“We’ll be home soon,” Eric pointed out more quietly when the bulk of the conversation redirected elsewhere. “And then you can stop pining.”
“I’m notpining—”
Eric raised his eyebrows.
River shut his mouth. So he missed his boyfriend! So what? That was normal! Maybe he was a little bummed that Jem would rather lie in bed for forty-eight hours in California than come spend time with him….
Okay, that wasn’t fair. River knew how hard Jem worked, and he probably needed those two days in bed to avoid succumbing to whatever plague the children had been spreading. His body, mind, and immune system deserved a rest.
Plus if he slept for long enough, maybe he’d be able to stay awake post-orgasm when River got home.
“No, go back to pining!” Eric protested at whatever expression River’s face was making. “Quit thinking gross things!”
River ignored him and dug his phone out of his pocket. “If you don’t want to know my business, better mind your own.” Just because River was in Detroit and Jem was all the way back in LA didn’t mean River couldn’t buy him presents.
Surely he could find appropriate loungewear and arrange for same-day delivery. Maybe a basket of suggestively shaped fruit to go with it.
Eric groaned and stole River’s last dumpling right off his plate. “At least you’re not pouting.”
That night, the concert buzzed like electricity through River’s veins. With every note, his skeleton vibrated at the same frequency as his guitar strings. They played three sweat-drenched encores. River grinned until his face hurt.Thiswas the note he wanted the Flat Tires to end on: triumphant. Resounding. Joyous. He wanted to look back and remember feeling like he and Eric and Ward had done the impossible.
But afterward, the energy stayed on the stage. In the green room, it was quiet. River couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. He locked himself in the bathroom to check his messages and found only one from Jem, timestamped two hours earlier.Break a leg tonight!!! xoxox
Maybe he’d decided not to mention the gift so they’d have something to talk about after? But when River called him, it went to voicemail.
Probably for the best, he convinced himself. As much as Jem’s silence hurt, he knew he needed to spend time with Eric and Ward tonight.
He pocketed his phone and returned to the green room.
Ward and Eric were already red-eyed.
“So like, I know we’re too old to trash a hotel room,” Ward said, “but we can stillgettrashed in a hotel room, right? Because I need a beer.”
All thingsconsidered, the wedding went pretty well.
Andrew had given in to their father’s pleading and consented to hold the reception at the golf course. “Dad said he wanted to do it as a wedding gift,” he’d told Jem over the table at their lunch date, rolling his eyes. “Like if he really wanted to give us a gift like that, he could’ve written a check. But the venue’s accessible—Dana’s mom’s got worse mobility issues than me—and the other place we liked was booked up for the next three years.”
So Jem had known going in that he’d be back in his old stomping grounds. He just hadn’t known how he’d feel about it.
It turned out that living well was pretty great revenge, and strolling into your daddy’s country club where he’d treated you as a charity case instead of his kid, in a bespoke shirt and jacket you bought with your sugar daddy turned boyfriend’s money, felt like taking a refreshing swim in the tears of his enemies. Or something.
He left his four-hundred-dollar bow tie untied around his collar, slipped on the Wayfarers he’d stolen from River’s collection, and snapped a selfie for later. Did he look like a douchebag? Yes. But a hot, successful douchebag, and that was what was important.
Andrew and Dana had only one attendant between them: Dana’s sister Margaret, an Amazon in a perfectly tailored tuxedo. Probably the only thing that could’ve pissed Jem’s dad off more than this beautiful suit-wearing woman who looked like she could snap his neck without breaking a sweat was if Jem stood opposite her in a dress.
Damn it. He should’ve accepted the best man job instead of awkwardly declining, and borrowed that red one from River. Oh well, next time.
In any case, Jem had a reserved seat in the front row, next to Dana’s mother—a sharp, charming woman who clocked Jem right away as the designated shit-disturber and lit up in delight when he introduced himself.
“Oh, I hope we’ll be friends,” she stage-whispered, leaning over the arm of her wheelchair.
“Done,” Jem said, grinning back, and basked in the fact that his father and his wife were in the row behind them, stewing about it.
Jem had been to a lot of weddings, some good, some great, some abysmal. It was fine if you closed the bar during speeches, as long as the speeches didn’t go for an entire hour and circle back on themselves like a starving ouroboros. Fortunately Andrew and Dana must’ve felt the same way, because after the dinner they just clinked their glasses to call for silence, toasted each other and their families, friends, and guests with a couple lines cribbed fromHamilton, and declared the dance floor open for business.
Someone should be taking notes, Jem thought, on how to do a wedding correctly. Fifteen-minute ceremony, then a cocktail hour while the bride and groom did photos—some of which Jem was roped into; they had an actual fashion photographer shooting, because of Andrew’s business and Dana’s mental-health-influencer thing—followed promptly by dinner, one teeny tiny speech, and dancing.
There was one minor hiccup—when Jem walked up to the bar for a drink only to nearly run into his father, who was just coming away from it with a glass of wine in each hand.
