Eli wraps a hand around my arm just as my ass hits the ground. The cake tilts the same way my stomach does: fast and hard, with a sickening sense of doom.
But then Adam’s there, righting the box before it can fall. He closes his eyes, exhaling a shaky, “Holy…”
“Is the cake okay?” I yelp.
“Are you?” Eli shoots back, his fingers tightening around my bicep.
“Yes.” I clamber to my feet, eyes burning, my damn heels slipping again. “But the cake—”
“It’s fine,” Adam says, peering over the top of the box. “Well. The majority is fine. There’s one side that’s pretty smashed.” A wounded sound escapes me and I move to inspect it, but he twists the box away. “It’s fine, George, seriously, I could not give a shit about imperfect frosting right now.”
“I give many shits.” Mainly because I’m the reason for it.
“Are you okay?” Adam asks, ignoring that. “You really biffed it there.”
I twist to inspect the damage. “Yeah, I’m f—” Fucked. At least, my dress is. There’s a long streak of mud extending from my ass to the hem, dirt and grass clinging to the fabric. I look like I was rolling around in the vineyard blocks.
The burn in my eyes turns into a frustrated flood and I blink furiously, keeping my chin tucked to my chest to hide my imminent breakdown.
“I’m going to run to the bathroom and clean up,” I get out.
Eli’s attention is a weight between my shoulder blades all the way up to the Big House.
Once I’m inside, I slip into the bathroom, leaning against the door as soon as I shut it. The sudden silence makes my ears ring, sets off a low tremble in my body.
So much for no more disasters.
I try to breathe through it, using the same cadence Eli does for his panic attacks, as I set my bag on the counter. I grab the zippered pouch that holds the safety pins I’m looking for, along with a tin of Altoids, some tampons, and the notebook with my best woman speech.
Only it isn’t there.
“What?” I whisper in confusion, dropping the pouch to dig frantically through the bag.
I pull every item out until it’s impossible to deny: the fancy notebook I bought because I thought it would make an emotionally satisfying keepsake to remember a night of togetherness with my best friends—probably our last one for the foreseeable future—is nowhere to be found. The speech I worked on for weeks to create a perfect representation of my friendship with Adam and celebrate him moving into this next phase with Grace is gone.
It’s weird that what grips me feels like grief, but that’s it, some sort of loss that now I won’t have the right words to explain what this era of my life has meant before it leaves. I’ve never been able to say real goodbyes to the things that have formed me—not my mom or my first defining best friendship, not my relationship with Eli or, thanks to our agreement ending unceremoniously, whatever this week has been. Not sharing a home and day-to-day closeness with Jamie or the inevitable shift in my friendship with Adam, the first best friend who stuck around. Nothing I’ve cared about most has been tied up with a pretty bow before it was given away. It’s all been messy. It’s made me wish and need and crave.
And it turns me into this—a girl in a broken dress, crying alone in a bathroom.
I don’t hear the door open. Barely hear the measured footsteps that stop just behind me. But my body recognizes the person it loves most, so when I’m pulled against a solid chest, I know it’s Eli.
“Take a breath,” he murmurs into my hair.
What I really want to do is curl into him and never leave. I curl my hands around his ribs instead, pushing. “I can’t do this with you.”
“Why?” His arms stay wrapped around me, his hand a steady pressure between my shoulder blades.
“Because you’re going to—” Want to talk about it. I’m trapped here in this room with you and you could say anything, everything, and I’ll break down and I can’t break down when everything’s already falling apart.
“I’m not going to,” he says, frustration threaded through his voice. He wants to say it all, despite his promise. “But I’m not going anywhere either, so take a breath, Georgia.”
It’s not a request. It forces me to inhale and then let it go, to breathe in again in fragments. God, it feels good to be held up by him. And god, I want it for so much longer than this moment we’re in.
“What do you see?” Eli asks quietly, his palm smoothing over my skin. “What?”
“Five things,” he says, and my pulse spikes with understanding. His calming exercise.
My voice comes out hoarse. “The sky.” I stare at the gray patch framed by the window, wishing it was blue.
“Good.” A soft praise. “What else?”
“Um, white tulips. This pretty jute rug. My bag spilled everywhere.
Fancy hand soap.”
I catch his eye in the mirror hanging over the sink. You.
“Four things you can touch,” he says, his eyes dark, intense, unavoidable.
I close mine, let my fingertips wander. “My dress and my shoes. The counter against my hip.” I reach out to trace the sink. “Cold porcelain.”
