Best Man

He knelt on the floor and slowly dragged my panties down over my hips. Spreading my legs, he touched my wet folds, gently at first.

I’d been sitting up on my elbows, but the second he started to move his fingers down there, I collapsed down flat. “Oh, god.”

“You want this?” he asked, his voice gruff.

My head bobbed.

Rubbing my sex with his thumb, he inserted a finger. I let out a breath. “This?”

I nodded again.

“Hell, you’re tight. You’re not a virgin?”

I shook my head.

Still pumping me with his finger, he scooped his other hand under my ass and dragged me to the edge of the futon.

I nearly lost it when he dipped his head and replaced his thumb with his tongue. Just one long, lazy lick that tore me to pieces. He buried his tongue deep in me and groaned.

“Miles!” I squealed. “I’ve never…no one’s ever…”

“You want me to stop?”

I shook my head. I most definitely wanted to see where he was going with this.

“Holy shit,” he said, kissing my hip bone and settling between my legs again. “If I’m dreaming, don’t wake me up. I want to stay here.”

And then he planted his mouth on my core and began to suck.

I’m pretty sure that was the closest to heaven I’d ever gotten.

The last thought that goes through my head, as I’m coming out of the dream, is that I’ve never been there since.

When I wake up, my face is buried in his chest and it feels so good. He’s holding me close and his cheek is brushing my hair. His fingers are entwined with mine. He smells so good. I smile and press my lips against his warm skin in a kiss, to taste him, and then it hits me.

Mayday. MAYDAY.

This is Miles. The wrong man.

I pop up like a spring, putting distance between us. His eyes flicker, and he casts a sleepy eye at me before yawning. “You okay?”

So he was sleeping. Good. Maybe he didn’t notice I was nearly licking his chest a second ago?

I hope.

“Uh, sure. Just…nightmare.”

“Nightmare?”

No, it wasn’t one. Luckily, I stopped myself before it became one. “Almost.”

He gives me a curious look but doesn’t say more. He stands up, stretching as he walks toward the door to peer outside. While his back is to me, I say a silent prayer for the strength to not gawk at his back muscles like a horny sex addict, but wind up succumbing anyway.

He whistles. “A lot of snow out there,” he says, rolling his shoulder. “Flares are gone. But I think another plow came through, so that’s good.”

I tear my eyes away from his body and grab my phone. “I’ll see if I got any texts.”

I go outside and check. I have one, from Eva: Just got off the phone with the state police. They know where you are. They’re sending a tow first thing in the morning.

I hurry back inside to tell Miles the news and spot him coming out of the restroom as I appear. His voice is playful. “Guess what?”

“What?” I echo his playful tone.

“You’re getting married today.”

I’d almost forgotten. Why does that make my heart squeeze, and not in a good way? “Oh. Right.”

“Don’t worry, Princess. We’re going to get you there.” He sounds concerned.

He says it like it’s just as important to him as it is to me. And at least he’s calling me Princess instead of Bridezilla, but I don’t know why it still stings. “Right. Eva texted me there’ll be a tow truck here first thing in the morning.”

I’ve been waiting for this day for over a year. So why does it suddenly feel like it really is D-Day?

“Cool. See? Nothing to worry about.”

I nod and fan my face a little. I need to get a grip. Of course Aaron has made me feel good in bed. He’s given me plenty of good orgasms. Everything in that department is fine, just peachy, so I don’t know why the fuck I’m having the distinct feeling like the time with Miles was so much better.

I need to stop my mind from reeling like it is. I wish I had a book to read, to get my mind off him. My mind’s going haywire because I’m about to make a massive decision that’ll shape the entirety of my life. The grass always seems greener until you take your shoes off and walk through it a while.

Cold feet. That’s all it is.

I sit down on the bench and pull my knees to my chest. Talk about cold feet. My toes are so pale they’re almost blue.

Suddenly, it hits me. “Miles!”

He’s standing in front of the vending machine, rubbing his chin. “Yeah?”

