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Cynthia gave Penny’s arm a squeeze. “Whether his parents come to the wedding or not, you’ll both be just fine. This is your day. Don’t let anyone spoil that.”
“That’s right,” Brooke said with feeling. “With or without his parents, at the end of the day you and Caleb will be married, which is all that really matters.”
Fuck Caleb’s parents, and fuck hers too.
Blood didn’t make you family; it was just an accident of nature.
Family were the people who stood by you no matter what, not the ones who were nowhere to be found when you needed them.
Chapter Three
Brooke adjusted the new throw pillows on her couch and stepped back to survey her work. Frowning, she rearranged them so they looked more natural.Casual. That was the effect she was going for. Like they’d just been tossed effortlessly onto the couch.
Ugh, no.
Now they looked haphazard. She readjusted them so they weren’t quite so messy. Only now they looked too staged, like she was trying too hard. She didn’t want Dylan to think she’d spent hours trying to make her apartment look Pinterest-perfect for him—even if that was exactly what she’d done.
She checked the time again and did a brief calculation in her head. According to the airline website, Dylan’s plane had landed on schedule. Allowing time for him to deplane, pick up his rental car, and drive from LAX to her apartment, he should be arriving…any minute.
Nervously, Brooke prodded the pillows again, resisting the urge to stand out on the balcony and watch for him. She’d offered to pick him up at the airport, but since he’d rented a car to get around while he was in LA, it had made more sense for him to drive himself to her place.
Now that she was really looking at them, she was worried her new pillows might be tacky. They’d seemed clever at the store, but in hindsight she feared they were a little too…lame. Or weird. Or something.
She’d intended to get something fashionable and grown-up—two adjectives that would not normally be used to describe her aesthetic—but then they’d had this cute whale pillow, and Lord help her, she was helpless to resist a good whale pun.
Everything Whale Be Okay,it read in curly script alongside a smiling cartoon whale. She’d picked a velvet cushion in a complementary shade of turquoise for a pop of color that she hoped would help disguise how plain and boring her couch was, but now she was wishing she’d gotten the geometric patterned pillows instead.
Welp—or whale-p as she liked to say when she was feeling punny—the damage was done. They were her pillows now.
Should she crease them or something? Was that a thing people did? Or just a thing her mom used to do?
As she was repositioning her new cushions for the umpteenth time, Brooke heard the dreadful sound of her cat hornking up a hairball somewhere in the apartment.
“Come on, Murderface, not now!” she groaned.
The cat’s timing was impeccable, you had to give him that. He always managed to perform his hairball expulsions at the worst possible moment. Like when she was about to sit down to eat. Or that time she’d brought a date home and the cat had yacked right in front of the couch just as things were starting to get hot and heavy.
Although in retrospect, she probably should have thanked Murderface for his attempted intervention on that particular occasion, because that guy had turned out to be a dud in the bedroom.
Following the retching sounds into the bathroom, Brooke came upon her big brown tabby, Murderface McGee, just in time to watch him splorch out a giant hairball on her brand-new white bath mat.
“Awesome. Thanks very much for that,” she muttered as the cat trotted off proudly, swishing his tail like he’d just left her a gift wrapped up with a bow.
She tore off a handful of toilet paper, picked up the hairball, and flushed it down the toilet. Of course it had left a big, gross stain in the middle of the bath mat, which would have to be washed now. There wasn’t time to throw it into the machines downstairs, but hopefully she could hand wash it before Dylan got here and leave it hanging up to dry.
Tossing the bath mat into the tub, she turned on the water and started washing. Miraculously, she managed to get the stain out with a liberal application of elbow grease and Oxiclean. Unfortunately, she also managed to soak the entire front of her gray T-shirt like she’d been through Splash Mountain at Disneyland.
Also unfortunately, just as she’d finished draping the bath mat over the shower curtain rod to dry and was planning to go grab a clean T-shirt, there was a knock at the apartment door.
Dylan.
He was here, and Brooke looked like the loser in a Super Soaker fight. Cool. Just like old times, then.
Drying her hands on her jeans, she hurried to the front door and pulled it open.
Whoa.
Okay, so, Dylan was unreal levels of hot now.