You. I graze my cheek against his shoulder. “Three things you can hear.”
“Voices in the lobby. The string quartet practicing for the ceremony outside. Footsteps.”
You. My own I love you, a thing I can’t say out loud. It pulls relief into my veins to have it sit somewhere between us, unknown to him.
His voice is low and soothing. “Two things you can smell.” “Fresh grass,” I say, inhaling deeply. “Rain.”
You. The same spice he’s worn for years. The specific alchemy of his skin that winds itself around my body and heart.
“And one thing you can taste.” I lick at my wet lips. “Salt.” You. I wish it was you.
“Georgia,” he says, sounding pained. When I look up at him, I see it in his eyes. “Why are you crying?”
I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter.” “It does,” he says.
“It’s not the time.”
“It is the time, because you’re feeling it right now. Why are you crying?”
He says that, but I hear: right now, if you needed something, would you say it?
I’ve spent so many moments denying him—and more importantly, myself—the answer. Right now, I don’t have the ability to.
“I’m a fucking mess.” Saying it out loud feels like getting the wind knocked out of me. All the air rushes out of my lungs before I’m ready, but the emptiness that follows brings weightlessness.
Eli tucks a loose, sweaty strand of hair behind my ear. “Hey, join the club.”
“This club sucks.”
“I know,” he says sympathetically. “No free swag or anything.”
My wet laugh turns into a fresh round of tears, and I cover my face. “God. I messed up with the flower vendor.”
“Who’s here and all set up,” he says calmly. “And the cake.”
“Which is fine.”
I peek through my fingers with a flat look. “It’s smashed on one side.” “So they angle that side away from everyone.” His eyebrow tilts up
when my expression doesn’t change. “It’s going to get eaten anyway.”
“My dress is ruined,” I say, dropping my hands. “I’m going to be the black mark in all the photos.”
“That’s not possible.”
His eyes make a quick circuit of me, and it’s not a heated look, but it warms me all the same.
“Sounds a little biased,” I sniffle.
One corner of his mouth pulls up. “C’mon, Georgia. Not a little.”
My breath catches low in my throat. I look down between us, at the bare inch of space between our bodies, searching for a way to claw us out of this quiet intimacy.
Eli’s breath hitches, like some emotion is caught in his throat. Like he’s pushing past it to say something.
“Hey, I brought you— oh.”
Eli and I startle apart at the sound of Adam’s voice in the doorway. He doesn’t look surprised, nor does Jamie when she peeks around his shoulder. A knowing smile blooms on her face, but then her gaze tracks down my cheeks and it falls away.
It’s her voice and Adam’s in unison: “Are you crying?”
“No!” And it’s true, I’m not currently crying, but it’s still ridiculous. My face is streaked with mascara. “No, I just needed a few minutes to fix my dress.”
Everyone is kind enough not to mention that my dress is, in fact, still not fixed.
“We were reviewing the list of things she thinks she messed up, actually,” Eli replies.
I gape at him. “Thanks, traitor.”
“Messed up?” Adam echoes, bewildered. “What do you mean?”
Now it’s Adam’s turn for my incredulous look. “Adam, I just nearly took out your cake. You know, the thing that Grace was most excited about?”
He winces. “I almost hate to tell you this because we were all emotionally attached to the cake, but this morning Grace literally threw up saying the words ‘passion fruit,’ so we can let that stress point go.”
“I— oh.” I blink as Jamie pushes Eli and Adam out of the way, coming over to swipe her thumbs under my eyes.
“What else?” Eli asks. He leans a shoulder against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. He’s so fucking beautiful. Unfair, when I resemble a disheveled hamster.
“What else what?”
His gaze is steady. “What else is on your list?”
My attention drifts back to Adam, a lump growing in my throat. He’s watching me, hazel eyes wide, tall and handsome in his suit. But I can see the freckle-faced boy underneath the height and squared jaw, that kid I walked up to the day the loneliness of losing my best friends became something I had to let go of. I saw something in him, some kindred thing that came true, and knowing I don’t have the words to properly convey what that’s meant to me makes me want to cry.
Oh, but I am. What a surprise. “I lost my best woman speech.”
Adam frowns. “How do you lose a speech?”