“I just remembered…I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. I have a Macy’s bag in the back of my trunk with a pair of boots in there. I was going to return the outfit because I wasn’t sure they were my style, but they’re better than nothing.”

He yawns and stretches, then heads to the front door. “On it.”

I start to toss him his flannel shirt, but he waves me off again. So the dude’s going to go out there half-naked. He’s suicidal. I throw it at his face. “Take it. I’ve had enough of your washboard abs.”

He grins at me and throws it on.

“Thanks. Watch that you don’t hurt yourself this time.” I sit there, massaging the feeling back into my toes, trying not to think about him.

But that’s impossible.

He returns a few minutes later. “Uh. Lia?”

I turn my head suddenly, thinking it’s got to be someone else.

He called me Lia.

He actually knows my name? My voice cracks. “Ye-es?”

He’s looking into the crumpled Macy’s bag. “I think you might be better off barefoot.”

I hop off the bench and grab the bag from him. “They’re not so…” I look inside.

I’d forgotten how awful it was. The vinyl teddy and matching kitten-heeled boots, and the little mask.

“Um…” I blush bright red.

“You’re right that it’s not your style. Were you actually going to wear this?”

“Well…” I crumple the bag up and flop down on the bench. “Okay. Here’s the deal. Aaron told me he had this fantasy. A Catwoman fantasy. And I thought I could…I don’t know. I thought I’d make it come true for our wedding night. But then he said something that made me lose my nerve, so I stuffed it back in the car.”

He’s eyeing me like I’m from another planet. “You’re serious.”

I nod.

“What did he say to you?”

I shrug. “Well, when I hinted that maybe I’d give it a try for him, he laughed his head off. He said that I shouldn’t even try.”

He’s listening attentively. He doesn’t say anything, like he’s waiting for the punch line. I feel like I have to go on, so I start to babble.

“It’s all right. I’m not sexy. He told me that’s fine. I’m the girl-next-door. I’m the girl he wants to spend his life with, right? Not all those other women. So I guess I should be happy with that,” I reason cheerfully, opening up the bag.

“Yeah…” His mouth is open like he wants to say more. Then he closes it and his eyes trail to the ground.

“What?” I pull out the boots. They’re thigh-high vinyl with little kitten heels, but they’ll keep my feet warmer, at least. I slip them on over my leggings as he watches.

“Nothing.” He eyes me curiously as I stand up and model them. “So…you’re not going to put on the rest of the outfit?”

I stick out my tongue at him. “Ha ha.”

“I’m just saying…if you’re having trouble deciding. I can be the judge of whether you’re sexy or not.” He crosses his arms and sucks in his cheek. “Because I can tell you now. That’s pretty hot.”

“Ew. Stop it.” I know he’s just teasing me again. But he needs to stop tempting me to think about anything other than the fact that I’m going to marry Aaron in less than nine hours. I’m going crazy enough as it is. “I think I’ll pass.”

He shrugs and goes back to the vending machine.

“Do you have a dollar I can borrow?” I ask him as I wobble back to the bench. “I’m starving. Those Good and Plenties didn’t cut it.”

He shakes his head and holds up a single dollar. “My last one.”

“Oh.”

All right. No problem. I listen to him pressing the buttons for the machine and take a sip of the water he gave me, which is almost gone. I’ll fill my stomach with more coffee. The good news is, I’m definitely going to rock my wedding dress.

In less than nine hours.

Ohmigod. I’m getting married in nine hours. I think.

“That’s another plow,” he suddenly says.

I whip around, stumbling for the doors in those ridiculous boots. Before I can get far, he takes my hand and puts something in it. “Here.”

He’s outside before it can register in my head…

Twizzlers.

My favorite candy on earth.

I stand there, frozen, trying to wrack my brain. How did he know that? Had I said that during this trip?

No.

Had I said that to him anytime in the past few years?

No, I’ve barely ever seen him.

He just somehow knew.

Why?

I know, he’s telling me I shouldn’t read into things. I shouldn’t read into the fact that when all his friends were having fun in basement parties, he was spending his time with me, playing chess. That he drove all the way out of Denver to tutor me for the GRE. That he watched over me at the frat. That he knows my favorite candy when I don’t even think Aaron does.

