“Oh, babe. Aren’t you supposed to be the more intuitive one of us?” Sam said, patting his fiancé’s cheek. “Maybe it’s because you knew them as stepbrothers forso long, you couldn’t imagine them being anything else?”
“I’ve known them just as long as Ryker, and I was the first to know they had a thing going on,” Jones said, sounding proud.
“You told him before you told me?” Ryker turned to us. The hurt in his voice had Jones going into damage control.
“They didn’t tell me! I kinda caught them kissing in the hot tub a few weeks back,” he explained.
“And you didn’t tell me?” Ryan piped up, brow furrowed to look like he was angry. Jones stammered something that didn’t sound like intelligible words. His boyfriend laughed. “I’m just messing with you. I understand you keeping your friends’ secret.”
Jones sighed audibly with relief, and we all laughed.
“Does that mean you’re okay with us being together?” Dan asked softly. He was nervous, I could tell, so I squeezed his hand in comfort.
“Why do we have to be okay with anything? Your relationship is nobody’s business but your own,” Ryker said sternly. He cast his eyes over the crowd of diners, and I caught more than a few eyes flick away at the comment. They were obviously snooping in on our conversation. “As long as you two are happy, I’m happy.”
The others nodded their agreement.
“You guys…” Dan said, his voice filled with emotion. I was getting emotional, too. I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a tiny part of me that worried about how our friends would take our sudden shift in relationship status, but I never should have doubted them.
“You guys are the best,” Dan said and leaned around the table to give them hugs. I joined in the awkward hug, too.
“But I thought for sure you still had a crush on Jones’ twin cousins. You were so pissed at the cookout when Dan was flirting with Jasmin…or was it Jayla?” Ryker furrowed his brow in thought.
“Are you ever going to learn to tell them apart?” Jones teased, but I was ninety percent sure he had trouble telling his cousins apart as well. It was hard when they were set on being identical down to the makeup they wore.
“I never had a crush on them,” I corrected and crossed my arms.
“But you looked jealous out of your mind in high school…” Ryker glanced between me and Dan, and his expression told me the lightbulb moment happened. “You weren’t jealous of Dan. You were jealous of the twins, because they had Dan’s attention.”
“Aww, that’s sweet,” Sam chimed in. “Does that mean you two liked each other since high school?”
Dan looked at me with a softness in his eyes. He placed his palm over mine, and I twined our fingers together. I could hear our friends cooing about how cute we were being, but I paid them no mind. My entire world was filled with Dan.
“It was a lot longer than that. I’ve liked Clay since we were kids,” Dan told them, but his eyes never left me. He stole my breath away with his bold confession in front of our friends. Dan never ceased to amaze me.
I brought the back of his hand up to my lips for a kiss, and our friends went crazy with dramatic kissy sounds shot our way.
“Does that mean that instead of being late because you’re fighting, you’re now going to be late because you’re fucking?” Ryker suddenly asked with a wrinkle of his nose.
“Who says that isn’t the reason they’ve been late all this time?” Jones commented, and Ryker’s eyes bugged out once more.
“I knew there was something off when they came with bruised lips!” Ryan said, and then they started dissecting all the times we’d been late to brunch.
“You two made quite the entrance,” Atlas said when he came up to our table to take our order. “I hear congratulations are in order.”
He beamed as he looked between Dan and me. We thanked him, then Jones pulled Dan back into their conversation. They were still deep in their discussion, so I turned my body toward Atlas to chat with him. He had his usual sunny smile, so I took that as a good sign.
“Seen anything off recently?” I asked.
Atlas’ smile faltered for just a second. He didn’t need me to clarify for him to know I was referring to his stalker situation.
He glanced around to make sure nobody was paying attention to us. I studied the crowd too. It was the usual, familiar Sunday crowd. I didn’t notice anyone or anything abnormal. Some were still looking our way, but they were probably the nosier folks of our town. They thrived on gossip, but I couldn’t imagine any of them going as far as stalking someone.
When Atlas confirmed that nobody was eavesdropping, he took a step closer to me and whispered, “I found a note in my room last night.”
That put me on high alert. My coworkers and I had been going through the notes throughout the week to try to find a clue. Any clue. But so far, we’d come up with nothing. It seemed the only similarity was the cursive handwriting that leaned more toward a female stalker.
“Have they tried making contact with you? Have they hurt you?” I asked, and Atlas shook his head.