“I wrote it in a notebook and I thought I put it in my bag, but it’s not there,” I say, and his mouth parts, his expression fading from confusion to realization, then sympathy. “I know how stupid it was to not put it on my phone instead. I just…I wanted it to be special.” I bite my lip, looking at Jamie and Adam in turn. “We haven’t had any time together the past three months, and before that I was in Seattle and no one could get up to visit, which trust me, I understand. Everyone’s got their own lives and you’re moving into new, exciting eras, and I’m so—”
My voice cracks. Around my waist, Jamie’s arms tighten. “I’m so happy. And now you and Grace are having a baby, Adam, and, Jamie, you and Blake are, like, on the bullet train toward matrimony, which I swear I won’t lose my speech for.” She lets out a thick laugh. “But with all of that, and me potentially leaving, it feels like the wedding is the last time we’ll all be like this before things really change, you know? It really is the end of this era. I wanted to properly memorialize it with a kickass speech that would make Adam weep.”
I’m out of breath by the time I finish, and there’s a beat of silence.
Then Adam says, “I’m going to digest all of that, but did you just say you’re leaving?”
“Okay, because I thought I was the only one who heard it,” Jamie replies.
My stomach drops as I meet Eli’s wide eyes. “Sorry, no. I didn’t mean to say that.”
“You didn’t mean to, but you did,” Adam says. “It’s easy enough to pretend I didn’t,” I shoot back.
He laughs incredulously. “Yeah fucking right. Tell us.”
I groan. “Can we wait? I didn’t want to say anything until after the wedding, and there’s so much going—”
“Let’s deal with it now,” Jamie interrupts gently.
I swallow, cornered. “I— my role got transferred up to Seattle. Well, actually, my role was dissolved. The role up in Seattle is director level, but they want me to take it. Nia told me right before I went on PTO.”
Out of the corner of my eye, Eli straightens. “You’re moving?” Jamie gasps out.
“I don’t know. I think—maybe.” Helplessly, I repeat, “I don’t know.” Adam runs a hand over his mouth. “Whoa.”
Jamie circles me so that we’re face-to-face. Her eyes are huge, overflowing with emotions. She whispers, “How do you feel? Are you happy about it?”
The question hits me sideways. I’ve been so caught up in the anticipatory fear of making the decision that I haven’t given myself time to think of what it would feel like to be there. “I don’t know. I mean, I love my job and a promotion is objectively a great thing, but…”
My gaze slides to a still-silent Eli. There’s a kaleidoscope of emotions playing over his face, but I can’t catch any of them.
“But I’m scared, too,” I admit, caught in the magnetic clutch of his eyes, and there, I see one: understanding.
“Of what?” Adam asks.
I turn back to him, catching Jamie’s gaze on the way. I shake my head, too afraid to let the words out.
“It’s okay,” she assures me. “We love you. We can take it.”
It’s an echo of the other day: you can be messy. The people who love you will accept every single piece of it.
“Because everything changed when I was up there for six months,” I admit, and the pressure off my chest is almost instantaneous. “You moved out, and Adam and Grace moved away, and now we barely see each other. It feels like the fuller your lives get, the less space there is for me. If I leave, maybe that space will go away completely.”
Eli’s attention is a weight, like his hands on my back just minutes ago. It was like that with him, too. The bigger his job and anxiety got, the further it pushed me until I was crammed into a corner. Until I was so small there was no space at all.
“Georgia, no,” Jamie breathes out. “There will never be less space for you.”
“There’s definitely less time. This is the most time we’ve spent together in…” I trail off, shaking my head. “Since way before I left for Seattle.”
Adam’s quiet. I can see him calculating. Digesting. His expression drops when he realizes it’s true.
“I’m not asking you to change your lives, I’m just saying I don’t know where I fit, and that’s hard. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want us to drift away without knowing it until we’re too far to get back,” I say, my voice breaking. “Growing up, I didn’t have the true-friends thing, or the close- family thing, and then you came along and turned into both for me. And I’m sorry, I know it’s so much to take, but I need you all. I don’t want you to forget me if I move to Seattle and I don’t want to miss you the way I have for the past nine months, and I’m scared I’m the only one who feels that way.”
My gaze slips to Eli. He presses his lips together, blinking down to the ground.
Adam takes me by the shoulders, breaking my connection with Eli. “First of all, you needing us in your life isn’t too much to take. Fuck anyone who ever told you that, and yes, that message goes straight to those assholes
Heather and Mya, among others.” His scowl softens when I choke out a laugh. “Second of all, why didn’t you say anything?”
“Everyone’s had so much going on and no one else seemed particularly bothered by it. And it’s hard for me to…say things sometimes.” I glance at Eli again and swear I see the shadow of a wry smile before turning back to Adam and Jamie. “I don’t know, the timing never seemed right.” My groaning laugh echoes around us. “Not that talking about it hours before your wedding is great timing.”