But reading into everything is all I’m doing.

I’m Bridezilla. Headcase. Shorty. Princess. He hates me.

Doesn’t he?

After a minute, I wrap my cardigan around myself and follow him out to the front. I stand under the building’s overhang and watch a plow, busily working at the other end of the huge lot. Miles is standing in snow up to his thighs, his hands in his pockets.

The snow is slowing down.

“Does he see us?” I call, standing at the edge of the overhang, where the snow gradually rises to a massive drift that dwarves the walls of the building.

“Yeah,” he says, turning and pushing through the high snow. “But he’s kind of being a dick. I asked him if he’d pull your car out but he said he won’t. Liability issues.”

“Really?” My spirits plummet. “Did you tell him—”

I stop. I was going to say about me getting married, but what had he said before? Just because I’m getting married doesn’t make me special.

And he’s right.

It’s not like I cured a disease or ran a marathon or did something that few people can do.

Everyone gets married.

Other than my small circle of friends, no one else gives a shit.

His eyes drop to the ridiculous boots and he gives me a lazy smile. “Well, you might have different results. Especially if you put on that full Catwoman getup.”

Hmm. He’s so funny. He goes back to watching the plow and I stand there, staring at his broad, flannel-clad back for a few moments, trying to pretend that the mere sight of him doesn’t make my mouth water.

Then I crouch down and scrape together a little snow, packing it into a snowball. I throw it with everything I have and—contact. I aim for his head but it hits the back of his shoulder.

He whirls on me as I’m scraping together another one. “You want death?”

A person doesn’t bring a knife to a gunfight, but that’s just what I did. I’m not athletic, and I’m wearing kitten heels in the snow, and Miles is a beast of an athlete who loves the cold.

He cracks his knuckles and gives me a rabid look that tells me I’ve woken the dragon.

As I throw another one that misses, he reaches into the snow and forms his own massive ball.

I shriek and look for somewhere to hide. I try to hurry to one of the stone pillars under the overhang, but before I get there, a snowball hits me right in the boob.

“Hey! Sergeant Shitface!” I shout as I shake the snow off me. “You may have won the battle but you’re not winning the war.”

He saunters innocently up to me, his hands in his pockets, grinning. “Think I already secured victory, Private. For someone who doesn’t like the snow, you have a lot of it on you.”

“You’re hilarious.” I bend down to reach for more snow. “You want some more of this?”

My answer’s a snowball, right on my chin.

I gape. He’s fast. “All right. It’s on!”

He motions me forward. “Bring it, Shorty.”

I reach down, fingers stinging, and mold another snowball. I aim at his head but miss by a yard.

“You call that bringing it?” he taunts.

I frantically grab more snow as one ball hits me on the top of my head, breaking and trickling cold water down my neck. I squeal.

The next time, I trick him, pretending to throw one way, so that he’s not expecting it when I unleash the ball into the drift where he’s jumped. Snow breaks on his forehead.

I pump my fist. “Yes!”

He lies there, half-buried in a thigh-high drift, frozen in shock.

My triumph only lasts for a second, because in a blink, his expression of shock turns to raw determination. “Now, you are in for it,” he shouts, quickly scraping together an enormous snowball, nearly the size of his head.

I shriek and back away, trying to hide behind the pillar, but lose my footing and fall feet-first into a drift, covering my body, head to toe, in snow. I manage to get my own snowball, somehow, and we both hit each other at the same time, squarely in the chest.

By now, I’m too exhilarated to care about the cold.

I can’t feel my fingers or toes, but I don’t care.

We’re not molding the snow into balls now, we’re just throwing handfuls of whatever we can grab at each other.

And I’m laughing. Laughing so hard, I can’t stop. I feel dizzy and wet and…alive.

I’m lost in a sea of white as he keeps tossing it at me, getting closer and closer as he keeps taunting me about not liking the snow.

“I think you need to cool off,” I say to him as he’s bending over.

