“Earth to Beck.” Jared snapped his fingers in my face. “I asked if you’d managed to con some poor hapless woman into attending tonight’s wedding with you.”
“Do I look like I have a woman with me?” There was no helping my cross response. Not hot on the heels of my most recent remembrance.
Talk about dumping a salt truck on the wound. Kinleigh and I weren’t anything beyond friends, but that didn’t mean I didn’t sometimes wish we could be.
Jared smirked. “No, but from the sounds of things, you should work on it.”
“What about you, smart ass? I don’t see you with anyone on your arm.”
He bristled. “Gina will be here.”
“So? Unless you two have finally stopped dancing around each other, she doesn’t count as a date.” I propped my fingers under my chin. “Or does she?”
“Gina is my best friend. It isn’t like that with us.”
“That doesn’t mean it can’t be.” At Jared’s sharp look, Moose cleared his throat. “If you want to change your status, you just have to alter your approach so you step out of the friend zone.”
Jared crossed his arms. “Now you’re an expert?”
“Well, he’s happily married,” I reminded him.
“Very happily,” Moose agreed. “Stupidly happily. So happy that—”
“That if you could, you’d knock her up again while she’s already pregnant.” Jared tapped his gloves against his thigh. “Yeah, yeah, we get it. Don’t be smug.”
Moose grinned and tucked his thumbs in the pockets of his suit pants.
Smug bastard was right. That expression he was wearing said it all.
His life was marital bliss. Jared was locked in the friend zone, whether he would admit it or not. And I…
I looked up and glimpsed Kinleigh gliding across the grass in her mile-high purple boots. Her sunset-colored hair streamed behind her in the wind, and she had on another one of her long dresses. This one was purple to match her boots with some kind of secondary lacy layer in dark blue that swished around her ankles.
I was thoroughly fucked.
“Oh, shit, look who it is. The man of the hour. John Gideon, ready to get hitched?” Jared slapped Gideon on the back as he joined us. He was already dressed in his tux and looking more than a little harried. And slightly green.
He nodded rapidly, his eyes wheeling in that panicked manner I’d seen at my sister’s wedding. Not from her. Nope, that expression had belonged to Lucky Charms, which I’d found ridiculous. He’d married up with my sister, no doubt about it.
Gideon pushed a hand through his hair and blew out a breath. “Yeah. I’m good. But I keep checking my phone.”
Moose, Jared, and I exchanged glances.
“In case Macy decides to bail?” Moose finally guessed.
Of course. He was the sensitive one among us. Jared and I had the combined emotional barometer of a rock encased in seaweed at least half the time.
Gideon nodded, swallowing hard.
“She’s not going anywhere. At least not until she sees all this.” I gestured to the wedding wonderland around us. I didn’t have a thing for Halloween like Macy did, but even I had to admit it was pretty cool with the mason jars hanging from the tree branches and the twinkling lights draped all over the place.
“Wow. You did this, Aug?” Gideon zeroed in on the arbor that we’d put at the beginning of the aisle where Macy and her ladies would proceed to the gazebo. A length of purple carpet led right up to the gazebo’s steps where the actual ceremony would take place, like many of Crescent Cove’s fine townspeople before them.
Minus the bats.
And the orange lights.
And the—