“Shots,” Tanner declares, and plunks the bottle of whiskey down in front of me.
“Whistlepig 30 Year. The Big Shebang,” I read aloud from the bottle label, distracted.
My mind’s not really on the whiskey or my brothers or any of the hustle and bustle going on around Rosemont.
It’s my wedding day. And all I can think about is the woman who’s about to be my wife.
It might be a very small, intimate wedding that Lila and I are having, just my family, since hers unsurprisingly sent their “regrets,” but there are still caterers and photographers and coordinators milling around the place. My sister Josie flew in this morning, and that was a whole hullabaloo of greetings and happy reunions among everything else going on. She and Sadie are with Lila right now, getting hair and makeup done in one of the guest bedrooms.
“No shots,” Walker says, pouring out glasses of amber liquid for all of us. “That ain’t how you treat a thirty-year single malt. Not like that cheap swill you bull riders guzzle.”
Tanner shrugs. “Potato, po-tah-to.”
Walker glowers. “This is a five thousand dollar bottle of whiskey, you heathen. You’re supposed to go slow.”
“Fuck going slow,” Tanner says, and knocks back the whiskey back in one go.
Walker rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I bet your girlfriends could start a complaint hotline about that attitude.”
Tanner grins. “Ain’t heard any complaints yet.”
“That’s because he doesn’t let any girl stick around long enough to become a girlfriend,” Rafe says, eyeing my brother knowingly. “Can’t hear a complaint if you never see her again.”
“I’m a busy man,” Tanner says with a shrug.
“One day,” Walker says, “You’re gonna learn the value of quality over quantity.”
Tanner give him a cool look, green eyes glittering. “I know the difference better than you think, my brother.”
Rafe takes the bottle and pours an extra finger of whiskey in my glass. “You look like you need it,” he tells me.
Rafe’s our brother in all but blood. Started working at Wild Rose when he was a teenager and we just about adopted him. Things were bad at home for him. Mom and Dad and all the rest of us made sure he found a family in all of us.
Him and Tanner are the closest in age, and just the closest, period. They’re complete opposites: quiet versus never-shuts-the-fuck-up, introverted versus extroverted, serious versus always cracking jokes. A ranch foreman who prefers the shadows versus a bull rider born for the spotlight. But somehow they’ve been best friends since they were fifteen.
I never understood the whole “opposites attract”thing.
Then I met Lila.
“No girlfriends,” Walker muses. “Just an endless train of buckle bunnies, huh?” He takes a sip of whiskey. “Hasn’t that gotten old for you yet, T?”
The sparkle in Tanner’s green eyes dims slightly. “We’re not here to talk about me,” he deflects. “We’re here to celebrate the unlikely union of one intelligent, talented, beautiful woman to a grumpy meathead with the personality of a rock.” He pours himself another glass of whiskey and clinks his against mine. “Stone-cold Slade Rhodes. Never thought you’d make it down the aisle.”
“Me neither,” I say honestly.
Walker looks at me over his glass. “But this one doesn’t count, right? Being that it’s all on paper.”
He’s testing me, seeing how I react. I don’t give him the satisfaction of seeing that comment get under my skin. But Walker’s words slide in like a sharp splinter anyway, because the honest answer, the one I’m not going to give him, is that it counts to me. Every part of it.
I just drink my whiskey. “This is good stuff.”
Good as it is, it doesn’t do a thing for the wedding day jitters rolling through me.
I’ve stood in front of hundred mile an hour slap shots. I’ve gone into the corners with power forwards who outweigh me by thirty pounds. I’ve played game sevens in front of twenty thousand people with a Stanley Cup on the line.
I’ve never been nervous or terrified about any of it. Hockey is just a game, when it comes down to it. It’s not life or death.
I know life and death stakes.
