“I don’t know if we should go with the Whitney dried buttonhole or the Wellington dried buttonhole.”
Adam stood over his fiancé and the disaster that was their living room, an ominous sense of dread settling over him as he attempted to process what Noah had said. “A dried…what?”
Noah gave him that look he gave Adam whenever he was getting on his last nerve. Usually, Adam deserved the look. But he’d just arrived on the scene, having stumbled down their loft stairs after peeking over the edge of their railing to see Noah had taken up camp on the floor.
Adam sighed. This was about the wedding. The wedding Adam was almost certain would never happen. At least once a month, Noah would drag out these enormous binders, pull out photo after photo, quote after quote, and stare at them, debate Adam about them, and then get frustrated and put it all away again. Once, he’d even tossed all the binders in the trash, leaving Adam to fish them out and find the emotional support vodka.
Noah’s stress and anxiety regarding their impending nuptials had become damn near pathological at this point. It wasn’t that Noah didn’t love him or want to marry him. Adamknew that. Their relationship was perfect. Well, as perfect as any relationship he knew. They fought, they bickered, Noah admonished Adam for being a dick in public, but never in the bedroom. No, Noah loved when Adam was a dick in the bedroom.
So, Adam didn’t get it. Hewantedto get it. He wanted to care about flowers and color schemes and place settings. He wanted to understand why the idea of this wedding sent his level-headed but emotional fiancé off the rails. He tried to pretend that he got it, that he cared about the things Noah wanted him to care about. But it seemed like, no matter what he said or how many times he agreed with Noah, it was never truly the correct answer.
Noah thrust a picture at him, showing a man wearing a tux and tails. “That.”
Adam scanned the picture. “What am I looking at, babe?” he asked, using the same sort of patience one saved for people who might be on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Noah glowered at him. “The little flowers that go in the buttonhole of your suit? We need to decide on those.”
Adam had no idea why they even needed flowers for their suits. Felix had been given free rein to design their outfits in any way he saw fit, and that was like giving a toddler a can of spray paint. There was literally no telling what was going to happen, but it was likely to be chaotic and unexpected.
“Why don’t you ask the wedding planner? What was her name? Farah?” Adam asked, feeling the best course of action was deferring to someone who clearly knew more than he did about such things.
Noah looked him dead in the eye. “I fired her.”
To the curious onlooker, it wouldn’t appear that Adam had just stepped on an active landmine, but to those in the know, he was teetering precariously on the edge of oblivion.
“Oh?” He tried to make his tone as innocent as possible even as he felt himself start to sweat. “Why?”
Noah set his jaw, his face twisting in disgust. “She just didn’t get it.”
Adam didn’t get it either. Nobody got it. Whatever it was this wedding represented to Noah in his head, he was keeping to himself. This was their seventh—seventh!—wedding planner. A staggering number when one considered Noah was the reasonable one in the family. The one Thomas trusted to take over for him someday.
Adam didn’t give a fuck about the planners. Any of them. If Noah had asked him to gut her and paint their bathroom with her blood, he would have done so without question. They were all vapid, shallow, and fake as fuck. A few of them had tried—and failed—to bully Noah into setting the date and booking the venue once and for all. Something that tended to send Noah into a rapid spiral, which made Adam ragey and unreasonable.
But this wasn’t about Farah or whatever her name was.
Adam approached Noah slowly, carefully stepping over now worn color photos ripped from bridal magazines and the binder bursting at the seams. When he’d made it to the inner circle where Noah sat in his underwear, he moved the papers out of his way and kneeled between Noah’s raised and open knees.
He didn’t look good. No, that wasn’t true. Noah always looked good. Beautiful even. But his face was paler than usual, his freckles on full display, purple bruises beneath his eyes. “Babe, how long have you been out here?”
Noah shrugged, then reached around Adam to attempt to snag another photo. Adam grabbed at Noah’s wrists, holding them hostage. “How long?”
Noah’s gaze flicked to him. “I don’t know? A while.”
“A while?” Adam countered. “What’s a while?”
Noah gave another long-suffering sigh. “Since you fell asleep last night.”
Adam dropped Noah’s wrists and cupped his face, tipping it upwards. “Talk to me. What is happening here? Are you anxious about something? Did you have a bad session with your therapist?”
Noah’s gaze floated away from Adam to look at the wall over his shoulder. He gave a jerky shake of his head. “No.”
“Okay, so what is it? Just talk to me.”
“Nothing. It’s just this fucking train wreck of a wedding.”
Adam didn’t take it personally. “How is our wedding a train wreck?”
Noah looked at him like he was stupid. “Because everything is fucking wrong.”
