Page 35 of That Reilly Boy
“How about a toast?” I say, thinking it’ll be a fun way to tell my best friend I’m getting married. I’ll pretend I’m happy and then take a very, very long sip.
Her face lights up and she raises her glass. “Is she selling him the house?”
That’s the part she’s going to cheer for, but only that, and I imagine her glass shattering on the floor, splashing wine everywhere. “Actually, maybe put the glasses down for a minute.”
“She’s not selling him the house?” Mel, clearly confused, sets down her wine and crosses her arms. “Are we celebrating or not?”
“We are,” I say quickly. “I’m getting married!”
Her head tilts in the exact same way as one of my favorite four-legged clients, and I have to fight down a nervous giggle. “Married? To who?”
“Hayden.”
She barks out a laugh. “I haven’t even had a drink yet, so this wine must put off some potent fumes. I swear it sounded like you said you’re marrying Hayden freakin’ Reilly.”
“That’s the second time you’ve called him that. You know that’s not actually his middle name, right?”
“The only thing I know is that I should have brought a bottle of vodka instead of wine.” It doesn’t stop her from downing a third of her glass in one shot. “This is a joke, right?”
“It’s not a joke.” A fraud? Yes. A bad idea? Probably. But a joke, it’s not. That would require, among other things, for the situation I’m in to be funny. “You know I’ve always thought about him.”
“I’ve thought about the guy who taught me how to sneak out of my house without getting caught once or twice over the years, too, but if he shows up in Sumac Falls, I’m not going to marry him because we dated in high school.”
“I’m sure your husband appreciates that.”
We’ve both emptied our glasses already, and this time I do the pouring. She’s not wrong about this conversation pairing better with vodka, but I’ll take whatever help I can get right now.
“Cara, you better tell me everything.”
I tell her the same story we’re telling everybody—we’d always pined for each other and we reconnected online. Then, when he showed up in town, we realized we’re still in love and don’t want to be apart anymore.
“Bullshit. The only pining was you wishing you could take a pine two-by-four to the side of his head,” Mel declares when I’m done, and I take a long drink of wine because lying makes my mouth so dry.
The way my best friend is looking at me isn’t helping. I hate this and it’s so tempting to tell her the truth. I can just swear her to secrecy.
Maybe more wine will help.
“If you were talking to Hayden online, you would have told me. You tell me everything.”
I knew this was coming. “Maybe I knew you would tell me it’s a bad idea and remind me he broke my heart once.”
“Because it’s a bad idea and, oh yeah, he broke your heart once.” She reaches for the wine bottle.
“I didn’t want to hear it.”
We argue for a while—drinking wine the entire time—about her being my best friend and doing her job. My rebuttal that I knew she wouldn’t let go of the past and I didn’t want to lose out on a future with him because of a mistake he made seventeen years ago didn’t seem to impress her.
At some point we ended up sitting on the floor, our backs against the wall and the almost empty wine bottle between us.
“How come you don’t have a couch?” Mel asks as she divides the last of the wine between our glasses.
“Because this is my work, not my house. If I had a couch here, the dogs would just sleep on it and then people wouldn’t pay me.”
“How come you don’t have any snacks?”
“Because the dogs would eat them.”
These questions are easier to answer than why I’m marrying Hayden. Plus, I don’t have to lie. Letting dogs lounge around on couches, eating snacks, is no way to run a grooming business.
