"Seven," I say. "We'll be there. Knox and Mason too, of course."
"I'll call Maren and Luna," Beth says. "They can probably handle table settings and signage while the guys do staging."
Harper's chin does that thing, the trembling thing.
"Don't," Beth tells her. "If you start, I'll start, and Arthur won't know what to do."
"Are you kidding?" I say with a smirk. "I'm always up for a good cry."
Harper laughs and I watch her shoulders come down from where they've been living near her earlobes for the last twenty minutes. The color starts creeping back into her face in stages.
She thanks us four more times in the span of getting her jacket on, which Beth handles by reminding her that we're literally the best men and the maid of honor, this is baseline job description stuff, and Harper is about to tear up, but then her phone buzzes and she glances down at it and her whole expression rearranges.
"Ben needs... things from the pharmacy," she says flatly.
"Tell Ben we said feel better," Beth says.
Harper pauses at the door. Turns back. "Thank you again. Seriously."
"Go home," I say. "Hydrate your man."
She snorts, waves, and slips out.
The apartment goes quiet.
Beth sets her phone down on the couch cushion beside her and looks up at me. Her hair is still mussed from earlier and her shirt is sitting slightly off-center on her shoulders, the left side tugged down just enough to show the strap of her bra. I lick my lips before I realize I'm doing it.
She notices, and our eyes catch. Hold. One second too long, then two, and suddenly the whole apartment feels about fifteen degrees warmer.
"So—" I begin, right as she says, "We should probably—"
We both stop. She bites her lip. Something low in my abdomen flips, hot and restless. All the responsible, platonic energy I managed to scrape together for Harper's emergency suddenly feels like nothing more than a flimsy dam holding back amassive flood, and looking at her mouth just put a crack right down the center of it.
I'm sure I'm visibly flushed and I'm pretty sure she's flushing.
"I should—I should call Knox and Mason," I manage, because resuming our business like nothing happened after hearing about our best friends' misfortune feels... wrong. "So they know about Saturday."
"Right, right." Beth says. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "And I need to call Maren and Luna. Make sure they're free on Saturday."
16
Beth
Harper looks spectacular in her green silk jumpsuit.
It’s honestly a miracle, considering that nine hours ago, every single one of us looked like a construction worker.
When we unlocked the front doors this morning, the venue looked less like a party venue and more like an abandoned gymnasium waiting to host a blood drive.
But nothing cures an aggressively beige venue like a highly caffeinated, unhinged dream team.
Ben showed up vibrating with the need to atone for his potato salad slip-up and hauled forty-two heavy plastic folding tables off the storage racks, flipping them open with the kind of grunting usually reserved for CrossFit gyms.
Luna arrived in yoga pants and a messy bun and aggressively started taping down extension cords. Maren actually closed her bakery three hours early and marched through the double doors at 11 a.m. with two massive bakery boxes of croissants and something she called "stress muffins". She spent the next four hours climbing a ladder to hang fairy lights while I stood at the bottom, holding the legs and praying she wouldn't fall.
And then there were the alphas.
Mason, Arthur, and Knox descended on the VFW hall like a highly coordinated strike team. Mason carried full kegs through the front door like they were slightly heavy toddlers. Knox did algebraic equations on a napkin to optimize the raffle table’s foot traffic. And Arthur somehow performed a miracle on the sticky, fluorescent-lit bar, transforming it into a high-end cocktail station using nothing but draped fabric, string lights, and zip-ties.