Then I grab the collar of his flannel, which is still kind of open because he hasn’t buttoned it all the way, pull it back, and shove a handful of snow underneath, right at the back of his neck.

He points at me with one hand and grabs my wrist with the other. “You’re dead.”

He says it like he means it. I try to get away but wind up stumbling backward onto the snow, and a second later, he falls on top of my squirming body, throwing more snow onto me, like he means to bury me in it.

I’m laughing so hard I can barely breathe. “Stop. Oh, stop! Stop!”

He does. He’s not moving. I’m not moving. We’re swallowing each other’s heavy breaths. His gaze fixes on mine. His nose bumps mine. I feel the warmth of his skin, the soft hairs of is beard on my chin, the twitching of his cock, trapped between us.

I’m going to die.

I’m not cold.

I’m as hot as a human can possibly be without bursting into flames.

I want to be kissed so bad I can taste him.

A cold wind rips though the valley, then, whipping wet tendrils of my hair into my face.

He blinks and rolls off me. “Admit it. I won that one,” he says coolly.

I lie there, my heart beating like mad.

What did I almost just do?

Still dizzy, I sit up and look at my fingers. They’re blood red. I’m sure my cheeks are probably two cherries. Miles, on the other hand, is completely unaffected by the cold. He’s somewhat out of breath, and his lips curl into a smile on his perfectly chiseled face. “Are you giving up so soon?”

“I can’t feel my fingers,” I admit, trying to bend them.

Looking into my eyes, he takes my hands between his. Despite having handled all that snow, they’re perfectly dry. Immediately, my hands warm like my feet had before, aching with a pins-and-needles feeling.

“Better?”

I nod, forgetting how to speak. The only thing I can think about is his hands enveloping mine.

My hands are cold.

But his are the ones that are trembling.

I wonder if he realizes this, because he lets go suddenly and wipes his hands on his jeans, as if he’s just touched something gross.

The plowman comes closer and rolls down his window. Miles climbs over the drifts to talk to him, and I follow, tottering along in those ridiculous boots.

I’m soaked to the skin, and it’s only when another wind blows that I realize how freaking cold it is. The pain slowly leaks into my fingers and toes.

“Sure we can’t get you to pull our car out?” Miles asks.

The guy, an older man with a beard like Santa Claus, except not as white, shakes his head. “Sorry. Been burned before. Not that it matters. There’s still a backup on the bottom of the hill that ain’t gonna be cleared out anytime soon.”

Miles scratches the back of his neck. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s a mess.”

Miles looks over at me. “She’s getting married at eleven tomorrow. At the Midnight Lodge. What do you think?”

The old man regards me carefully, taking in my outfit. “You planning on walking down the aisle in those boots?”

I frown at him. Just answer the question, dude.

He laughs. “The way things look down at the bottom of the hill? No way in hell.”

I nearly choke on the cold air. “What?”

“Just being honest, sweetheart.”

I start to hyperventilate.

Miles climbs closer to the truck, steps on the side-rail, and hoists himself up. “Look. She’s freaking out. She might be better off if you agreed to tow her car out of the ditch. Consider it a wedding gift?”

He shakes his head. “Nice try.” He throws the plow into drive, so Miles has to hop off. “You two stay warm, now. Congratulations.”

The plow lumbers off and Miles gives me an apologetic look.

I start to fan myself. “I can’t breathe. Miles. I can’t breathe.”

“Hey.” He takes my flailing wrists and holds them still. “Look at me. This isn’t over.”

My teeth are chattering wildly. “I’m falling apart. I can almost feel the dark circles popping out on my eyes. I’m going to look like ass on my wedding day. Especially if I don’t get there on time.”

“Look. If you don’t get there exactly at eleven, so what? Maybe they can delay it an hour. Or two.” He reaches out and pushes a strand of hair behind my ear, showering me in déjà vu. “And there is no way in hell you will ever look like ass. It’s not physically possible.”

My teeth stop and suddenly I feel warm. “What?”

He drops my hands and clears his throat. “I mean that Aaron would never think you look bad.”

