Page 97 of The Bridges I've Burned

“Okay, that’s a yes.” She laughed. “So, what’s the holdup? Is it Macon? Is he cockblocking you ’cause she’s Marin’s best friend? Macon, are you cockblocking your brother?”

“Fuck my life,” he muttered under his breath.

“No,” I answered for him. “No one’s…cockblocking.” Kill me now.

“Oh.” She seemed relieved. “So, then what is it? Can’t be a problem with attraction. ’Cause you’re both shit hot, and I saw you eye-fucking the hell out of each other at the engagement party.”

My eyes had been all over Elena that night, and I hadn’t exactly been subtle about it. Good to know it had been reciprocated.

“It’s timing,” I admitted because if I didn’t fess up soon, we’d all be here until next week with the way she was rambling. “The two of us are only here until the wedding, and then she goes back to Richmond, and I?—”

“Ah.” She nodded, not waiting for me to finish. “The distance dilemma.”

“Yeah,” I confirmed.

“So, obviously, what you feel for her is more than a casual hookup.”

“I don’t know.”

“That wasn’t a question,” she stated. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be concerned about a time or distance constraint. In fact, you’d probably be looking forward to moving on to someone new.”

Someone new?

My chest tightened as I imagined her at a restaurant, laughing at a joke her date had just told her.

“Don’t like that idea very much, do you?” She observed me.

“I hadn’t really thought about it until now.”

“But now, you are, and you want to rip this faceless fucker’s face off?”

“Yeah, a little,” I confessed, looking up at her like she was some sort of wise Prada-wearing Buddha.

“I’ve done the distance-dilemma thing.” Her face seemed to be haunted by a painful memory. “Eventually one or both of you will have to make a choice.”

“What choice?”

She gave me one of those looks. The kind mothers gave their toddlers when they couldn’t figure out how to open a banana. “A distance dilemma can only be solved if one of you decides to close the gap. Or meet in the middle—that’s what Aiden and I did.”

My gut churned because I knew my fate was already set. I’d signed a binding contract making it so, which only left?—

“Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves?” I questioned. “We’re still getting to know each other, and you’re talking about uprooting lives.”

“It’s just something to think about.”

I let out a sigh. “I don’t know if that’s even what I?—”

“Then, just go in with an open mind,” she suggested.

“So, I’m just supposed to go in with absolutely no plan, assuming that if this is meant to be, it will all work out?”

Macon was the one to answer this time. “Isn’t that what we do most of the time anyway? Just figure it out as we go and hope for the best?”

“Well, yeah, I guess. I was just hoping for something a bit more concrete.”

They both laughed, and then Millie said, “You can’t start a relationship, thinking of all the reasons it might fail—because it will fail. There is no plan when it comes to this kind of thing. You simply have to decide to try.” She gave me a wry grin. “Love is chaos. Surrender to the madness.”

After Billy’s overshare at the beach, the last place I wanted to be was anywhere near my brother’s backyard and all the mental images it brought up. But, that weekend, he and Marin decided to host a cookout.

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