The Best Man

by Renshaw, Winter

  The two exchange concerned expressions.

  They want to help. And they mean well. But no fucking thank you.

  I can do this on my own if I have to. I can find her. I can make sense of all of this. And I don’t need Dr. Shapiro on speed dial to do so.

  “We should probably get going if we’re going to make our dinner reservation,” Claire says. “We can talk about this more over drinks if you want …”

  “No. I need to go back to the Mondauer.”

  Claire laughs. “And do what? Hang out in the lobby like a stalker?”

  “No. I’ll be at the bar.”

  “Then we’re going with you. We’ll just cancel our reservations,” she says, turning to Luke. “Right, babe?”

  “Of course,” Luke says. “I’d love to meet this mystery woman myself.”

  “Because you don’t believe me …” I roll my eyes when they aren’t looking.

  “Cainan.” Claire comes to my side, taking my hand. “Put yourself in our shoes. If I hit my head, woke up, and told you I was married to the King of Jamaica and then six months later told you I found him in a bar in Manhattan … you’d tell me I was batshit freaking crazy and you’d have me committed.”

  She isn’t wrong.

  “You guys better get going,” I say, “or it’ll be three months before you can get another table at Centro Pietro.”

  With that, I show myself out.

  I hail a cab back to the bar.

  And I wait for her until closing time.

  But she never shows.

  13

  Brie

  “You’ll have to let me know if there are ever any openings at the Phoenix branch,” my Manhattan counterpart, Maya Delgado, says in her thick accent Wednesday morning over lunch.

  Carly would be proud—I’m eating at a restaurant I’ve never tried before and I switched to a new hotel just to try something different for a change.

  “You’re looking to move?” I ask. My gaze moves to my naked ring finger. I left the ring at home before I flew out here. It was an unintentional move. I was washing my face and sat it next to the sink. I was already through airport security Tuesday morning when I realized I’d forgotten to put it back on.

  She twirls a mound of pesto-slicked linguine into a spoon. “My grandparents live in Mesa. They’re in their eighties and Gram’s not getting around as well. I’ve already lost one set of grandparents, and my biggest regret was not spending more time with them. Would just be nice if I could be closer, you know? At least temporarily. New Yorker for life, baby.”

  She places a fist over her heart then makes a peace sign.

  “Yeah.” I dab my mouth with a cloth napkin. “I don’t know if there’ll be any openings soon … but maybe we could trade locations? Maybe for a few months or something?”

  “Seriously?” Maya’s eyes smile before her mouth does. “You would do that for me?”

  I nod. “Yeah, why not?”

  Who even am I right now?

  I chuckle to myself.

  I’m a crazy woman, that’s who.

  “We’d have to get it cleared with HR and a couple of the higher ups, but I don’t think it’d be an issue. We do the same jobs. And we can keep our caseloads. We’ll just be trading offices essentially,” I say. “Maybe we could start at the end of the month? Go through the end of the year?”

  I check my watch. The first candidate’s interview is in two hours. The second interview is tomorrow. Brenda at Fairway Recruiting managed to line up a third for this Friday morning, five hours before I’m set to fly back home.

  “You realize you’d be trading arguably the best weather months in Phoenix for some of the worst ones in New York, right?”

  Shrugging, I say, “I’ve always wanted to see New York around the holidays. It’d be nice to experience a white Christmas too.”

  “All right.” Maya sips her water and lifts her dark brows. “Let’s do this.”

  On our way back to the office, we pass the little bar connected to my original hotel, and I think about the guy from yesterday, the one who hit on me in a Hoboken hook-up bar earlier this year. There was something different about him. A quietude, a lack of sexual aggression perhaps? He kept studying me. And he claimed to have no recollection of ever meeting me before, of ever hitting on me.

  My cheeks heat for the next block when I realize that maybe I had the wrong guy.

  Maybe he wasn’t the same one from the bar?

  By the time we’re back to the office, I snap out of it. It was definitely the same guy.

  I could never forget that chiseled jawline or iridescent copper gaze.

  But it’s only when I’m sitting down, that I remember the words he said to me as I walked away from him the first night we met: Next time we meet, we won’t be strangers.

  I never thought there’d be a next time.

  I’m willing to bet he felt the same way.

  “It was just a pick up line,” I whisper to myself under my breath as I prepare for our first interview. “And it meant absolutely nothing.”

  14

  Cainan

  “Mr. James?” My assistant says over the loudspeaker Friday morning. “I have Grant Forsythe for you on line three.”

  “Thanks.” I swipe the receiver and grunt a hello into the phone.

  “You sound like fucking ass. What’s your issue?” he asks.

  I’m losing my damn mind. That’s the issue.

  Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I stayed at the hotel bar until close, hoping, praying, waiting, and wishing for that woman to come back— but she never did.

  And in a city of almost two million people, there was no way of finding her. Besides, for all I knew, she flew back to wherever she was from.

  “Did you get my email?” Grant asks.

  I turn to my computer screen, the brightness searing my tired eyes. “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “I haven’t had time to go over it yet,” I say.

