“Tonight was good, huh?”

Eli rarely drinks, anxiety aggravator that it is, but right now he’s adorably tipsy and rosy-cheeked as we make our way down the path to our cottage, hands clasped, gravel crunching beneath our shoes.

“It was very good,” I agree, still enveloped in the easy intimacy we shared all night: at dinner and on the dance floor after Cole left us, using the dense, undulating crowd as an excuse to dance impossibly close, and then on the quiet drive home when Eli leaned his head back, eyes closed, running his hand up and down my thigh in a soothing circuit.

Really, the only hiccup in the night was that weird interlude with Cole. “Adam seemed stoked about the band,” Eli continues.

I make an assenting noise. If the HOLY SHIT YES text I got after

sending the video is any indication, we can give ourselves—and Cole—a big pat on the back.

Things are starting to go right, and not a minute too soon. Adam and Grace will be here in less than forty-eight hours.

My fingers tighten around Eli’s reflexively at the reminder of our time limit.

The grounds around us are silent, the courtyard we’re passing through cloaked in darkness. I can make out the shape of the wedding venue—the tent for the reception, the freshly finished deck, and the oak tree that will drape its shade over Adam and Grace on Saturday. It all looks like a promise. It’s not the picture they painted when they planned their wedding the first time, but the one that’s developing now looks beautiful in my imagination. I just hope they agree.

“They are way better than a DJ, right?” I ask. “I’m not just talking myself into it?”

Eli stops, tugging on my hand so that I’ll turn to him. I do without hesitation, sinking against his body when his hand shifts to the small of my back.

“That band is a hundred times better than any DJ we could’ve found on such short notice,” he says, pushing a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “It’s probably ten times better than what we could’ve found on long notice. We owe Cole for this one, too, but it’s time to admit that Geli is killing it.”

“I’m…sorry.” I blink. “Did you just mash our names together?” He grins. “I did.”

“Wow, that’s—”

He presses a finger to my lips. “I’m going to be embarrassed about it tomorrow, but please let me get away with it for now.”

It takes everything inside me not to laugh. “Okay.”

“Adam’s face is going to melt off on Saturday. He’s going to wonder why he ever wanted a DJ in the first place.” I can see the pleasure in his eyes, the need to prove himself turning into something triumphant. My heart expands; this Eli is a far cry from the one who sat in my car last week. “He’s going to be indebted to us for the rest of his life.”

I close my eyes and imagine that. Not him owing us, but knowing I’ve grown roots deep enough to stick for that long.

When I open my eyes, Eli’s looking down at me, his face illuminated by the moonlight. Kissed by it, in all the places I want my mouth.

“You’re the best best woman, Georgia,” he says with a tenderness that takes the shape of adoration. Something intensified by alcohol, no doubt. It goes to my head like champagne all the same. “And I’m turning into a not- terrible best man.”

“Drunk Eli gives himself a lot more credit than sober Eli, but not enough. You’ve been the best best man this week.”

He runs his hand up and down my back, pleasure and amusement warring on his face. “I’m buzzed, not drunk. Drunk Eli would’ve forgotten that you gave Cole the first dance instead of me. Buzzed Eli remembers very clearly.”

“I gave him the first three if we’re being accurate.” Eli spears me with a look so unimpressed that I laugh. “Do I need to remind you that you got every dance after that?”

“No,” he says, a rough purr entering his voice. “You were grinding your ass into me for the better part of two hours. It’s already permanently in my mental reel.”

I give him a slinky smile. “See? And anyway, Cole talked about you the whole time, so you might as well have been there.”

His hand stills. “He talked about me?”

“Well, you and me,” I amend. “Turns out he’s onto us.” “Onto us.”

“He knows we’re…” I struggle to find a word that isn’t too big or small for what this is, the Goldilocks of It’s Complicated, before landing on a very underwhelming, “Doing things.”

He hums, his fingers starting to play up my spine. “What did he say?”

The decision is split-second: I won’t divulge it all. Doing so would go against the agreement Eli and I made to keep things simple this week. Everything Cole laid out was about future things, not what we’re doing right now, and none of that is going to come to pass.

I clear my throat. “Basically that. He’s onto us. Specifically, he mentioned the unsavory things he thinks we’re doing in the cottage—”

At this, Eli’s expression clears. His grin is equal amounts lopsided and heated as his hand wanders down to palm my ass. “I think they’re very savory.”

“Easy, tiger,” I laugh as he dips his mouth down my jaw, placing sweet, open-mouthed kisses there. “You don’t seem surprised that he knows. Or concerned, for that matter.”

After a beat, he says, voice muffled, “I’m not concerned.” “Do you think he’s going to say something to Adam?”

“No.” The word is a brush against my throat. “He can keep it to himself.

