“Oh, shut up.” I was totally jealous, but I didn’t need my best friend to call me out.
“You and Joel need to have this out. You can’t ruin a life-long friendship just because things got a little heated between y’all last night.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” I’d laid awake thinking about it last night and I knew there was no way of going back to the way things had been before our fight. “The damage has already been done. Even if I did apologize, which I’m not saying I would, but if I did, he would think I had an ulterior motive.”
Briar shook her head. “No, he wouldn’t. This is Joel we’re talking about, not some guy you just met. He knows your heart. And he knows you’re not an opportunist.”
“Oh yeah, then why did he accuse me of trying to use him?”
“Maybe, like you, he was wound a little too tight too. I’ve seen the way the man looks at you. He’s been dying to get into your pretty little panties ever since he game back to town.”
“No, he hasn’t.”Has he?
“Deny it all you want, but the sexual tension is off the charts between you two. Just ask anyone who’s ever been around y’all.”
Briar loved to dramatize, to see things that weren’t there just to build up a story. But this time I wished she was right, and Joel was as attracted to me as she claimed. That would mean I wasn’t suffering all alone.
“I don’t think so.”
She rolled her eyes. “Think what you want. I know what I see.” After a minute’s hesitation, she said, “Do you want me to talk to him for you?”
“Are we still in eighth grade, or what? If I want to talk to the man, I’ll talk to him myself.” I hated myself for being such a bitch, but I blamed her for not taking me seriously when I told her I was in serious bitch-mode this morning.
“Fine, talk to him yourself.” Her eyes met and held mine before she added, “I mean it. Talk to the man. Don’t let the best thing that’s ever happened to you get away.”
* * *
I was gonna hurl. Jake was a guest at the wedding I was working. With a date. “Shoot me now,” I muttered, when he spotted me from across the room.
“Excuse me?” my florist friend, Abi, asked.
We were supposed to be adding fresh flowers to the candelabra centerpieces and I couldn’t take my eyes off the bleached blonde hanging off Joel’s arm. Probably Angela, the photographer he’d been casually dating for a couple of months. I’d never met her, but hated her instantly.
Her gaze followed mine and she whistled under her breath. “Wow, that guy is hot. You know him?”
“Yeah, we went to high school together.” I didn’t see the need to fill her in on our entire history. Abi and I weren’t that close.
“Is that his wife?” she whispered, turning her back on Joel and his date.
“No, he’s not married,” I spit out, refusing to look at him.
“He must be an asshole then,” she said, with a definitive shake of her head. “Guys who look like that, at that age, who aren’t married are either assholes or addicts.”
I resented her assessment. I was also a woman of a certain age who’d never been married. What did that say about me?
“Ohmigod, he’s coming this way,” Abi said, tossing a glance over her shoulder.
“Great.” I thought about making a beeline for the ladies’ room, but since it was on the other side of the large ballroom, I’d look like I was running away.
“Gia.”
His deep, raspy voice gave me chill bumps, but I still wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of eye contact. “I’m working, Joel. Go back to your date.”
Abi obviously sensed the tension between us because she said, “I’m going to set up the cake table. I’ll catch up with you in a bit, Gia.” She smiled at Joel as she slipped past him before fanning her face behind his back.
Right now, I hated him for being so hot. Why couldn’t he have returned to our hometown with a pot belly and a few missing teeth?
“I didn’t know you still helped setting up for events,” he said, watching me tuck roses into the boxwood at the base of the candle holder before placing the white taper candles.
