Page 40 of Just One of the Groomsmen
She gave a shrug that conveyed she thought he deserved to suffer at least a while longer. Little did she know how much he was suffering.
She toed a groove in the wooden floor, her gaze focused on the motion. “I’m not sure how things got so… Yeah.”
“Yeah,” he said, biting his tongue on everything else he wanted to say, which was anything that would keep her here with him longer. Then he shifted into strictly friends mode, walked her to her truck, wished her good night…
And experienced that very same sense of helplessness they’d talked about earlier as he watched her drive away.
Chapter Ten
First thing Monday morning, after grabbing her usual cup of coffee on her way to work, Addie spotted Shep a few yards down the sidewalk, probably headed toward the school, and quickened her pace to catch up with him. “Hey.”
He glanced at her, and panic bound her lungs at the resigned look on his face. “Hey,” he said, but what she heard was that he couldn’t hang out with her anymore and she was disinvited to the wedding.
The image of Lexi and her bridesmaids coming after her with pitchforks even flashed through her mind, unlikely as it may be.
Addie swallowed past the lump in her throat. “She’s still mad.”
“Not mad exactly. She’s…” His sigh weighed about a hundred pounds. “Emotions are just high and planning a wedding is stressful, and…hopefully after the ceremony and reception are over and done with, we can get back to being us.”
With that, he continued down the path that led them both to their jobs, and she stayed by his side, the silence heavier than their usual companionable type.
While Addie had been focusing on all the happy parts of a relationship she was missing as of late, it made her wonder if people truly did get back to just being them. Or did the pressures of life make it so there was always something in the way?
Her parents were happily married, but she’d also seen the toll caring for Nonna Lucia took on them. As easy as she could be most days, she could also be high maintenance and ornery as a polecat, and once her mind was made up, that was it—a la, planting flowers in the neighbor’s yard.
Alexandria and Eli appeared to be the perfect couple, and while Addie knew they still loved each other, between a few years of babies and his nonstop work schedule, she’d also witnessed plenty of fights where they blamed each other for why things weren’t as good as they used to be.
Shep and Lexi were ridiculously cute and in love, and yet the tension wafted off him in waves.
Extra stressors, like two sets of families in the mix, bills, how exactly to raise the kids, health insurance, mortgage payments, and a whole slew of other stuff added up so quickly.
The mere idea of balancing all that with someone else made Addie’s skin tighten, and suddenly a touch of the shine got worn off the idea of settling down.
Part of that might also be because her date on Saturday night hadn’t exactly turned out the way she wanted to—thanks for that, Crawford.
Without bothering with conversation, David had started a movie and opened a bottle of uppity wine that was supposedly super fancy and expensive but tasted like where she assumed that sour-grapes saying came from.
A few minutes in, his hands began roaming, and all she could think was that shewashis booty call, when hello, maybe it was her sexy underwear putting out the vibe.
Again, thanks, Tucker Crawford.
And another thanks to him that when David wrapped his arm around her shoulders, instead of feeling a flicker of interest, she thought of how much better she’d felt with Tucker’s strong arm around her as he’d talked her down.
She couldn’t stop replaying the way he’d stalked toward her in the cabin of the houseboat, his eyes darker than she’d ever seen them. Tingles had broken out across her entire body, which had clearly gotten the wrong signal.
Then he’d delivered that last line, the one that’d kept replaying in her head:You deserve better.
Her heart had squeezed when he’d said it. In a way it was nice, and yet it’d still hurt like hell.
With her thoughts so messed up, she could only get halfway through the movie before making an excuse about being too tired and heading home—thank goodness she could only choke down two sips of that awful wine so she was able to drive.
And that’s enough thinking about my messy love life.
She refocused on Shep, who’d kept striding in a bit of a daze, and what she could do to help. “I’m sorry things are so stressful right now. I’ll bow out of the wedding if I need to.”
He came to a full stop, the distraction in his features fading as he turned to face her. “You’re in the wedding, Addie. It’s my fault that I never told her you and I had dated, not yours. Since she’d already had trouble believing we were such close friends, I just didn’t want to get into it, so I purposely glazed over the whole thing.” He ran a hand through his hair. “It was more than a decade ago, for hell’s sake.”
“Right. It was nothing.”
