I let go quickly before I got any ideas about holding on to her hand.
“It all started with a wedding attendants’ weekend over the summer. We were in Holly Creek, New York.”
“Never heard of it,” she said.
“Neither has anyone else who didn’t grow up there. Sorry, that sounds mean. It’s a cute little town, but it was bad timing for me, and I didn’t want to be there. Everyone seemed to have the same attitude when we had a bridesmaids/groomsmen mixer on Saturday afternoon. A dry mixer, I’ll add.
“And then Miriam, Rex’s mom, blew into the event like she owned the place. She enters every room like that. Then again, she often does own whatever place she’s blowing into.”
Kat nodded. “I’ve met the type.”
“Next thing we know, she’s planning to go matchmaker on all of us, and we’re insisting we’ll get our own dates, and the bridesmaids imply they’ll find great dates who will leave us groomsmen in the dust. And then some smartass grabs on to the idea of a bet between the two sides. If either side loses, they owe the winners five hundred dollars and a chicken dance at the wedding reception.”
“Why do I suspect I’m looking at the smartass?” She covered her mouth to stifle her laugh, then gave up. “Sorry. But I think I’d pay five hundred bucks to see you in your wedding tux doing the chicken dance. And you know that’s going viral.”
I groaned. “Don’t remind me. Really, please don’t. My fellow groomsmen remind me daily that I’m the one who got cocky and pushed for this, along with the caveat that dates need to be genuine, not a rando one of us picks up in a bar the night before. Now I’m the one most likely to lose it for us.”
“How is this multi-person bet all on you?”
“My exact words were, and I quote, ‘Groomsmen versus bridesmaids. Anyone that shows up dateless loses for their entire team.’”
“You remember your exact words?”
I cringed. “One of the bridesmaids caught it on her phone and sent Chelsea, the bride, a copy. She shared it with Rex, who has sent me that quote multiple times since my breakup with Melody. I think he’s kind of hoping we’ll lose, the asshole.”
She nodded. “I take it Melody was the woman who slammed a lot of doors before leaving on Thanksgiving weekend.”
I nodded, hating that anyone in the building knew that much about my romantic life. That was the swift-kick-in-the-ass reminder to not screw where I eat. “We dated off and on for two years, although this last go-round was probably doomed from the start. I don’t know what either of us was thinking.” On second thought, I did. I’d been thinking she’d grown up, and she’d been thinking I’d loosened up. We’d both been dead wrong. “We’d gotten back together literally the week before the Holly Creek fiasco. I was feeling optimistic, which didn’t last long.”
“And also feeling the aforementioned cocky.”
“Fair enough.” I finished my wine and pushed away the thoughts of the breakup, which, other than Melody’s door-slamming, was most memorable for how uninterested we’d both been in trying to work things out. “Your turn.”
“Okay, my embarrassing story started with a bottle of wine.” She poured a small sip more into each of our glasses. “So, I picked up this nice bottle of wine to share with my neighbor because I wanted to thank him for his help.”
I held up my hand. “No, no. I do not need to hear this story.”
She grabbed my hand as she laughed, twining her fingers in mine for a mere second, just long enough to send a jolt of awareness zinging through my body.
“As I was saying, I take a bottle of wine over to my neighbor’s door, knock, then realize—how embarrassing—I’ll have to ask to borrow a wine opener. But that thought flies out of my head the minute he opens the door because the man is completely naked.”
My eyes shot open wide. “He was not!”
She nodded. “He was. And I don’t even think he looked through the peephole before opening the door and just letting it all hang out. I could have been anyone. I could have been Mrs. Welby from 5B.”
“Really? He wasn’t even wearing a towel?”
She shook her head. “No towel. He was starkers.”
I took her glass and set it down. “I think you’ve had too much wine,” I joked. “Dude was definitely wearing a towel.”
“When I tell this story to other people, there will be no towel.” She licked her lower lip and grinned.
I stared at her mouth. Maybe she was trying to seduce me, after all. “You, 6A, are a dastardly woman.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Do you call me 6A because you’ve forgotten my name?”
I shook my head. “You are unforgettable, including your name, Kat Hartmann.”
