Just holding the stupid thing brought the whole day in Amarillo back to her. No, it brought the whole trip back and the reunion and the summer they were seventeen. Jamie skipped out on the biggest party of the year to risk his health and stay with her when she was burning up with fever and tested positive for mono. Ten years later he’d walked in on her with the one guy he thought she’d always put on a pedestal—and maybe she had—and instead of telling her how he felt had let her go off on him in an angry-drunk rampage. Not her finest moment. Then he offered to make it up to her by bringing her exactly where she thought she wanted to go: L.A. Maybe she could understand how professing his love to her after all of that may have seemed less than optimal.
But it wasn’t the texts from Spencer or the anticipation of finally finding out if something was there that flooded her thoughts now. It was Jamie showing up at her apartment in his hoodie and baseball cap. It was the flat tire, riding to the top of the St. Louis Arch (without hurling, thank you very much), going blind in Galena, and naming that beer on her first sip. She thought of sneaking a peek at him as he leaned out of the shower and the places her mind went after that delicious sight. And then when he almost fell off the top of that Cadillac…she knew.
Oh.
She was so worked up over Jamie’s lapse in judgment that she’d sort of, kind of, maybe neglected to tell him that her big revelation hadn’t been the kiss. Or the phenomenal sex. Or even what happened again after the shower. Her first revelation was when they were seventeen. But Jamie needed a friend that summer, and as much as it hurt to realize too late how she felt about him, she promised herself she’d be that friend.
This time around, she let him freak out again, but he wasn’t alone. She allowed her own fear to get in the way, too, and together they’d let doubt push them further and further apart when, after ten freaking years, they’d finally found their way to each other. It took a little bit of tequila to fully kick in, but Brynn realized she loved him while he nearly killed himself spraying graffiti on an upside-down car in the desert. She didn’t need to see Spencer to know he wasn’t the one, so what the hell was she doing taking a bus to him now?
“I’m an idiot,” she grumbled. Across the aisle, the lady shot her a look again, and Brynn threw up her hands, knocking her pinky on the frame of the window. “Ow. Shit!” She cradled her hand against her chest and then laughed. If Jamie had been there, she most likely would have just clocked him in the face. The thing was, she wasn’t clumsy by nature. She’d never accidentally punched, poked, or stabbed any other person in her life. Just Jamie, because he was the only one who got her fired up emotionally—usually out of exasperation, but it seemed like that was changing. Good or bad, he pulled that extra dose of passion out of her and made her feel really and truly alive.
It amazed her that she’d let ten years go by without admitting to herself he was the one person with the power to do it. And it infuriated her that he didn’t know, couldn’t tell that there was no competition. Spencer was the stand-in. At least the idea of him was.
“Is it your bouquet?”
Brynn turned toward the voice, the same woman who had been looking at her before. She was older, with a long salt-and-pepper braid that draped over her right shoulder. Her green eyes crinkled at the corners as she smiled.
“What?” Brynn asked.
“The bouquet? I don’t mean to pry, but if it’s yours, I was going to ask where the groom was.”
Brynn looked down to where she unwittingly clutched the bouquet to her chest. Her lucky bouquet.
Her heart swelled as she thought of the groom.
“He’s stuck in Holbrook,” she said, not correcting the woman. “We’re meeting in L.A.”
“Rough honeymoon?” the woman asked with a wink, and Brynn remembered the bandage on her forehead and the headache that seemed to throb less the more she thought about making her way back to Jamie in Los Angeles.
Her fingers brushed over the gauze. “You could say that. Rough courtship, actually.” She laughed, and the woman’s smile broadened.
“How long were you together before the wedding?”
Brynn shifted her body so she was facing the woman now, lucky bouquet still pressed firmly to her heart.
“Ten years.” And as she said it, Brynn knew it was true. Maybe they went about this whole thing in the most messed-up way possible, but no matter which way you looked at it, her heart had somehow been his. “Holy shit. I’ve loved him for ten years.” She let go of the bouquet to fish her phone out of her bag. “I need to tell him.”
The woman’s brows pulled together. “He doesn’t know?”
“No! I mean, the bouquet’s mine, but we’re not married. I caught it. At the wedding we crashed. And then he kissed me because Frank and Dora told us to so we could get the free room. I thought we were putting on a show, but it was real. And then he told me he loved me and he—let’s just say he did some things, amazing things. I think he knows I love him, but he doesn’t know I’ve loved him the whole time. I didn’t really know it until now. I need to tell him I was an idiot for not fighting for him then or today when he put me on this bus and, oh my God, why isn’t there cell phone service here?”
She stopped to catch her breath. She expected braid lady to pull the emergency stop cord and have her removed from the vehicle, but instead the woman looked at her and sighed, a soft smile on her face.
“Messy courtship indeed.”