The Second Best Man

Chapter Ten

The storm hit properly before they'd made it back to the marina, rain coming sideways, the little boat pitching hard enough that Cass grabbed the nearest rail and didn't let go. Below deck, she could hear Priya being sick again, and someone else, one of the groomsmen, laughing too loudly in the particular way people laughed when they were more scared than drunk.

"We're not going to make the marina," the captain shouted, fighting the wheel. "There's a cove two miles up, private dock, I can get us in there safer than trying to outrun this."

"Whose dock?" Wren yelled back, white-knuckled on the rail beside Cass.

"Marchetti family's, ma'am. Closest safe harbor I've got."

Cass looked across the deck and found Eli already looking back at her, rain plastering his hair flat, his jaw set in the exact stubborn line she was starting to recognize as the face he made when he'd already decided something and wasn't going to discuss it.

"It's fine," he called over the wind to her specifically, as if he'd read the question on her face before she asked it. "The caretaker keeps the guesthouse stocked. Nobody's been up there in months. We'll be safe."

We'll be safe didn't cover the part where it was his family's dock, his family's guesthouse, another piece of Marchetti territory she'd have to walk into soaked and shaking and trying not to think about the last time she'd been somewhere that belonged to them.

The docking was rough, the captain fighting crosswind the whole way in, but they made it, eleven soaked, rattled people scrambling up a slick wooden dock toward a squat stone guesthouse tucked into the cliffs, lit only by the captain's flashlight and one motion-sensor light that flickered on as they approached.

Inside, it was worse than Cass expected and better than she feared: small, plain, more a fisherman's cottage than anything resembling Marchetti excess, with a single main room, a wood stove, a kitchenette, and two narrow bedrooms that Wren immediately claimed for the more shaken members of the party.

"There aren't enough beds," Wren said, doing a headcount with the particular efficiency of a woman who'd spent months planning seating charts and had accidentally trained for exactly this crisis. "Priya and Delia get the room with the actual bed. The groomsmen can take the floor by the stove. That leaves—" She glanced between Cass and Eli, and something in her expression went carefully neutral in a way that made Cass immediately suspicious. "The loft. Sorry. It's the only space left."

"There has to be somewhere else," Cass said.

"There's the boat," Eli said dryly, "which is currently being thrown against a dock by a forty-mile-an-hour wind. I'd take the loft."

Wren, already halfway to the stove to help someone get a fire going, threw Cass an apologetic look over her shoulder that fooled absolutely no one. Cass had known her twelve years, and she recognized matchmaking when she saw it, even matchmaking born out of a genuine crisis.

The loft turned out to be a single open space under the eaves, a mattress on the floor, a small window streaming with rain, close enough to the wood stove's chimney that it was the warmest room in the cottage, which felt, to Cass, like a particularly unfair joke from the universe.

"You take the mattress," Eli said, once they'd climbed the narrow ladder and the rest of the party's voices had faded to a low murmur below. "I'll take the floor by the window."

"It's your family's guesthouse."

"Doesn't matter." He was already peeling off his soaked jacket, hanging it over the ladder railing to dry, careful to keep his eyes somewhere neutral, somewhere that wasn't her. "You're the guest. You take the mattress."

Cass sat down on the edge of it anyway, wrapped in the blanket someone had shoved into her arms downstairs, watching Eli fold himself onto the floor by the window with his back against the wall, rain streaking the glass beside him, lightning flashing white and sudden over the water outside.

Neither of them said anything for a long time. The storm did the talking instead: wind against stone, rain against glass, the wood stove ticking as it heated the floor below them.

"You didn't have to be that kind to Priya today," Cass said finally, into the dark. "On the boat. Before the storm."

"She was scared and alone in a group of strangers. It wasn't kindness. It was just noticing."

"Most people don't notice."

"Most people aren't looking." Something in his voice had gone quiet, careful, the storm outside pulling something loose in him that six months of dress fittings and cake tastings never had. "I've spent a long time learning to notice things. It's a useful skill, in my family. You learn to read a room before it reads you."

Cass pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, watching him in the dim light the line of his jaw, the tired set of his shoulders- a man who'd spent five years being someone she'd built entirely out of one hallway and one sentence, and who kept, infuriatingly, refusing to be that person.

"Eli," she said, quiet enough that the storm nearly swallowed it. "What did you notice that night? In the hallway?"

He went very still.

Lightning flashed again, closer this time, illuminating his face for one long second and in it, Cass saw something she recognized instantly, because she'd worn the same expression herself more times than she could count: a man standing at the very edge of a truth, close enough to touch it, and still not sure his feet would carry him over.

"I noticed a lot of things that night," he said finally, carefully, each word placed like he was crossing ice. "More than I've ever told you. But it's not—" He stopped, dragged a hand down his face, and when he spoke again his voice had pulled back into something guarded, something that cost him visibly to hold onto. "It's not mine to tell you tonight. Not like this. Not in a storm, in the dark, where you can't even see my face clearly enough to know if I'm lying."

"I don't think you're lying."

"That's exactly why it has to wait." His jaw was tight, his eyes fixed somewhere past her, on the rain-streaked window. "If I tell you now, in a moment like this, some part of you will always wonder if I only said it because the storm made it easy. You deserve better than that. You deserve the truth on a day neither of us has an excuse for it."

Cass sat with that for a long moment, frustration and something gentler tangling together in her chest, unable to decide which one to be angrier about.

"You keep doing that," she said quietly. "Getting right up to the edge of it and stopping."

"I know." Outside, the wind hurled another sheet of rain against the glass. "One day I won't stop. I need you to believe that's true, even though I know I haven't earned it yet."

Cass didn't answer. She lay back against the mattress instead, pulling the blanket up to her chin, listening to the storm and to Eli's uneven breathing across the small dark room, and thought that whatever was coming, it was getting closer now, close enough that she could feel its shape even in the dark, even without the words to name it yet.