Zach nodded because, well, he knew this.
"When you've got a woman who loves you, sometimes it scares her. We're not always easy men to love," Jase said, pulling that right out of his ass.
"Speak for yourself," Roman countered.
"Dude." Jase shook his head. Then he just waved his hand along the front of Roman like that explained everything.
"Why would you say she loves me?" Zach asked, because he wasn't sure he could buy that.
"Trust me. She may not have admitted it to herself yet, and you may not have admitted it to yourself yet, but she is in love with you. And you love her, too," Drake said.
"I mean, yeah, that last part's a given," Zach conceded. "I'm so far gone for her."
"Then what we need to do is go over everything you said at the point that things went downhill so we can see where you fucked up." Jase lifted his shoulders like this was super simple.
Zach stared at the pop top on his soda can. "I don't think I did."
"And that, my brother, is how I know that you did," Jase said. "At what point did you start to feel the pull away?"
He let out a long breath. "Okay, so things were great until I kissed her in the tent when we showed Anna her dress."
Jase steepled his fingers in front of his lips. "Are you a shit kisser?"
"No." Zach shook his head.
"I mean, not that you know. No one would really tell you that. Can we call one of your exes and get them in on this?" Roman asked.
"What happened after you kissed her?" Drake countered, refocusing everyone.
Zach replayed the entire scene with them like they were in a low-budget cop movie and they were finding a serial killer instead of in his soon-to-be brother-in-law's pre-wedding purgatory suite trying to determine how he had fucked up.
Unfortunately, this method illustrated to him exactly the many, many ways he could, in fact, fuck up without even realizing it.
Option one was when he mentioned what Babushka always said in the wrong context at an inappropriate time. He'd already marked that as a high probability.
Option two was discussing how he was certain that everything was now going to work. Which, for the record, he had no idea why that would be a problem, but Roman seemed to believe that was it.
Or, option three was that Piper just wasn't that into him like he was her.
"For our purposes here, that's not an option." Jase frowned. "Because Heather and I like her, and we want her to be in the family."
"Is this whole thing entirely necessary?" Zach asked, forcing himself not to toss his hands in his hair because he didn't want to have to screw with it again, comb it to make it right.
"Are you happily married like the rest of us are?" Jase asked, stretching his arms wide. "No? Then you should sit your ass down and let us help you."
"What if it's not me? What if it's the stress of the wedding and everything else?" Zach asked, hopefully.
"Yeah, that's not it," Drake assured.
"Re-roll," Roman said. "Tell me exactly what you said again after you kissed her."
"I told her things were going amazing and that she'd done so great. That the success was all her and I was grateful."
"Why were you grateful?" Roman asked like they hadn't already been through this three times.
"Because my business is going to do well and she's gonna get her promotion. Everybody wins."
"Okay, hear me out," Roman said this like any of them were giving Zach a choice in the matter. "You said that." He made a circle in the air with his fingertip. "Except she wanted you to be good-kisser and 'into her' Zach and not 'TED Talk business Zach.'"
