and it’s
You again.
It’s you again?
Oh, baby, it’s you again.
And what can I do
but just lose it for you, again.
The lyrics were alternately fluttering and fiercely punctuated with the piano keys. Without even the backup instruments or polishing of any kind, Marcus knew, in his bones, that this was going to be a number one hit someday. Just like he knew, in his bones, that this song was absolutely about him.
Bachelors In Love Page 63
