She isn’t my best friend’s sister.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Maybe I’ll talk to her after you pass out,” I banter. “But I’m fine here for now.”
“I want this for you,” Alex says, his words jumbling together. “I want you to feel this…this magic. I know. I’m getting soppy. I don’t care. I’m allowed to on my wedding day, aren’t I?”
“Yeah,” I reply.
“Don’t you want this?” He reaches for his drink, then places it down when he realizes it’s empty. “I wish you could feel what I feel. I wish I could. I don’t know, like transplant the emotion or whatever. Does that even make sense?”
“Sure,” I say, resisting the urge to grind my teeth.
I do feel what he feels. Or something else. Something fiercer, more primal. But it’s there, this need he wishes I had. It’s just aimed at the wrong person.
No, not the wrong person. Becca will never be the wrong anything, not to me.
“But you have to try,” he goes on. “If you want this.”
“I haven’t met the right person yet. That’s all.”
“But how do you know?”
Stop making me lie to you. I roar in my mind.
It’s unfair. He’s not making me do anything. I could tell him the truth right now and make his entire wedding about that. Warp this memory forever.
“What if I find somebody, but we can’t be together?”
“Why would that be?”
I shrug. “Maybe she’s twenty years younger than me.”
“Pfft.” Alex laughs grimly. “I don’t see what difference that makes, as long as you’re both okay with it. It’s about the people in the relationship, right, so if you both feel the same and you both want it…who’s to judge?”
“What if she’s….”
I trail off, wondering how drunk he is, feeling small for questioning him in this way.
What sort of best man am I?
“What, Ben?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Imagine if I wanted to get with Jerry’s daughter, for example.”
Jerry is one of our business associates, helping us set up the franchising for the gym.
“Do you?” Alex asks.
“No. It’s a hypothetical.”
I don’t want anybody else except for Becca, always.
“There would be complications. He’d hate me for it. It would be a betrayal. And it would make business more complicated. There are many reasons I could find somebody I want – need – and wouldn’t be able to act on it.”
Alex turns to me, eyes glassy, with a shaky smile. “Sorry. What did you say?”
I shake my head, clapping him softly on the shoulder. “Nothing important. How about we find your wife for you?”