  “Rough week?” He chuckles into the receiver.

  “Something like that.”

  “All right, cool. I get it. Not every day can be rainbows and sunshine … unless, you know, you live someplace that actually has sunshine most days of the year,” he says. “Anyway, I looked over the boilerplate prenup you sent and I made some notes. I wasn’t sure if there was a way we could address the post-marital assets in a more … subtle way? Like aggressive but not aggressive?”

  I double-click on the attachment in his email. His handwriting over my typed contract is almost impossible to decipher, so I zoom in.

  “So her dad is this ridiculously-loaded, residential real-estate fat cat,” he says. “Estimates put him at just under half a billion dollars net worth.”

  “And you want to make sure you get a piece of that if the marriage falls apart?”

  “I mean … let’s say we’re married twenty years, her parents pass, and she gets a fourth of that since she’s got three siblings,” he says. “I want to make sure I don’t walk away empty-handed.”

  “And why would you be entitled to any of her parents’ fortune?”

  “Because I’m about to double it for them,” he answers without hesitation. “I’ve been talking to her father about switching his long-term finances and capital gains accounts to my company. Once he signs with me, the yearly management fees alone could top seven figures. He could be my one and only account and I’d be sitting pretty. Virtually retired.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m going to make that wealthy bastard an even wealthier bastard, and I want to make sure everything is allocated in a fair way—without coming off …”

  “… without coming off as a self-serving douche?”

  “Cain, stop …” he exhales into the phone, dramatic and exhausted. “You know what it’s like to have nothing. To come from nothing. It’s not like I’m trying to steal anything. And for the record, I treat this woman like the freaking queen that she is.”

  “Except for the part w
here you’ve been flying to New York once a week and hooking up with Serena McQuiston …”

  “I’m not perfect.” He snorts. “And I told you last time, I’m done with Serena. I’m taking this engaged thing seriously.”

  Famous last words …

  “You realize there’s a cheating clause in this prenup,” I remind him. It’s standard. I left it in knowing damn well he’d gloss over it because I’d hoped I could bring it up personally. Best friend to best friend, I still don’t think he’s making the right decision, but unfortunately, it’s not my call.

  “Can we take that out?”

  “She’ll notice if it’s not there. Spouses always notice. If she takes this to her own attorney, they’ll notice too. And with the verbiage you want me to add, any lawyer with half a brain cell can see this thing is tipped generously in the husband’s favor.”

  “Damn. Okay. Get creative then.”

  “You want me to write a prenup that looks fair at first glance, but secretly gives you an out so you can cheat and still walk away a rich bastard in the end.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. I do this sort of shit all the time for other clients. It shouldn’t be that hard to do it for my best fucking friend. But there’s a weight in the pit of my stomach. A hesitation.

  “Exactly.”

  My cell phone vibrates next to my computer mouse.

  “Grant, my sister’s calling. Let me get back to you about this later.” I return the receiver to its cradle and take Claire’s call. “What’s up?”

  “Hey! So your party is next weekend …”

  “Yeah?”

  “But we’ve had a handful of guests who originally RSVP’d yes but have since had to cancel …”

  I lean back. “Okay. And you’re telling me this why?”

  “Well, the party invite is on Facebook,” she says. “And you no longer have a Facebook account. But a bunch of people are posting old pictures of you in this group and writing well-wishes and asking questions about you. I just think you should reactivate your account so you can respond to some of them.”

  “No.”

  “One week,” she says. “Reactivate it for one week then you can go dark again.”

  “No.”

  She laughs. “Then give me your password and I’ll reactivate it and post as you.”

  “Hard no.”

  “Seriously though. Some of these pictures on here are freaking hilarious. I forgot you used to get highlights. You looked like a boyband-er. And remember when you used to tan all the time?”

  Good God. “Who the hell posted those?”

  “If you logged on, you’d see …”

  I groan.

  “Oh, and have you seen Grant’s new fiancée? She’s freaking gorgeous. They’re going to make beautiful babies someday. They look really happy together.”

  I bite my tongue, unable to tell her about Grant’s attempt to fuck her over in this prenup.

  “Oh! Gotta go. Luke’s beeping in.” My sister ends the call, and I slump back, dragging in a ragged breath as I tap on the App Store icon and re-download the Facebook app I swore off a lifetime ago.

  Three minutes later, I’m logged in and welcomed back.

  I wade through a hundred notifications until I find the invite to the party, and I accept it.

  A flood of images, most of them older than fucking time and would be embarrassing as hell if I were the kind of guy who gave a damn what people thought of me.

  Halfway down the page, I click on an image Grant posted eleven hours ago—one of the two of us in London our senior year of college, when we had a competition to see how many English girls we could bag. For the record, he won because his standards were arguably looser than mine. But to this day, I get hard anytime I hear a beautiful woman speak with received pronunciation.

  I smirk at how young, stupid, and piss-poor we were at the time.

  Never would’ve believed we’d have both come so far in such a small amount of time, but here we are …

  I click on Grant’s profile to check out his pictures since Claire said his bride-to-be was drop-dead gorgeous and I’d like to see the face of the woman we’re about to fuck over—should I agree to trash my morals.

