I can feel Luna staring a hole into the side of my head. I work hard to ignore her.
"You're—" Jessica blinks. "You're dating Knox? And Arthur? And Mason?"
Abort mission. Fix this. Tell her you’re just their roommate. That you’re "seeing" them in the hallway.
"The whole pack," I hear myself say.
I have to zip it right now, before I announce we’re planning a last-minute double wedding with Harper.
Jessica's smile does something. Flickers, maybe. Then it's back, bigger. Way bigger.
"That'swonderful," she says. "Oh my god. That's so great for you." She presses her hand to her chest. "I'msohappy. Really. You guys must be—wow. That's amazing."
5
Mason
Beth drops her bag on the kitchen counter, still in her green apron, breathing like she ran here. Her face is doing something I've seen once before: on a guy at the construction site who accidentally reversed a forklift into his boss's truck and was now trying to figure out how to bring it up.
"So," Knox says, padding in from the hallway in leggings and a terry cloth headband that makes him look like an extra from a Jane Fonda workout tape. A towel hangs around his neck. He's glistening slightly. "What was so important I had to interrupt my wellness workout?"
Arthur looks up from the mixing bowl he's been hovering over for the last twenty minutes—some elaborate brownie situation that requires, apparently,threetypes of nuts he was explicitly prevented from buying because Beth called this emergency meeting.
I lean against my room's doorframe and squeeze a grip trainer in my right hand. Sixty pounds of resistance, which is the only workout I can manage right now because Beth's text yanked me out of my workout mid-set.
Beth presses both hands flat on the counter. "Okay. I'm going to try and say this as calmly and objectively as I can." She takes a breath, straightens up and clears her throat. "So, Jessica came into my shop."
Arthur goes still.
Knox's towel slides off his shoulder. He doesn't pick it up.
My hand squeezes the grip trainer all the way in and holds it there.
"And she—okay, so she comes in, right, goingoh my god your shop is adorable, like we're girlfriends, and she says she wantsmeto take care of her flower arrangements." Beth's hands are moving faster than her mouth now. "For herwedding.To Grant. Their wedding."
I squeeze the grip trainer so hard something in my forearm twitches. Heat starts as a sharp point behind my sternum and bleeds outward.
Arthur stares at her. "She walked intoyourshop and asked you to arrange flowers for her wedding. To Grant."
"Yes." Beth folds her arms across her chest, then unfolds them, then folds them again. None of the configurations seem to work for her.
"Wow," I say.
"She did the whole thing." Beth's hands are moving again, restless. "TheGrant feels terriblespeech. The head tilt. The—" She touches her own arm, mimicking it. "She squeezed my arm and told me she hopes I find my special someone soon."
Knox, who's been standing motionless against the hallway entrance like a man waiting for a verdict, crosses his arms. "What the hell?"
Beth closes her eyes. Opens them.
"So you have to understand—I was seeing red. Like, actual red, the color, behind my eyelids. So please don't judge me too hard when I tell you what came out of my mouth, because I wasn't—Imean, I wasthere, obviously, but I also wasn't fully in control of—"
"Beth," I say. "What did you say?"
She looks at the counter for a beat. Then at me.
"I told her I was dating all three of you."
My face does something, I have absolutely no idea what. I can feel muscles moving but whatever expression I've assembled, it's not one I've worn before.