And more importantly, he knows it’s not his business.”

“That’s what I told him, but it didn’t stop him from saying something anyway.”

“It’s probably my fault. Maybe I’m being extremely obvious about it,” he murmurs. “Maybe he’s been catching me staring at you when you’re not looking, thinking about all the unchecked things on our list.”

I move gratefully with the subject shift. I don’t want to think about complicated past or future things. I want to be here, sinking into the simplicity of wanting each other then and wanting it again now. Acting on that, instead of thinking about all the hurt that happened between it.

“Still pretty long, huh?”

“You have no idea.” His body sways into mine and he catches me around the waist, curving a hand around my neck. His thumb makes a soft path along my jaw as he says, quieter now, “This is on the list.”

“What is?”

“Kissing you right here. I always loved being outside with you at night in the summer. You looked so beautiful that it made my heart ache.” His voice drops. “And so happy. I loved seeing you like that.”

There’s an ache in his voice that becomes a twin feeling in my chest. “Well, here we are again.”

“Yeah.” The word is barely a sound, small and grateful. Eli pulls my hand to his chest, right over his pounding heart. “Will you give me your mouth now?”

It’s so easy to say yes. He lets out a bare groan as soon as our lips touch, another one, hungrier now, when I give him my tongue, my taste, those quiet sounds that seem to wind his need so tight. He curls over me, hand still cradling my face, gentle despite the way our kiss turns deep and unrestrained.

“Fuck, the way I’ve wanted you,” he breathes against my mouth. “I don’t know how anyone can look at me and not see it.”

He says something else, into my skin the way he did the other night. All I hear is the you, and I repeat it in my head in a rhythm that matches the beat of his heart: wild and fast, over and over and over again.

Eventually, his mouth turns patient. He gives me a tender kiss on my lips, in the middle and then at each corner. Up along my cheekbone, to the

outer corner of my eye, my temple. For a handful of seconds he stays there, a kiss that doesn’t end, and I close my eyes, holding on to him.

Right now just keep doing what you’re doing feels like falling, and it makes me grip him tighter. I can’t hit the ground.

“C’mon,” he says finally. He puts his hand over mine, still pressed to his heart. “Let’s go home.”

I wake up to an empty bed. When I check my phone, there are a handful of texts that my eyes are too bleary to read, so I toss it aside after checking the time—nearly ten, dear god—and drag my tired body out of the bedroom.

Eli is sitting on the loveseat, shirtless, pulling absently at his necklace while he scrolls his phone. He looks up when I walk in, setting it on the table.

“There she is,” he says, giving me a lengthy once-over.

He’s clearly cataloging the signs of the way he wrecked me last night once he’d fully sobered up—the whisker burn he left on my thighs, the disaster he made of my hair when he turned me onto my stomach and tangled his fingers into it, pushed into me with hard, slow strokes while he murmured, “This is what you needed, isn’t it?” He kept that pace for so long, telling me he could be so patient when he wanted to, he could wait forever for me, until I was a begging mess, whispering, “please,” so ready to fall apart for him. Only then did he push me over the edge, groaning, “It’s what I need, too. All the time.”

“Here I am, in all my glory,” I croak out.

The room is small enough that with just a few steps I’m close enough to reach, and Eli wastes no time reeling me between the V of his legs, gazing up at me. “You’re beautiful.”

And then he wraps his arms around my waist, resting his cheek against my stomach; his exhale takes the shape of relief. It’s quietly intimate, so

familiar, and for a second I can’t breathe. I’m preemptively jealous of the Georgia who gets this now.

I curl over him, running my fingers through his hair, remembering how I wished for him on my birthday all those years ago. Remembering how it came true, and the bliss and mess that came after it. I know better than to wish for anything now, but it curls like smoke from a birthday candle anyway, still warm from the fire that burned it.

“Are you hungover?” I ask.

His breath puffs through my sleep shirt. “Not in the pounding headache way.”

It takes me a second to get it. “In the racing thoughts way.”

“Yeah. Probably why I ended up staring at my bank account this morning, and then switched over to LinkedIn.”

“Oh.” My heart dips and I start to step away, but his hold tightens stubbornly. “Anything new on the job front?”

“I got an email from my recruiter about that strategy role. They want me to come in a week from Monday to meet with the wider team. Should be a lock.” His tone is a curious mix of relieved and weary.

“That’s good, right?”

He groans, tilting his head back to look at me. “It is, but…I don’t know. I vacillate between feeling so fucking burned-out that I can’t imagine working right now and having panic attacks because it’s been almost two months since I got a paycheck and I’m paying Amari out of pocket, among other things. Going to the client side means better hours, which is good because I don’t want to work eighty hours a week anymore, but it’s also less pay. And what if this doesn’t work out and I’m still unemployed in another month?”

