Next, she noticed my neck. “Is that a hickey?”
“Yesterday, you thought it was Tabasco sauce.”
She covered her mouth. “Who gave it to you?”
But I shook my head. “It’s a whole saga,” I said.
She would normally know all the details already. But it’s a lot of work being a bride, and there had been no crannies of time when I could grab her and share. And it certainly wasn’t happening now, with Brody clanking around in the room behind her. I wasn’t even sure whose side he was on.
“Did you take my sunscreen?” he asked Ashley right then, and she turned back to answer.
Sunscreen. I’d be needing that today.
When Ashley turned back to me, she took one more look at my neck and then gave me a sly smile. “You should tell Finn itisTabasco sauce,” she said. “And then dare him to lick it off.”
“Ashley!” I scolded, looking both ways down the hall.
But nobody would overhear. The bridal suite was above the waterline. Definitely not with the wedding block.
“How is it rooming with Harmony?” Ashley asked then, wrinkling her nose.
“That’s—another whole saga,” I said, implying I’d have to tell her later.
Would I tell her later? I had never withheld anything from Ashley. But things were already different now. Seeing Ashley and Brody framed through the doorway in their matching robes? They really looked like a married couple.
Did husbands and wives tell each other everything? Could I trust Ashley now to keep anything between just us two? By the end of this week, she and Brody would be married. She was going to take his last name—and leave “Ashley Burton” behind for the very unfortunate “Ashley Cockburn.”
And even though Brody’s last name was technically pronouncedCoh-burn, that didn’t make it any better. Once you saw it writtenout—on a name tag, or a wedding invitation, or, maybe worst of all, the back of a sports jersey—you couldn’t unsee it.
As Pete liked to say:Ouch.
But there was no reasoning with Ashley. This was happening.
They’d already put a down payment on a house and merged all their bank accounts and everything.
Before we knew it, they’d be making little Cockburn babies.
Soon, she’d belong to him.
Which meant, I realized with a sting of loss, that she wouldn’t belong to me anymore.
That’s when Brody called, “Ash? I need you.”
Ashley glanced back, very pleased to be needed, and then blew me a goodbye kiss.
As I walked down the hallway, she popped her head out to call after me, “I want all the details the minute you’re back!”
I turned around to say, “You got it!”—not even sure if that was true.
But she’d already closed the door.
In the elevator, I ran into my dad. His arms were full of bags of paper flowers.
I took a couple from him to be helpful.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said.
“Dad,” I said then. “Are you busy?”