But he has. In our five years together, he’s never been afraid to call out when he thinks I look awful. I learned that a few months into dating, when I wore purple and he told me it made me look like Barney. It’s why I made sure that every time I was with him, I looked my best. I refused to let him near me for a week when I found out I was allergic to shellfish and got the worst case of hives in history. When I had the flu, I also made sure he kept away. When I got that awful haircut right before my senior year of college? I didn’t see him for a month.

“You obviously don’t know Aaron as well as you think you do,” I murmur.

“Maybe I don’t,” he acknowledges, digging his hands into his pockets. “But I’d say your wedding day would be too late to admit he made a mistake.”

I swallow. Exactly. Which is why I’m not thinking of mistakes from here on out. Everything is as it should be.

We walk a few steps toward the rest stop doors.

“Thanks. And thanks for trying. Back there. With the dick. Why do you think it is that everyone thinks we’re getting married?”

“No clue.”

I give him a sideways glance. “Really?”

He shrugs. “I mean, yeah. Obviously, you’re not my type at all.”

Oh. So that whole you’re insanely beautiful thing was just a line. “Right. Obviously you’re like Aaron. You may not want the triple D’s, but you want the Catwoman. Considering how excited you were by the outfit.”

He nods. “Right.”

“I’ll tell you what. How about I give it to you, and you can get your girlfriend to wear it? That is, if you ever have a girlfriend?”

He shakes his head. “That’s nice of you to offer. But again, big if.”

“Right. I forgot. One-night stands are more your thing. No one meets your impossibly high standards to warrant that repeat engagement.”

He narrows his eyes and growls low, “That again? Why do you care? Because you were one of my legions of hot women? You curious as to how you stacked up against the competition? Is that it?”

I freeze, speechless for a moment. Then I realize I have the perfect out. “You think I’m hot?”

“Ha. Ha.” He pulls open the door to the building and lets me go inside. “Maybe you should stop being so curious. You know what they say about curiosity.”

Clumps of snow that had been clinging to my clothing drop on the floor as I walk in.

He doesn’t wait for me to answer. He scans down to my boots. “It killed the cat…woman.”

“Oh. You’re such a comedian.”

The heat hits me hard, making my skin burn all over. My clothes are so wet, their dampness grating against my already irritated skin. I wrap my arms around my soaked cardigan and shiver.

He watches me. “Come here.”

For a second, I wonder if he’s going to offer to warm me up again, but he doesn’t. Which is a good thing, because I can’t accept. Outside, I was mere millimeters away from kissing him again. In fact, I wanted it. A couple of millimeters were all that existed between being a good wife and an awful human being.

I follow him into the ladies’ bathroom, my teeth chattering. The second I get in there, he presses the button for the automatic hand dryer and moves me into the stream of it. It’s not hugely better, but it helps.

“These boots were a mistake, I think,” I say, unzipping the long zipper down my thigh and stepping out of them. They’re not snow boots, so they’re ruined, and my feet are just as cold as if I were barefoot.

“I could’ve told you that,” he mutters.

I sit on the edge of the counter and lift my feet up to the warm stream of air. Better. “I think you did, Dumbledore.”

He chuckles. “Dumbledore?”

Oh, had I said that out loud? Well, it’s not as terrible as some names I have for him. “Yeah. Because even when you don’t know everything, you know everything. Or at least you think you do.”

“I don’t know everything,” he says smugly, leaning against the tiled wall. “Just most things.”

I roll my eyes. Shrug off my cardigan, which is heavy with the dampness, and move around, trying to get as much of my body dry as possible.

As I’m doing that, contorting my body in different ways to get close, I glance in the mirror and see him watching me.

His eyes are hot and possessive. As if nothing short of the apocalypse would tear him away.

He’s only looked at me like that once before.

The night I met him.

For a minute, I watch him, watching me. His eyes are darkened again, and they’re moving over me the same way his hands had moved over me that night, as if tracing the path they’d made, so many years ago.

And that one simple look confirms everything.

He doesn’t hate me as much as I thought, either.