“The ideal timing is when you’re feeling it,” Eli says with the softest edge only I catch.
“Exactly,” Jamie says, wrapping me in a tight hug. “So first, let’s cross out that we’re going to forget you, because that’s never happening. Things changed so fast and it happened while you were gone, so it was hard to process. Truth be told, it’s been an adjustment for me, too, although I don’t even think I wrapped my head around it until we spent the past couple days together. Life has been so busy, but I miss you. I need to do better.”
“I do, too,” I say against her shoulder. “I should’ve said something.”
“Yes.” She pulls back, tears in her eyes. “Please, if you ever need more than I’m giving you, or if you need me to hop on a plane, just tell me and I’ll do it. I would do anything for you.”
“I’ve been wrapped up in my life, too, and I’m sorry,” Adam says, squeezing my arm. “I can get myopic about my own shit, especially when curses are involved.”
“Oh my god,” Jamie mutters over my “Stop” and Eli’s “Here we go,” but Adam just grins.
“Time’s going to get scarce when Lil’ S-K comes, but we’re lifers. You’re the best woman at my wedding. You’re going to be my kid’s godmother.” My heart soars and he tugs on a hank of hair, his mouth twisting. “You think a few hundred miles would change that?”
“It sounds dumb when you say it,” I admit. “Just not when I’m feeling
it.”
Jamie runs a finger under my eyes. “Forget about us for a second. Do
you want to go to Seattle?”
I let out a shaky breath, setting aside all of my various fears—drifting away from them, failing at it the way I failed in New York, being lonely, forgotten.
The truth is, I’ve never had an opportunity like this. I’ve lived in Seattle before, but it was temporary, and I moved permanently before, but New York was for Eli, not me. I can’t know what living in Seattle permanently will feel like unless I do it. That’s the terrifying risk.
But maybe it could be the thrilling reward. “I think I do,” I admit. “I’m just scared.”
“All the best things are scary,” Jamie says, squeezing my hand. “What if you make new best friends?” I ask.
“Fuck that,” Adam says. Jamie’s pointed look seconds that emotion. “What if I hate it up there?”
“Then you come back to us,” Jamie says, eyes luminous. “What if I love it?” I ask thickly.
“Then we come to you for as long as you’re there,” Adam says. Over his shoulder, something flashes in Eli’s eyes with that answer, a thing that shakes me.
I look at Jamie. “What if it’s forever?” “Then it’s forever,” she says simply.
My heart is growing with each answer, stretching in a way that feels like pain. “That’s a lot of flights.”
“I’m a slut for miles,” Adam says. “I have an entire credit card devoted to getting miles.”
The scene in front of me fades, replaced with a developing picture of my potential life in Seattle: doing a job that I love with people who appreciate and recognize me. Falling back into the cadence of happy hours and weekend adventures. Finding a place of belonging that I made, something I’ve never done. Letting my friends come see me, weaving them into that fabric. Saying goodbye to the era that shaped me, yes, but starting a new one that’ll watch me grow.
Adam ducks into my line of sight, knuckling a tear from my cheek and wiping it on my shoulder. He grins when I roll my eyes with a laugh.
“You’re stuck with us, George. Got it?” “Loud and very clearly.”
I sneak a glance at Eli. He’s been so quiet this entire conversation, but his silence is shaped like words, like a monster looming at my back. Everything is just starting to feel calm and controllable. I let my messiness out here, but this is a cup of water I can hold without spilling. The mess with Eli is the ocean; it’ll drown me.
I beg him silently to let it be, but he just gazes back at me, only breaking our connection when Adam opens his arms wide and says, “Group hug time.”
We all surge in. Eli pulls me close, and I end up halfway smashed onto his chest; his heart presses against mine, racing. I close my eyes, knowing I might not be able to touch him like this again this weekend. Not until we have some distance and that reckoning fades away.
“I love you all,” Adam says, and for the first time today he’s choked with emotion. “We haven’t found an officiant yet, so I don’t even know if Grace and I are going to be officially married today, but whatever happens, thank you for everything you did to make the good parts even better.”
Everyone’s arms tighten, and it’s like being crushed. It’s perfect. It’s mine.
“Hate to interrupt whatever super weird shit is happening here,” comes Cole’s voice from the doorway. We turn as one and his mouth tips up sardonically before he focuses his attention on Adam. “I just heard you’re looking for an officiant.”
He perks up. “Yeah.”
“That’s great news,” he says, “because I’m ordained. What do you say we go get you and Grace hitched?”
