step brother rules

Chapter 6:The wedding,Take Two

Chapter 6: The Wedding, Take Two

The second Cole-Ellison event of the season was a smaller affair — a courthouse signing followed by a family dinner, since the backyard wedding had technically already covered the vows. But Diane had insisted on "doing it properly," which meant a photographer, a cake, and thirty of Robert's closest relatives descending on the house for a Saturday that Mara had been dreading all week.

Mostly because of the toast. Again.

Mostly because of Jonah.

She hadn't given him an answer. Not really. Six days of careful, deliberate distance — polite at dinner, absent during the day, gone to bed early every night like she was fleeing a crime scene. He hadn't pushed, exactly, but she'd catch him watching her sometimes across the kitchen table with a patience that felt more unsettling than pressure would have.

"You look nice," he said now, adjusting his tie in the hallway mirror as she came down the stairs in the pale green dress her mother had picked out. He didn't turn around right away, like he needed a second to arrange his expression before he did.

"Thank you." She smoothed the fabric self-consciously. "You clean up well too."

"I have a wedding-appropriate suit and everything. Growing up in this family, you learn to keep one on standby."

The joke was light, easy, but there was something careful underneath it — both of them tiptoeing around the porch conversation like it was a bruise neither wanted touched by accident.

Robert's extended family arrived in waves — aunts with loud opinions, cousins comparing notes on grad school, an uncle who cornered Mara near the dessert table to ask, with genuine confusion, whether she and Jonah were "the actual siblings or the step ones," a question that made her choke slightly on a bite of cake.

"Step," she managed. "Recently."

"Huh." The uncle studied her for a second too long. "You two looked awful comfortable together at the ceremony. Thought maybe I had it backward."

Mara excused herself before she had to explain that particular observation to anyone, least of all herself.

She found Jonah by the drink table an hour later, tie loosened, looking like he'd survived a similar gauntlet of relatives.

"Your uncle Pete asked me if we were the actual siblings," she said, pouring herself a glass of lemonade she didn't especially want, just for something to hold.

Jonah winced. "God. Pete. I should've warned you about Pete."

"He said we looked comfortable together at the ceremony."

"We probably did." He said it plainly, without flirtation, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd tried to charm his way through it. "I wasn't exactly hiding how I feel very well. In my defense, I wasn't trying to."

Mara glanced around instinctively, checking who was in earshot, and hated herself a little for the reflex. "Jonah."

"I'm not starting anything," he said, holding up both hands. "I promised you time. I'm keeping the promise. I'm just saying — apparently it's visible to a seventy-year-old man who hasn't seen either of us in three years. Might be worth thinking about what that means."

She didn't have an answer for that, so she didn't try to find one.

The reception wound down slow, the way family gatherings do — relatives peeling off one by one, cake boxed up in Tupperware, Robert and Diane slow-dancing in the emptying living room to a song from the actual radio because someone had turned off the speaker system by accident and nobody cared enough to fix it.

Mara ended up on the back porch again, this time by choice, needing air and quiet after hours of performing normalcy for people who barely knew her. She didn't hear Jonah come out until he was already beside her, two glasses of champagne in hand, one offered wordlessly in her direction.

"Stolen from the good stuff," he said. "Figured we earned it."

She took it, grateful for something to do with her hands. "Your family is a lot."

"They mean well. Mostly." He leaned against the porch railing, close but not too close, the careful distance he'd been keeping all week still technically intact. "You survived it, though. That's the important part. First big family event, no casualties."

"Except my dignity, when your uncle interrogated me about our sibling status."

"Pete does that to everyone. Ask my cousin's husband about the year he thought Pete meant something by 'you two seem close' at his own wedding."

Mara laughed despite herself, and something in the tension of the evening finally cracked loose, replaced by something warmer, easier.

"For what it's worth," Jonah said, quieter now, watching the last of the sunset bleed orange over the yard, "I meant what I said about not pushing. But I also meant everything else. I'm not going to stop feeling it just because it's inconvenient."

"I know." Mara turned the champagne glass slowly in her hand, watching the bubbles catch the porch light. "I haven't stopped either. That's the problem."

The admission hung in the air between them, fragile and enormous at once. Jonah didn't move closer — he'd promised, and he was keeping it, even now, even with the whole evening conspiring toward something neither of them had named yet.

"So what happens now?" he asked.

Mara looked at him for a long moment — at the patience in his face, the restraint he clearly hadn't asked for and was exercising anyway, out of respect for a boundary she'd drawn herself.

"I don't know yet," she admitted. "But I think I'm done pretending I don't want to find out."

Something shifted in his expression — hope, carefully contained, like he didn't trust himself to react too visibly to what she'd just said.

Inside, through the window, Robert spun Diane in a clumsy circle, both of them laughing, blissfully unaware that on the porch outside, the two people they'd just made family were standing on the edge of something that could either complete their happiness or unravel it completely.