He Loves Me - 2. Chapter 2: MY SISTER'S HUSBAND

Three months is exactly enough time to convince yourself that a catastrophe isn't actually going to happen. It is ninety days of aggressive, sustained denial. Ninety days of waking up, looking at the calendar, and thinking, Surely, someone is going to stop this. Surely, an adult with a functioning prefrontal cortex is going to step in and put an end to this absolute circus.

But no one did. And so, exactly three months after Warren successfully held up my 7/11 with a neon green water pistol, the catastrophe arrived. It did not announce itself with sirens or a meteor strike. It arrived wrapped in aggressive white tulle, drowning in the cloying, suffocating scent of fifty imported Easter lilies sweating to death in the humid vestibule of the First Presbyterian Church of Podank.

It was my sister’s wedding day.

The day she was officially marrying Chet. The guy who had broken my heart, left me bleeding out on the suburban battlefield of our high school cafeteria, and somehow successfully convinced my entire family that a shotgun wedding at the deeply mature, worldly age of eighteen was a blessed, beautiful event.

The air conditioning in the church was fighting a losing battle, groaning and rattling in the ceiling grates in a desperate protest against the sheer volume of body heat, hairspray, and floral arrangements packed into the sanctuary. I stood in the narrow hallway outside the bridal suite, tugging violently at the collar of my rented charcoal suit. It chafed. Everything about this entire day chafed. The fabric felt like it was woven from recycled fiberglass, the shoes were pinching my left pinky toe, and the matching silver tie felt like a meticulously tied noose.

I had been actively avoiding my sister for the entire ninety-day countdown. Our interactions had been reduced to passive-aggressive text messages about shoe fittings and forced, agonizingly tight smiles over Sunday dinners. I had spent eighty percent of those dinners glaring at my mashed potatoes, mentally rearranging the peas on my plate, and twenty percent of my time genuinely, fervently wishing Chet would choke on a piece of dry pot roast.

But today, avoidance was no longer a mathematically viable option. I was a bridesmaid. Well, a "bridesman," as she had so generously and loudly proclaimed when demanding my participation. It was a title that sounded less like an honor and more like a punishment for a crime I hadn't committed yet.

I pressed my back against the cool plaster of the hallway wall, closing my eyes and listening to the muffled, chaotic sounds of the sanctuary filling up with guests. The entire town was here. Everyone who had ever witnessed my humiliating breakup, everyone who had ever bought a stale taquito from me at 2:00 AM, everyone who had ever watched Warren strike out swinging at a street hockey game. They were all sitting in those hard wooden pews, fanning themselves with the glossy, unnecessarily expensive wedding programs, waiting to watch the golden boy marry the golden girl.

I pushed off the wall, took a deep, fortifying breath of the lily-choked air, and pushed the heavy oak door of the bridal suite open just a crack.

I had expected a hurricane. I had expected a room overflowing with frantic, squealing bridesmaids in identical, hideous silver dresses, popping cheap champagne and aggressively adjusting each other's hairpins. I had fully prepared myself to walk into a storm of blinding hairspray and shrieking panic.

Instead, the room was completely, utterly silent.

It was just her.

She was sitting alone on a plush velvet stool in front of the massive, brightly lit vanity mirror. The other girls must have already been herded out for photographs or damage control. She was buried beneath a small, terrifying mountain of white satin, intricate lace, and heavy seed pearls. The dress was too big for the room, too big for the moment, and honestly, too big for her.

I paused in the doorway, my hand resting on the brass knob.

I had spent months painting her as a cartoon villain in my head. It was easier that way. She was the evil stepsister, the bitch who stole my ex, the smug, triumphant golden child who had won the ultimate race to "normalcy" while I was stuck sweeping up nacho cheese dust and sorting tragic Pokémon cards. I had wanted her to look triumphant today. I needed her to look smug. I needed her to be the bad guy so my bitterness, my anger, and my relentless cynicism could remain entirely justified.

But as I watched her reflection in the glass of the vanity mirror, the cartoon villain dissolved entirely, leaving behind something much worse.