I can feel his body shaking, see the hard beat of his pulse in his neck. It reverberates through me, a physical manifestation of my shock at his confession: I don’t want to work eighty hours a week. That admission alone is something I never thought I’d hear. Eli works so hard because he thinks he has to.

But then I hear the rest. How, even if it looks different, he still needs it. That anxiety is so deeply ingrained that he can’t fathom taking real time off to repair the way his previous job broke him.

“Do you still have some savings?” I ask. Some is probably an understatement; Eli is meticulous with his money. After we broke up, he moved into a place with a friend on the Lower East Side, even though he could’ve afforded something on his own.

“I helped my dad with his down payment and had to use a chunk of it the past couple months, but yeah.”

I consider my next words carefully. I told him he should quit, just once, after watching him work until one in the morning seven days straight. He was so busy he was skipping meals, so tired he fell asleep fully clothed. I said it on a Friday morning, ten months into our time in New York, after months of watching the way he’d transformed from someone familiar enough to love into just enough of a stranger for me to silently pull away from.

“I need to stay until I make associate. Another year, maybe a little longer,” he said, looping his tie end through the knot at his throat, his exhausted eyes trained on his reflection in the mirror. He’s always been his dad’s twin, and I wondered if that’s who he was seeing right then, some version of his dad who wasn’t struggling, divorced, and alone. “Then I’ll get something better.”

Better, he said, but not less soul-destroying.

“What if you took a break?” I venture now. “A real one?”

He pulls back, running a hand through his hair. “Amari broached the same idea, but…this LA job seems fine. Better than what I was doing before, and I can bounce off of it if it doesn’t work out.”

It’s a weak echo of what he said long ago, but I hear it anyway, and it presses against that old bruise.

“Well. Wherever you end up, I hope they treat you better than Luce did,” I say.

His expression relaxes. “I won’t accept anything less, I promise,” he says. “I wish I could take a break, but this is a fair medium.”

“All right.”

He must hear the doubt in my voice. “I’m better since I started therapy, but that fear of not having stability is hard to shake.”

His tone is imploring, a request for me to understand, and I do, even if it hurts.

“As childhood wounds often are,” I murmur.

A wordless understanding passes between us. We’ve both fallen victim to it. God knows it shadowed all the corners of our relationship.

I shift backward, feeling more bare than I did when he got me naked last night. He clocks it, scoots to the edge of the loveseat. His pleading expression turns determined and he hooks his hands around my thighs. “Georgia—”

It’s my turn to give him a pleading look. No reckonings here. It’s not what we agreed to.

His mouth straightens as he tows me between his legs, propping his chin on my stomach. After a beat, he sighs. “Thanks for taking care of me last night. No hint of a headache.”

I let out a grateful breath. “Thank Advil and H₂O, not me.”

Instead of laughing, he gazes up at me. “You’re always taking care of other people. Who’s taking care of you?”

The question comes out of nowhere, hits me somewhere deep, even with the tender way he asks it. Maybe because of it.

“Oh, you know, good ol’ me,” I say in a tone two hundred miles away from casual.

He looks wrecked at that, and I feel the impact in my chest. “I thought I was. Before, I mean.”

God, he’s really hell-bent on dredging shit up this morning. I want to side-step it, but I can hear his self-censure and I find myself unable to deny him a response. He thought bringing me to New York was the start of something forever-shaped, that those thankless hours he worked were for us. All he could see was that he was building something stable for us to set our foundation on.

But I never wanted the foundation. I just wanted him.

“I know you did,” I say, throat thick.

“Would you ever ask me to take care of you?” he asks quietly. “Right now, if you needed something, would you say it? Even if it’s just a cup of coffee or breakfast, I’ll do it for you.”

There’s so much I need, but it’s tangled—old things and new, future ones that I can’t give him. I can only give him right now.

“I do need something.” “Tell me.”

I climb onto his lap. There’s a flash of emotion in his eyes, something stormy, but when I trace his mouth with my fingertip, he melts under my touch.

“You.”

It’s too much and a crumb, and I’m gratified when he accepts it without digging deeper. He takes the slide of my tongue into his mouth with a pained sigh, holds on to me tight while he grows hard beneath me.

“Guess that’s a no to coffee,” he groans after a minute. “Your coffee sucks anyway.”

He huffs out a laugh. I love the way his happiness tastes; my favorite emotion, the easiest one.

Things have veered wildly off course with my shirt around my neck and my hand down Eli’s boxer briefs when there’s a knock on the door.

Eli rips his mouth from mine, his expression murderous. “I swear to fucking god, if that’s Cole—”

But that’s not the voice that drifts through the door. “Open the door, my elusive grapevine, and let your best friend in.”

It’s Jamie, a full day early.