He fell into step beside me. He was taller than I wanted him to be, and he smelled clean, like soap and something I wasn’t going to identify, because identifying a man's scent at your best friend's rehearsal dinner was a door I wasn’t walking through.
"Quick question about tomorrow," he said.
"If it's about the seating chart again, I will end you."
"Toasts."
I stopped walking. "What about the toasts?"
"I think the best man should open."
I turned to face him. He had his beer in one hand and his other hand in his pocket. His whole posture saidrelaxedin a way that meant he knew exactly what he was about to start. Three months had given me fluency in that posture.
"Maid of honor goes first," I said. "That's the order."
"Traditionally, the best man opens."
"Traditionally, the best man's toast is under five minutes. Yours is fifteen. I'm not following fifteen minutes of you."
The dimple appeared. "You've timed my toast?"
"Astrid timed your toast. She texted me about it. With a screenshot."
"It's a good toast."
"It's a TED Talk. I'm going first, and then you can have the room."
"See, that's my concern." He took a sip of his beer, unhurried, like we had all night. "If you go first, you're going to be warm and devastating, and every person in that garden is going to be in tears, and then I have to follow that with a pinball machine story. You're setting me up."
"That's not my problem."
"I'm saying, you soften the room, I land the jokes. It's a better sequence."
"I'm not your warm-up act, Rhodes."
He looked at me for a beat longer than the conversation required. His eyes were green and bright with something between amusement and appreciation, and heat moved through my chest that I attributed to nothing, because there was nothing to attribute it to.
"Fine," he said. "You go first. But when I bring the house down, I don't want to hear about it."
"You won't bring the house down."
"I have a pinball machine story that is going to bring the house down."
"Nobody cares about your pinball machine story."
"Easton cares about my pinball machine story."
Astrid drifted past us, her hand trailing along my shoulder. "Are you two fighting about the toasts again?"
"He wants to go first," I said.
"She's threatened by my material," Duke said.
Astrid looked between us with the patient, fond expression of a woman who had watched this for three months and stopped refereeing somewhere around week four. "You’ll work it out," she said and kept walking.
Duke saluted her with his beer. I watched Astrid cross the room toward Easton, and everything else fell away.
He was standing by the window with a glass in his hand, talking to someone I didn't register, and when Astrid reached him, his shoulders settled. Astrid leaned into his side, and he shifted his weight to make room for her without looking down. She said something quietly. He laughed against her hair. She closed her eyes for half a second, and I watched the two of them disappear into the small, private world they'd been building.