She didn't look triumphant. She looked utterly, profoundly terrified.

Her hands, manicured to absolute perfection, were clutching a crumpled tissue so tightly her knuckles were stark white. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, staring blankly at her own reflection as if she were desperately trying to recognize the girl trapped inside the elaborate updo and the expensive gown. The sheer, suffocating weight of what she was about to do hung around her shoulders like a physical, leaden shroud. She didn't look like a bride. She looked like a hostage.

I stepped fully into the room, letting the heavy oak door click shut behind me. The sound was surprisingly loud in the quiet space.

She didn't jump. She didn't gasp or scramble to compose herself. She just slowly raised her eyes, meeting my gaze in the reflection of the glass.

For a long, agonizing second, neither of us said a single word. The silence stretching between us wasn't hostile. It wasn't the bitter, sparking tension that usually defined our relationship. It was just heavy. It was the exhausted, hollow silence of two people who had been fighting a war for so long they had completely forgotten why they were fighting in the first place.

"You think I don't know?" she said finally. Her voice was raspy, painfully quiet, and entirely stripped of her usual arrogant polish. She didn't turn around to look at me directly; she just kept holding my eyes in the mirror.

The words hit me like a physical, blunt-force blow to the ribs. I stopped walking, my uncomfortable dress shoes freezing against the plush hotel-grade carpet. All the snarky, defensive retorts I had stockpiled for this exact day—the cutting remarks about her shotgun wedding, the jokes about Chet's plunging IQ—evaporated from my mind instantly.

"I've known since the day I met him," she continued, her voice trembling. A single, thick tear spilled over her lower lash line, carving a devastating path through the expensive, airbrushed concealer she had spent an hour having professionally applied. She angrily, viciously swiped it away with the crumpled tissue, smearing a streak of mascara across her cheekbone. "I just thought... I thought if I was good enough, if I was perfect enough, if I just did everything exactly right... he'd learn to love me instead. I thought we could just play house, pretend we were the perfect couple, and eventually, the pretending would become real."

I stared at the back of her head. I stared at the elaborate, intricate twists of her hair, pinned perfectly into place with dozens of invisible clips.

The anger I had clung to for so long, the bitter resentment that had kept me warm during my miserable graveyard shifts, suddenly felt ridiculous. It felt small. It felt entirely, humiliatingly misplaced.

She hadn't stolen anything from me. She hadn't won a prize. She had caught a live grenade, clutched it to her chest, and spent the last six months desperately trying to convince herself and the rest of the world that it was a flawless, two-carat diamond ring.

"He didn't choose me over you, Tom," she whispered, her voice cracking, breaking completely on my name. "He trapped himself. We got drunk, we made a mistake, and he trapped himself. And I let him do it. I encouraged it. Because I was just so tired... I was so incredibly tired of everyone looking at you like you were the interesting one. The brave one. The complex one who was struggling with his identity, while I was just the boring, invisible girl fading into the floral wallpaper. I just wanted a day where everyone was looking at me. I just wanted to be the one everyone was happy for. Just once."

I swallowed hard, trying to force down the massive, jagged lump forming in my throat.

I looked at this girl. My sister. Not a villain. Not a mastermind. Just a scared, overwhelmed nineteen-year-old kid drowning inside a dress that cost more than my entire net worth, trapped in a town she was entirely too terrified to leave. I had been so intensely, selfishly busy feeling sorry for myself, nursing my own bruised ego, that I hadn't realized we were both sitting at opposite ends of the exact same sinking boat.

I took the final few steps across the room, stopping directly behind her velvet chair. I didn't have a grand, sweeping speech prepared. I didn't have a magic wand hidden in my rented tuxedo that could fix the catastrophic, life-altering mess waiting for her out in the sanctuary. But I reached out, slowly, and gently laid my hands on her bare shoulders.

The white satin of her dress was cool and smooth under my palms. She was trembling.

"I didn't want to be you, you know," she murmured, leaning her head back, just a fraction of an inch, until it rested lightly against the charcoal fabric of my suit jacket. "I didn't want to take your life. I just wanted to be happy."