  I expect to find a generically beautiful stranger with a sun-kissed glow and desperation emanating off her body in the form of fake tits and an exercise addiction—because historically that’s been Grant’s type.

  Only the woman smiling ear to ear in his profile pic, her arms wrapped around Grant’s shoulders identified as “Brie White” … is the woman from the bar last week—who also happened to be the woman from my dream.

  And now she’s marrying my best friend.

  I sink back. Gutted. Hollowed.

  She told me in the bar that she was planning to leave her fiance—but now that I know it’s Grant and now that I know how thirsty he is for a drink of her family’s fountain of wealth … he’ll never let that happen.

  And even if he did—it wouldn’t change the fact that I could never have her.

  I would never do that to him.

  No amount of justifying will ever change the fact that she’s off-limits.

  15

  Brie

  I return to my apartment Friday night with every intention of chucking my suitcase into my closet to be dealt with later, uncorking a bottle of sweet red, and drawing myself the hottest, bubbliest bath in the history of mankind while I rid myself of airport grime. When I was finished with all of that, I fully intended to crawl into bed solo and lose myself in the book I started on the plane but didn’t have time to finish thanks to the chatty man across the aisle.

  Only I’m greeted with Grant in a navy suit, bearing a bouquet of two dozen ice-pink roses wrapped in rose gold paper and tied with a lace ribbon.

  “Surprise, babe.” He goes in for a kiss, his hand parking on my hip as he breathes me in and tastes my lips. “Missed you.”

  “You didn’t have to do all of this …” I take the extensive bouquet and leave my bag by the door. “I thought we weren’t getting together until tomorrow?”

  “I couldn’t wait another day.” He leads me into the living room, where two massage tables are draped in linens and two female masseuses greet us with smiles. Handing me a robe, he says, “Go get changed, babe. After this, I’m having your favorite dinner from Hollow Tree delivered, then I thought we could catch that indie flick you’ve been wanting to see.”

  I have to hand it to him—Grant is going to make someone an amazing husband someday. An impressive amount of thought and foresight goes into his every gesture.

  I slip away to my bathroom, freshen up, and change into a robe.

  But in the hour that follows, I’m silently grateful I don’t have to look into the eyes of the man whose heart I’m about to obliterate.

  16

  Cainan

  Her name is Brie White.

  All day, I’ve been repeating those two words in my head on a loop. Like a mantra.

  So much fucking white …

  When I woke up in the hospital, everything around me was white.

  It’s a coincidence, I’m sure. White is a common last name. It’s even more common as a color, particularly where hospitals are concerned.

  I lock my office Friday afternoon and pass Paloma on my way out. “I’m taking the rest of the day.”

  I’m too wound up to get anything done.

  I need air. I need a walk. I need a drink. Hell, maybe even a fucking cigarette with a side of Ativan—anything to calm myself so I can make sense of this.

  Grant said he met her at the hospital, that she was the one who saw my accident and called 9-1-1. Not only that, but she followed the ambulance and stayed in the waiting room … which was where she met him.

  But according to Brie, we met before that fateful night.

  I saw her first. I wanted her first. I put my sights on her first—even if I don’t recall any of it. And now, none of that matters.

  No one ever said life was going to be fair.
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  But no one ever said it was going to be fifty shades of fucked up.

  17

  Brie

  Grant’s side of the bed is empty Saturday morning. The scent of coffee wafts from the kitchen into my room via the half-opened doorway. But the house is silent. He isn’t making breakfast. He isn’t watching the news in the living room. He isn’t clicking away on his laptop.

  I drag myself out of bed, freshen up, and find him seated at the kitchen table, facing the sliding glass door to the back patio.

  He’s still, unmoving save for the slow rise and fall of his shoulders.

  He wanted to make love last night, but I rebuffed him. I told him I was tired. He kissed me and rolled over, sleeping soundly in a matter of minutes while the wheels in my head spun with a thousand guilt-laden thoughts.

  Perhaps he feels me pulling away? Perhaps he knows what’s in the cards for us.

  I have to end it.

  It’s not right to drag it out, to delay the inevitable. Originally, I’d planned to go with him to Cainan’s party later this week since the tickets were already purchased, but I don’t want to feel like a fraud, playing the part of the doting fiancée when really I’m two seconds from calling the whole thing off the instant we’re back on desert ground.

  “Hey.” I shuffle to the coffee maker and pour myself a mug. “You okay over there?”

  It’s not like him to be so sullen, so paralyzed.

  Finally, he moves, his head turning to the side. “Hey.”

  I take the seat next to his and clear my throat. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  I wrap my twitching fingers around the warm ceramic. I’ve always hated confrontation, hating hurting people.

  Dragging in a long breath, he turns from the glass door and faces me. It’s then that I catch the dampness in his dark eyes and the thick tear sliding down his cheek.

  “My dad died this morning,” he says.

  Grant buries his head in his hands, shoulders jerking with each silent sob.