I couldn’t exactly tell my mother,Sorry, I can’t pick up my child because I have to go meet with my maybe-brother-husbands about getting maybe-divorced!Sure, I claimed to love adventure, even risks, but this wasnotthe kind of fun plot twist I had in mind for my life. All I could do was hope for the best—and prepare, I guessed, for the worst.
3
LUCA
Nerves knocked around inside my head, louder than the gurgling espresso machines and gentle indie music playing over the speakers in the coffee shop. It was one thing to see Allie again, to have her talk to me with a customer service voice that wasn’t too far off from the flirtation I remembered, but with a layer of distance that made it easier to take. But to tell her why we were here, to confront her with a disruption to her otherwise normal life and sit in anticipation of her reaction…I’d never been so stressed.
Part of the problem was how much prettier she’d gotten. I’d remembered her face pretty well, considering how much time had passed and how much we’d all been drinking that night, but I’d only recently seen real confirmation of what she looked like then. In the process of moving out of my mom’s house to a place on my own for the first time outside of the college dorms, I’d uncovered the only memento that existed from that wild night in Sin City—a commemorative photo booklet we’d gotten at the rushed chapel wedding. In the photos, the guys and I were all over Allie, laughing and kissing her in turns, holding her by her waist, her hips as if we’d known her forever, as if wereally had some kind of claim. The booklet was what had jogged my memory about the spontaneous wedding in the first place; photos of Allie holding a bouquet, one where she showed off the stack of three rings on her finger, clearly mid-laugh. In those photos, she was a pretty, sunny redhead. Young and reckless and pink-cheeked from excitement and booze. She had a deceptively innocent face considering the sensual confidence she’d carried throughout the night, and her thin frame was delicate.
But she’d become better with a few years of age, I thought. A softer, more mature figure turned her from the attractive woman of my memories to a truly stunning one who made my mouth practically water. Curves on curves that reminded me of her soft skin, how much more satisfying it would be to feel the give of her body against mine now. I’d never been super confident around beautiful women, and the fact that I’d seen her naked, touched her, tasted her all those years ago didn’t help. If anything, it made my palms clammier.
The marriage reveal had been a shock to Cade and Gavin too. Somehow, none of us had held onto the most important piece of information from the night—the ill-advised legal consequences of our drunken fun. Gavin hadn’t reacted well to it, though he always kept his emotions under wraps, and Cade could only whisper a repeating string of “fucks” for a long while before he realized another layer to it.
“Oh, goddamn it,” he’d said that afternoon at my new apartment. The guys had helped me move, and in addition to pizza and beer, I’d rewarded them with life-shattering news. Cade shook his head and declared, “I fucking knew I didn’tlosethe ring. Worse, I gave it to some other girl.Fuck.”
“Or she took it,” Gavin suggested, which only made Cade swear again.
None of us, it turned out, were particularly comfortable with the idea of losing control the way we had with Allie.Gavin liked to keep a cool distance from the women he slept with; Cade avoided any connections that wouldn’t turn into something long-term, and he’d avoided long-term since his broken engagement too.
Me, though…I’d never felt sophysicallyout of control before in my life. The lust that coursed through me in Allie’s presence was like its own drug, and as pleasurable it had been to eat her pussy, to taste her as she came, crying out and shaking against my face…well, that lust ran a little too hot for my comfort. It felt like a worryingly thin line between fiery passion and explosive rage—the inheritance from my father that I never, ever wanted to claim. How easy would it be for me to lose control like that again now that she’d only gotten more tempting?
As if that wasn’t complicated enough, now I had to worry aboutwhichof the three of us had actually legally bound themselves to this woman we barely knew. It was hard not to think of how disappointed my mother would be if she knew my first marriage had been a drunken mistake, especially after she’d pinned so much hope on the idea of my happy fairy-tale future. She was always dreaming of the day I fell in love with some wonderful woman and chose to make the commitment she’d made to my father—as if me ending up happy would fix the miserable situation she’d landed in by accident. I wanted a healthy marriage, of course. But I had less faith in the possibility of it than my eternally optimistic mother, having grown up with a less-than-stellar example in my house.
“Look alive, guys,” Gavin suddenly snarked under his breath, and I followed his gaze to the front door of the coffee shop to find that Allie had arrived at last.
She spotted us quickly and strode over with sure-footed confidence. “Sorry I’m a little late,” she breezed as she pulled up a chair between Cade and me. “I had to make a call so my—um.” She stopped herself mid-sentence, blinked, and went on again.“I just had to make a quick call. But I’m here now, and if you guys want to talk…well, I guess now’s your chance.”
The abrupt shift she’d made felt…deliberate. But I had no idea what it meant, what she could have possibly censored. I supposed that she had a right to some privacy, and even more of a reason to want it, since we’d shown up to her work unannounced. I figured most women—hell, mostpeople—would be freaked out by how we’d turned up. But just like her body had grown, filled out in the years apart, I could sense a stronger self-image in Allie too. She was a grown woman now, far more sure of herself than the college girl we’d taken to bed. I hoped I’d gotten better with age too.
“Nice to meet you too,” Gavin commented with a sly upturn to his brow. “I’m Gavin, by the way.”
“Cade,” our stoic friend piped up, clearly wanting to get the introductions over with. He barely glanced at Allie as he said it.
I was the only one of the three of us to hold out a hand for Allie to shake, which she took with a gentle smile that made my chest ache a little.
“Luca,” I told her. “Nice to…well, not meet you, but remeet you.”
“Maybe not so nice once we all know why we’re here,” Gavin contradicted me. I watched him command the space the way he often did, locking his eyes on Allie’s. “Here’s the long and short of it, Allie. We’re here because of the ill-advised Vegas wedding I’m sure we all remember in bits and pieces. We need to undo our drunken mistake.”
“Five years after the fact? Seems a little late,” Allie quipped.
“Better late than never?” I chimed in with a shrug. Allie snorted a laugh, and I felt a twinge of warmth.
“So how does this work? You guys just show up at my work and…what’s next?”
“We deal with it,” Cade clipped. “All of us, since we’re all involved.”
“How do we know it was even legally binding?” Allie retorted. “What do you guys want from me exactly?”
She wasn’t here to waste her time or our own, clearly. I admired that forthrightness, never having gotten over the people-pleasing tendency my mom had taught me unconsciously by giving in to my dad’s every unreasonable demand. Allie had been bold like that in Vegas too. It was one of the things that made her so sexy.
“We’re not sure if it’s legal,” Gavin answered her. “Or which of us may be actually married to you, for that matter.”
“Any chance you remember?” I asked, wincing. Allie’s blue eyes went wide.
“Are you kidding? Of course I don’t remember. I was fucking wasted.”
Another wince tore through me. Yeah, I’d been drunk off my ass too. All of us had been less than cogent that night. Hence the ill-advised wedding. But hearing that Allie didn’t remember any better than my friends and I did had its own complications; how were we supposed to get out of this mess if none of us had any idea where to start?