"I know," I said softly, looking at our shared reflection in the bright lights of the mirror. Two kids, terrified of the dark, desperately pretending to be functioning adults. "Me too."

I gave her shoulder a final, grounding squeeze, reached over to the vanity, grabbed a fresh, un-crumpled tissue from the floral box, and handed it to her. She took it with a shaky, incredibly fragile smile.

I stepped back. The invisible, exhausting war that had raged between us for the better part of a decade quietly, permanently ended right there in the bridal suite.

"Fix your mascara," I told her, my tone dropping back into a comfortable, sibling cadence, though the bite was entirely gone. "You look like a very sad raccoon."

She let out a wet, genuine laugh, dabbing carefully at her cheek. "Shut up, Tom. Go line up. I need five minutes."

I left her to finish her makeup, pulling the heavy oak door shut behind me. I stepped back out into the stifling, humid hallway, the emotional whiplash leaving me feeling entirely unmoored. I needed to find Warren. I desperately needed to find my messy, chaotic, deeply un-photogenic boyfriend and ground myself in something that wasn't built on a foundation of desperate, terrifying lies.

Instead, I found Chet.

He was standing in the shadowy alcove near the church's overflow coat closet, pacing frantically in tight, erratic circles.

He looked like absolute hell. His expensive, custom-tailored tuxedo jacket was draped haphazardly over a folding chair. His silk bow tie was completely undone, hanging limply around his neck. His perfectly styled golden-boy hair looked like he had spent the last hour running his hands through it in a blind, unhinged panic.

When he heard my footsteps, he froze. His head snapped toward me.

His eyes were incredibly wide, the pupils blown completely out, swallowing the blue irises almost entirely. There was a fine, unnatural, greasy sheen of sweat coating his forehead and his upper lip. His jaw was tight, grinding rhythmically, the muscles jumping beneath his skin.

"Tom," he gasped, launching himself across the few feet of worn carpet.

Before I could even register the movement, he had slammed me backward against the closed wooden door of the coat closet. His hands were gripping my shoulders, his fingers digging painfully into the cheap fabric of my rented suit.

"Whoa, hey!" I snapped, immediately bringing my hands up and shoving hard against his chest. He stumbled back a half-step, his coordination completely shot, but he didn't let go. The acrid, chemical smell of his sweat mixed with the sharp, undeniable metallic scent of cocaine hit my nose like a physical slap. "Are you out of your mind? Get off me! You're supposed to be at the altar in twenty minutes!"

"I can't do it," Chet breathed, his eyes darting wildly around the empty hallway before locking back onto my face with a terrifying, feverish intensity. "I can't do it, Tommy. I can't walk out there."

He surged forward again, and before I could push him away, before I could even turn my head, he smashed his mouth against mine.

It wasn't romantic. It wasn't the sweeping, cinematic kiss of a repentant lover coming to their senses at the eleventh hour. It was frantic, sloppy, desperate, and tasted entirely of sour panic, stale coffee, and copper. It was the kiss of a drowning man trying to steal the air from someone standing on the shore.

I violently shoved him backward, throwing my entire body weight into it. He hit the opposite wall with a dull thud. I wiped the back of my hand viciously across my mouth, my stomach churning with pure, unadulterated disgust.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" I hissed, keeping my voice down so the guests in the sanctuary wouldn't hear.

"I don't like women, Tom," Chet choked out, genuine tears welling up in his manic, blown-out eyes. He slid down the wall slightly, looking small and pathetic. "I don't. I like you. I've always liked you. But I knocked her up... I was drunk at that stupid party... I was so stupid... I love you! I love you, please, Tommy, please."

I stood there, my back pressed against the coat closet, and looked at him.

This was Chet. The golden boy. The all-American athlete, the prom king, the guy who had systematically broken my heart, shattered my self-esteem, and convinced me that I was fundamentally unlovable. He was standing right in front of me, completely broken, offering me the exact apology, the exact dramatic confession, the exact validation I had fantasized about every single night for six months. The universe was handing me the ultimate, vindictive victory on a silver platter. I had won. I had proven that he was the broken one, not me.

