Page 196 of Forever

“Touché. But are you seriously never going to tell them who your best friend is?”

“No, I think they’d be too jealous when they found out it was you.”

She smiled up at me.

I ran my thumb along the tulle of her dress, tracing her clavicle bone.

Her throat made an adorable squeaking noise as she stared up at me.

Seriously, how much longer was she going to make me wait to get her out of her wedding dress?

Chapter 43

Friday

Brooklyn

Matt had loosened his tie and abandoned his jacket somewhere. The combination of his shirt sleeves rolled up and his vest did something to me. And that smile. God I loved when he smiled at me like that. He had this way of making time stand still. And for someone who was always worried about running out of it, his smile calmed me.

He pulled me back in close. “Today has been perfect,” he said.

“So perfect.” I reached up and wiped a little icing off the side of his jawline. I wasn’t even sure how I’d gotten it there. I’d done my best to smash the cake right against his mouth.

We started dancing slowly even though the song was fast.

I looked around at everyone else dancing. Pretty much all our friends were very drunk. It actually reminded me a lot of homecoming. I smiled, the old memories swirling with the new ones as my hips swayed to the song.

Matt had wanted to right some wrongs from our past today by reading me his original vows. And there was something I’d always wanted to make right too. I should have run to him when I’d gotten in trouble after homecoming 16 years ago instead of running to James. I’d spend the rest of my life running into Matt’s arms. Or maybe just not leaving them at all.

Starting tonight.“Truly magical,” I said.

“Mhm,” Matt said with a smile. “Enchanting.”

“Fantastical.”

He laughed. “I’ll come up with synonyms for how perfect tonight is all you want. But I feel like maybe something else is on your mind?”

I bit my lip and looked up at him. “I just wanted you to know how much I loved today. But do you maybe want to get out of here?”

His smile grew even bigger. “I thought you’d never ask.”

I tried to pull him off the dance floor, but he didn’t budge. I looked up at him.

“There’s just one small problem,” he said.

I looked down at the front of his pants.

“What?” He laughed. “No. As fun as grinding all night with you has been…”

I hit his arm.

“…I wouldn’t refer to that as asmallproblem.”

“Fair,” I said with a laugh.

“The problem is that I don’t think we can go to the beach tonight.”

James and Penny had been kind enough to offer us their beach house for the weekend. I hadn’t been to Rehoboth since I was a kid. We were going to take a limo down and spend tonight and all day there together tomorrow. And then all our friends were going to join us on Sunday. Jacob had been so excited about getting to have a sleepover with Scarlett before joining us there.

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