1
Carter
“Absolutely not,”Kieran said, passing me a cup of coffee across the kitchen counter. “I amnotgoing to your sister’s wedding as your date.”
My shoulders slumped, the faintest pang of rejection making my stomach twinge. It was a stupid feeling—it wasn’t as if I was romantically interested in my best friend—but it still stung a little.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Kieran said, tapping the side of his cheerfully-striped mug. “Your puppy eyes are worse than—oh.Oh.”
Kieran’s bright green eyes—I never wanted to call them emerald, because it sounded like such a cliché, but I didn’t know another name for the color—lit up like they always did when he’d come up with an idea so terrible it was genius.
At least,hethought it was genius.
He was right sometimes.
“Please tell me you’ve just realized you desperately need to go to Canada and you don’t mind dropping in on a wedding on the way through?”
“No,” Kieran said. “Better. I’ve just solved your problem.”
He grinned at me over the rim of his mug, pausing to take a sip. Keeping me in suspense.
“Well?” I asked.
“Aiden,” Kieran said.
I raised an eyebrow. How was his younger brother the solution to my problem?
“He’ll go with you. Guaranteed.”
That… didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
“Guaranteed?”
Kieran snorted. “C’mon man. He had a crush on you foryears. He’d do anything for you.”
My memory of Aiden was a little different. I remembered him as a moody troublemaker who got into fights a lot. I remembered Kieran worrying that his school record might suffer because of his brother’s behavior.
There was only two years between them, but they couldn’t have been more different. Kieran was captain of the football team, a straight-A student, and easily the most popular guy in our year.
Aiden was nothing like his older brother. Spent most of his time hanging around the art studio, the library, or smoking under the bleachers with the kind of kids who wore black trench coats in August.
Not that there was necessarily anythingwrongwith that—aside from the smoking, I hated that he did that—but what the hell would he want with a quiet nerd like me?
I wasn’t his type.
I wasn’t even gay.
“I’m not gay,” I said aloud.
The look Kieran gave me confirmed that I sounded as stupid as I thought I did.
“You just askedmeto pretend to be your date. You were planning on letting your family think you were gay.”
I sighed, sipping my coffee. This wedding had been the cause of a permanent knot in the pit of my stomach formonths. With the news that my ex-girlfriend wasn’t justcoming, but was one of my sister’s bridesmaids, I was considering faking my own death and moving to Mexico instead of going.
Pretending to be gay wasn’t worse than that, and it was the best solution I’d come up with.
At least, it’d been a good solution when it wasKieranplaying along, because I knew him. I was comfortable with him.