I searched my chest for a spark of triumph. I searched for a lingering ember of affection, a flash of longing, or even a twisted sense of petty joy.

I felt absolutely nothing.

There was no spark. There was only a profound, exhausting, incredibly heavy pity. Looking at him now, sweating through his shirt, vibrating with chemical panic and cowardice, he didn't look like a prize to be won. He looked like a cautionary tale. He was the ghost of a miserable future I had miraculously, narrowly avoided.

"You're high on coke, Chet. On your wedding day," I said. My voice was ice-cold, remarkably steady, and entirely devoid of any affection. "Don't ever kiss me again. You're a fucking disaster."

Chet reached out, his trembling fingers grabbing the lapels of my suit jacket, his knuckles turning white with the force of his grip. "Marry me instead," he begged, his voice dropping into a raw, pathetic, ugly sob. "Let's just get in your car and go. Right now. We can leave through the back door. Marry me instead."

"Fuck no."

The rejection fell out of my mouth without a single millisecond of hesitation. It wasn't an act of calculated bravery. It wasn't a performance. It was just an absolute, undeniable, fundamental fact.

"I love you!" Chet cried, his face crumpling, tears mixing with the sweat on his cheeks.

"You love yourself, asshole," I said. I reached up and pried his fingers off my lapels, peeling them back one by one. I smoothed my jacket down, stepping around his trembling form. "You don't want me. You just want a fire exit. Go wash your face. You have a wedding to get to."

I walked away. I didn't look back. The final, lingering ghost of my past was permanently, thoroughly exorcised in the hallway of the First Presbyterian Church.

By the time the agonizing, hour-long ceremony had concluded and the mass migration from the sweltering church to the rented reception hall had occurred, my emotional reserves were entirely depleted.

The reception hall was exactly what you would expect from a town like Podank. It was a massive, cavernous room with aggressively patterned maroon carpets that looked designed to hide bloodstains, a generic, pulsing DJ setup in the corner, and a towering, absurdly lavish five-tiered cake sitting in the center of the room like a sugary monument to bad decisions.

I immediately bypassed the receiving line, ignored the lavish floral centerpieces, and began scanning the crowded room. I didn't care about the open bar. I didn't care about the forced socializing. I just needed to find the one real, honest thing in this entire, ridiculous charade.

I found him near the ice sculpture.

Because of course my sister had insisted on an ice sculpture. It was a massive, weeping carving of two intertwining swans slowly melting into a silver drip tray.

Warren was standing next to it, completely ignoring the aesthetic majesty of the melting birds. He was nursing a glass of aggressively cheap, yellowing champagne in his left hand, and expertly balancing a tiny, delicate porcelain plate stacked precariously high with miniature quiches in his right. He had a white linen napkin tucked haphazardly into the collar of the suit I had forced him to buy, protecting his tie from falling pastry flakes.

He was also currently surrounded by a pack of golden retrievers.

Well, not literal golden retrievers. They were the groomsmen. But the chaotic, loud, bounding energy was absolutely identical.

There were three of them, all brothers or cousins of Chet, representing varying degrees of the same genetic stock: broad-shouldered, impossibly tan, thick-necked, and already sweating through their rented tuxedos. They had completely cornered Warren against the buffet table.

I paused near the edge of the dance floor, my protective instincts instantly flaring. I was fully prepared to stage a tactical rescue mission. I was ready to march over, grab Warren by his lapels, and drag him away to safety before they could demand his lunch money or shove him into a coat closet.

I took a step forward, glaring at the tallest brother, until the actual audio of their conversation drifted over the terrible pop music playing from the speakers. I stopped dead in my tracks, tuning in.

"DUDE!" the tallest groomsman bellowed, clapping a massive, heavy hand onto Warren’s shoulder. It looked exactly like a grizzly bear aggressively swiping at a very confused, very still housecat. "BRO! SUP YO!"

