The night air hits me like a slap, cool and bracing, but I run faster.
Said wedding planner is halfway across the terrace, leading a conga line that snakes between the tables. Right as I pass, Peacock stops dead, causing a pile-up of tipsy dancers who crash into him like human dominoes. He doesn’t seem to care, just watches me for a beat, eyes glittering, smug and knowing.
I slow just enough to catch his look.
He lifts two fingers to his temple in a perfectly exaggerated salute, deliberate, like he’s sending me off to battle.
For a split second, the man behind the feathers is back, open, oddly sincere, and I see him.
Then he breaks it with a wicked grin, spins on his heel, and grabs the nearest lady’s bottom to restart the conga line.
She squeals. The line erupts in laughter. Someone yells, “Peacock!” in delighted outrage.
And just like that, the party swallows him whole again.
I keep running, skirts tangling around my legs, no doubt giving the castle CCTV operator a full floorshow. I have to stop for half a second to extract a wedgie, because of course romance comes with ridiculous underwear, then take off again, dignity now trailing somewhere behind me with my left shoe.
In the back of my mind, I wonder if this is how Disney princesses handled their love lives.
Mulan, maybe, she was badass.
“Not the time, Hayley!” I hiss at myself, shaking the thought away as I vault over a stray lantern.
I swerve around a kissing couple and nearly collide with a particularly lumpy bush, Derek’s cousin, obviously, which I glare at mid-stride.
“Don’t you start, you smug little hedge. I’m doing something about it, alright?”
Silence. Naturally.
Lantern light flickers ahead, turning the path into something secret and endless. My pulse is in my ears. I take a breath, grip my skirts tighter, and keep running.
Chapter 24
Let’s Change Everything
Tyler
Six months ago, I’d have laughed at the idea of losing my mind over a woman and a wheel of Brie.
If anyone had actually told me someone could undo me like this, I’d have called them dramatic. And yet, here I am, slumped against a bush like some rejected extra from a period drama, jacket discarded, tie undone, feeling defeated.
This is not how I pictured tonight ending.
Six months ago, she was just a girl at a party. Now she’s the only thing I can think about.
My mind drifts back, unhelpfully, to that night.
She’d been drunk, not messy, just loose and warm and laughing at everything.
I hadn’t been laughing.
I’d been paying attention. Trying not to do it too obviously.
I don’t even remember how we started talking, or why we ended up alone in that room.
But I rememberher.
She was wearing a short skirt that kept riding up, taunting me with every shift of her legs. At one point, before I could stop myself, I reached over and gently tugged it back down.
