Aly cocked a brow at me in question.
“Inside joke,” I told her.
“You’ll have to explain that to us at some point,” Lauren said, stepping right up to hug me like we were old friends. “But first you have to tell me about this dress. Iloveit.”
“Same!” a lavender-haired woman exclaimed as she joined us. “Where’d you get it?”
I grinned. “One of my clients made it. Vern. She’s a lab tech by day, seamstress by night.”
Aly’s eyes flashed wide. “VernMartinez?”
“Yes. Do you know her?”
“She’s one of my best friends,” Aly said. “We work together.”
I blinked. “Woah. Small world. Wait, so you must know Greg, too.”
Aly grimaced. “He’s my cousin.”
My head spun, and I mentally downgraded the world’s size from small to microscopic.
“He’s not nearly good enough for Vern, so I refuse to set the two of them up,” Aly added.
“Ah,” I said, not knowing how to tell her that even without her help, the two of them would probably end up involved if Vern got her way.
The lavender-haired woman looked between us. “Which one of you is giving me her number so I can buy a dress?”
The woman’s name was Taylor, I learned, and afterward, I met everyone else: Josh, Junior, Ryan, Ben, and Jackson. Once the introductions were over, we sat, talk resuming, the conversation easy and light, the group quick to laugh and tease each other, the couples openly flirting—a far cry from the intensity I’d feared coming into this.
“So! Tyler!” Josh said at one point, his gaze shifting between us. “How did you and Stella meet?”
“Well, that’s kind of a long story,” Tyler said, his eyes sliding to me.
We’d known coming into this that people would be curious. He hadn’t spent much time with them over the past six months, so absorbed in his Macbethian plot that everything else fell to the wayside. He’d been trying to fix that lately, taking a more active role in Velvet, the play club he co-owned with Junior, and spending time with Josh, but he still hadn’t come clean about what he’d been up to. Partly because he hadn’t been emotionally ready to handle the fallout—he was still recovering from everything that had happened over the summer, and since Junior and Lauren were tied up in his lies, he worried it might negatively affect the whole friend group.
I found his hand beneath the table and threaded my fingers through his, squeezing so he knew he wasn’t alone, silently telling him that no matter how he chose to play this, I’d support him.
He faced Josh. “The TL;DR version is I went into her tattoo parlor for a consultation.”
Josh frowned, looking like his feelings might be hurt. The man was more heavily inked than anyone else at the table, and I recognized the artist he used from the designs alone—one of my competitors on the other side of the city who was famous for his dark, Gothic work. “I thought you never wanted to get a tattoo?”
Tyler shrugged. “I changed my mind.”
“What’d you get?” Josh asked.
I took a sip of water to avoid meeting his searching look, a blush threatening to pink my cheeks. Not that I should be worried. Tyler was so private that there was no way he would—
“Stella’s teeth marks on my ass,” he said.
I choked, barely managing to keep from spraying Ryan and Ben across from us. Beside me, Lauren howled with laughter. The rest of the table had mixed reactions. Josh was clearly shocked. Aly smirked. Junior was draining the rest of his beer like he wished he were somewhere far, far away. Taylor and Jackson looked like they were bursting with questions, while Ben and Ryan were still focused on me as I hacked, worried I might lose the battle and soak them.
Tyler rubbed my back, but his expression was anything but apologetic. One thing that hadn’t changed? His love for catching me off-guard like this.
Fine. Two could play at that game.
“Clearly, your training has failed,” I rasped.
“I guess you’ll just have to punish me harder,” he shot back, and I lost the fight against blushing.