Warren, who was mid-chew on a miniature quiche, blinked rapidly. His eyes darted from the hand on his shoulder to the giant's face. "Um. Hello. I'm Warren."

"We know, Big W-dude," the second brother chimed in, leaning casually against the buffet table and crossing his arms. "You bagged Tom. Nice." He offered Warren a solemn, deeply respectful, slow nod. "He’s hot. No homo."

"Yeah, I'd totally do him," the third brother agreed instantly, tossing a green grape into his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. "No homo."

"I'd totally let him rail me," the first one added enthusiastically, raising his brown beer bottle in a toast toward my general direction across the room. "No homo."

I inhaled sharply, choking on my own breath. I slapped my hand over my mouth, pressing my palm hard against my lips to muffle the sound of my incredulous laughter, retreating half a step behind a potted fern to watch the masterpiece unfold.

Across the room, Warren went completely statuesque. The second quiche, which had been halfway to his mouth, stopped suspended in mid-air. He looked at the three grinning, aggressively heterosexual giants. He looked down at the quiche in his hand. He looked back up at their faces.

"Wait," Warren said. His voice was entirely devoid of its usual anxious, defensive squeak. It was replaced instead by a tone of profound, clinical, deeply concerned confusion. "Wait. You guys realize that those things you just said are all totally gay... right?"

The three brothers stared at him.

It was a complete, terrifying dead zone. I could practically hear the screeching, grinding dial-up modem sounds echoing in the empty space between their ears. The gears weren’t just stuck; the engine block had entirely fallen out of the car. They stared at Warren with the blank, uncomprehending innocence of cows looking at an oncoming train.

Warren stared into the endless abyss of their blank expressions. He waited for the realization to hit. It didn't. He took a slow, deep breath, visible accepting the absolute futility of explaining the concept of homosexuality to these men.

"Never mind," Warren sighed, dropping his hand. "Football, am I right?"

The tension shattered instantly, like glass hitting concrete.

"FUCK YEAH!" the tallest brother roared, throwing his head back and high-fiving the guy next to him with a deafening smack. "Big W gets it! Wooooo!"

They crashed into him, a synchronized wave of aggressive back-slaps, shoulder-shoves, and cheers, immediately spilling a solid third of Warren's carefully stacked quiches onto the maroon carpet. Warren didn't even flinch at the loss of his food. He just expertly balanced his plate, nodded sagely at the magical word "football," and used the distraction of their frat-house celebration to smoothly slip out of the circle.

He marched straight across the room toward me, his expression entirely shell-shocked. He looked down at his half-empty plate of pastries, then up at my face.

"I think Chet's brothers are gay for you," Warren announced flatly, without preamble.

"That is... not a sentence I ever expected to hear in my entire life," I managed to say, wiping a genuine tear of mirth from the corner of my eye.

"They kept talking about you. They said you were hot. They literally said they'd let you—"

I held up a hand, cutting him off before he could finish. "I heard. I was eavesdropping behind the fern. I don't need the instant replay."

"One of them said 'no homo' immediately after saying he'd let you rail him, Tom," Warren insisted, his hazel eyes wide with a mixture of horror and fascination. "That's not how 'no homo' works. That is the exact, literal, definitive opposite of how the phrase works."

"Warren, they're just—"

"They called me 'Big W' and high-fived me because I said the word 'football.'" He looked at me, utterly betrayed by the fundamental mechanics of the universe. "I don't even like football. I don't know the rules. I don't know what a down is. I just said a noun."

"You said the right noun."

"I don't understand anything anymore," Warren breathed, stepping past me and leaning his back heavily against the cool plaster of the wall. He popped a surviving quiche into his mouth and chewed aggressively, as if trying to violently process his new reality. "Everything is confusing. These are the exact people I was terrified of in high school. The alphas. The jocks. They're not scary. They're just... really dumb. And nice. And apparently very, very sexually open with their feelings."

I looked at him.

The charcoal suit I had forced him to buy actually looked incredibly good on him, even with the white napkin still crumpled awkwardly in his breast pocket and his dark blonde hair already reverting to its usual chaotic, gravity-defying state. The brothers hadn't seen him as a joke. They hadn't seen him as a target. They had seen him as an equal. As a brother. And they had done it simply because he was standing next to me.

