“All right. I’m not sure—” Emerson swallowed, and Luca could almost feel it in his own throat. “I can’t remember where Ben said. I’ll text you.”
Luca smiled. Tilted his head back toward the van.
“I’ll finish up here. Go make Daisy andMoomoo their eggs.”
Emerson’s lips parted, his eyes suddenly unguarded and vulnerable, as if he wanted to say something else,dosomething else.
But then he clamped his mouth back together, eyes shuttered, and gave a short, quick nod before he walked inside.
When Luca turned back to the van, he knew the smile that still tugged at his own lips was foolish. He knew the excitement that bubbled in his gut—an excitement he hadn’t quite felt since the anticipation of a meet-up with Dell McCleary—was misguided. It wasn’t like he had a date. If anything, Emerson had just asked him to work on a Saturday night, after professing how much he wanted Luca to take time off. He didn’t need Luca’s company for drinks; he needed a buffer between him and his client, so his client wouldn’t know how much he was freaking out about the wedding.
Maybe being used as a buffer was another version of being a ghost.
But the idea of being in another dark room outside of this farm with Emerson King again—that didn’t make Luca feel ethereal and half here at all. By the time Luca loaded the last CSA box into the van, he felt rock solid: a man with things to do, a cold beer waiting for him at the end of the day.
nine
“Wait,so you sailed all the way to Alaska?”
“Sailisn’t the exact term for what we do. We run seiner boats. But when the salmon are running up there, yeah. It’s beautiful sometimes, but other times it’s…not as glamorous as it sounds. I wasn’t scaling Denali or anything, just spending a lot of time in gray mist on a boat.”
Ben’s eyes looked rapturous.
“But still.”
Luca laughed a little. Raised his beer to his lips. “Still,” he agreed good-naturedly, before taking a long sip. Emerson pretended—as he had pretended all night, as he had pretended a week ago, at a different bar—to not watch Luca’s throat as he swallowed.
“Jules.” Ben slapped his palms on the table and turned to the strawberry-blonde haired woman at his side. “Alaska. That’s it. We should obviously honeymoon in Alaska. There are way more trees there than people. Lex would be so happy.”
“Sure.” Julie picked up her phone, made a dramatic show of pretending to type. “Alaska. I’ll just add it onto the HoneymoonPossibility List. That’ll make it number…four hundred and twenty-three.”
“Okay, I know you’re making fun of me, but—can you actually add it, though? As my most favorite maid of honor?”
Julie swiped open her phone and typed without complaint.
“We can’t afford a honeymoon quite yet,” Ben turned back to Luca and Emerson to say. Well, he was, one could charitably say, talking to Luca and Emerson. But his eyes kept straying to Luca and Luca alone. Emerson couldn’t blame him. One, because Luca was beautiful. He was also the only one truly keeping up the conversation.
“There are a few reasons why,” Ben continued, cheeks coloring, as if he needed to explain that a honeymoon was expensive. Emerson could barely afford the beer in his hand. He never needed financial straits explained to him, ever. “One, just affording the wedding is expensive enough—I don’t really understand how people do it? A weddinganda honeymoon all at once, bam, just like that? But we had been doing okay, financially, for years, but then we bought a house—at the same time we got engaged, actually, like Alexei somehow got the keys early and when I walked in for the first time after we’d finally closed on it, the bare floor was full of candles and flowers and paper fucking cranes?—”
Ben paused here to blink rapidly through the tears that had gathered in his eyes. And then he said, with a wet laugh, “I’ve told you this story already, haven’t I?”
Emerson had, in fact, heard this story already, but he certainly wasn’t going to say that.
“Ihaven’t heard this story,” Luca said, like an angel. “And I am enchanted.”
Julie patted Ben’s hand. “Maybe one day you’ll even be able to tell it without crying.”
Ben shook his head. “No. Couldn’t be me. But anyway.” Adeep, loud sniff. “Loved the proposal, love the house, but one issue after the other keeps coming up with it, each of which costs approximately five hundred million dollars. And Lex’s jobused to beeven more reliable than mine, but it turns out being a federal employee these days isn’t necessarily stable. And even if wewereable to take off enough time from work for a honeymoon too, we just have not been able to decide on where to go.”
“Ben.” Julie gripped Ben’s forearm. “Dude. Take a breath. You’ll get your honeymoon. Let’s get through the wedding first, huh?”
“Right.” Ben listened, taking a deep breath in and out. “You really are my favorite maid of honor.”
“I know. Except if Carolina hears you say that, she’ll punch you in the face, so maybe stop saying it.”
“Carolina lives three thousand miles away.”
“I know, but you never know. That girl could have eyes and ears everywhere.”