And for the very first time, looking at his bewildered face, Warren seemed to be realizing that the grand, terrifying "normal" world he had been hiding from his entire life—the world that had dictated he hide his feelings, read vintage Playgirl magazines in secret, and pretend to be a gangster—was actually just a bunch of guys winging it completely blind.

I reached out, my fingers gently brushing against the dark fabric of his sleeve. "Welcome to the wedding, Big W."

Warren swallowed his quiche, leaning infinitesimally closer to my touch, seeking the grounding warmth. "I need more canapés. And I am totally the Alpha now, by the way. The brothers have spoken. It's official."

"My fuzzy alpha," I deadpanned, smiling softly. "Yum."

Warren opened his mouth to deliver a scathing retort, but the sharp, ear-splitting, piercing screech of microphone feedback suddenly ripped through the reception hall, drowning out the DJ's music.

We both winced, our hands flying to our ears, and turned in unison toward the head table.

The speeches had begun.

Chet was standing up. If he had looked bad in the hallway, he looked absolutely catastrophic under the harsh, unforgiving glare of the reception hall spotlights. His eyes were wide, glassy, and manic. The fine sheen of sweat had turned into a visible drip down the side of his face. He was gripping the thin metal microphone stand with both hands like it was the mast of a sinking ship in a hurricane.

Next to him, my sister sat completely, utterly frozen in her massive white dress. She wasn't looking up at Chet. She was staring straight down at her tightly folded hands resting on the white tablecloth. From across the room, I could see the rigid, lockjaw set of her profile. I saw the terrifying fragility of her posture, and all the residual empathy I had discovered in the bridal suite came roaring back, instantly transmuting into a cold, heavy dread in the pit of my stomach.

She knew. She absolutely knew her husband was currently riding the crest of a tidal wave of premium cocaine, panic, and unresolved trauma, and she was forcing herself to sit there and smile through it because this was supposed to be her "perfect" day.

Chet tapped the microphone with a trembling finger. Thump. Thump. The sound echoed like a heartbeat through the sudden silence of the room.

"Hey," Chet breathed into the mic. His voice was wet, ragged, and echoed ominously across the expectant, hushed crowd. "Hey, everyone. I just... I need to say something true. For once in my miserable life. Because looking out there tonight... looking at... a certain someone..."

Chet's bloodshot eyes bypassed his new bride entirely. He didn't even glance at her. His gaze swept over the crowd, locked directly onto me standing next to the melting ice sculpture, and anchored there.

Beside me, Warren went completely, unnaturally still. The air around us seemed to instantly drop ten degrees.

Chet leaned closer into the microphone, his lips almost brushing the metal mesh. His mouth opened, forming the distinct, undeniable first syllable of my name.

Tom.

I could see the slow-motion car crash happening in real-time. My sister squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for the devastating impact of her new husband publicly, permanently incinerating their life together before the catering staff had even cut the cake.

I took a half-step forward. My brain was frantically trying to calculate the physics of the room—how fast I could clear the distance across the dance floor, leap the head table, and physically rip the power cord out of the amplifier before he could ruin her life.

I didn't make it.

Warren moved first.

He didn't stride confidently into the center of the room. He didn't have a suave, commanding presence. He didn't look like a hero. He just sort of panicked, shoved his empty canapé plate blindly onto the edge of the swan ice sculpture, and marched directly into the dead, empty space between the dance floor and the head table.

"I'M GAY!"

The words ripped out of him like a physical explosion.

His voice didn't just crack—it fully, spectacularly squeaked. It pitched up so incredibly high it practically shattered the crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.

Every single head in the entire reception hall snapped toward him with the speed of a whiplash.

The silence that immediately followed was absolute. It was heavy, suffocating, and completely stunned. The DJ stopped moving. The catering staff froze in their tracks. My sister’s eyes flew wide open, staring at Warren in shock.

Warren stood alone in the center of the floor. His face was burning the brilliant, radioactive color of a fire engine. He looked entirely terrified, his chest heaving, his hands curled into awkward, tight fists at his sides. He looked back over his shoulder at me, swallowing hard, his Adam's apple bobbing nervously.

Then, he turned his gaze back to the crowd. He doubled down with the sheer, blinding, idiotic stubbornness of a guy who had just realized he had thrown himself onto a live grenade and had absolutely no choice but to absorb the blast.

"And I love Tom," Warren announced to the silent room. His voice was shaking violently, but miraculously, it held its lower register. He looked wildly around the room, scanning the crowd until he made direct eye contact with the groomsmen table. He threw up a desperate, frantic, two-fingered peace sign. "...No homo?"

I brought my hand up and smacked my palm directly into my forehead with enough force to leave a red mark. The slap echoed in the painfully quiet room.

"That's definitely not how that works," I groaned into my fingers, my voice muffled, though I was suddenly smiling so hard my face actively, physically hurt.

For two agonizing, endless seconds, the room held its collective breath. You could have heard a pin drop on the maroon carpet.

And then, from the groomsmen table in the back corner, the tallest brother thrust his brown beer bottle triumphantly into the air.

"NO HOMO!" he cheered, his voice booming like a foghorn across the hall.

"NO HOMO!" the other two brothers roared, leaping out of their folding chairs, knocking them backward, and pounding their massive fists on the table. "FUCK YEAH, BIG W! WOOOOO!"

The tension in the room snapped like a dry, brittle twig.

A few of the younger cousins, thoroughly confused by the terminology but completely caught up in the frat-house energy of the groomsmen, started clapping loudly. Someone in the back whistled piercingly through their teeth. A smattering of polite, bewildered applause rippled through the older relatives who assumed this was some bizarre, modern millennial wedding tradition.

At the head table, Chet stood completely frozen. The microphone drooped limply in his sweaty hand. He looked exactly like a man who had just tried to orchestrate a magnificent, tragic, emotionally devastating opera, only to have a circus clown car drive directly through the orchestra pit, honking its horn.

The grand, dramatic confession he had been building up to was entirely gone. Deflated. Ruined. The spotlight had been completely, effortlessly stolen by the scrawny kid he used to shove into gym lockers.

He looked at Warren. He looked across the room at me. He looked down at the heavy microphone in his hand. He had absolutely nothing left to say. Slowly, mechanically, he lowered himself back into his chair, a defeated, hollow husk of a groom who had just realized his tragedy was barely a footnote in someone else's comedy.

Beside him, my sister let out a long, shuddering, profound exhale.

She looked at Chet, sitting silently beside her. Then, she looked across the crowded room directly at me. Her shoulders dropped, the rigid, terrifying posture finally breaking, replaced by an overwhelming relief. She offered me a small, incredibly fragile, almost imperceptible nod.

Thank you, the nod said. Thank you for stopping him.

I looked away from the head table and looked at Warren. He was currently being aggressively swarmed by the three massive groomsmen, who had abandoned their table to rush the floor. They were aggressively ruffling his carefully styled hair, slapping his back hard enough to bruise, and cheering while he desperately tried to fix his crooked tie and maintain his balance.

He looked entirely overwhelmed. He looked completely ridiculous. He looked absolutely perfect.

I didn't need to save the day. My boyfriend had already handled it.

The DJ, possessing the brilliant, desperate survival instinct of a man who needed to pivot the energy away from the head table immediately before anyone else tried to grab a microphone, dropped the needle on a painfully generic, incredibly loud, upbeat pop song.

The heavy bass thumped through the floorboards. The colored disco lights began to sweep erratically across the floor, painting the room in splashes of neon pink and blue. The collective, nervous chatter of the room resumed at double volume as everyone mutually, silently agreed to pretend the last five minutes simply hadn’t happened.

Warren finally managed to extricate himself from the bear hugs of the groomsmen. His hair was completely unsalvageable, sticking up in static-charged spikes, and his tie was hanging completely askew around his neck. He immediately retreated to the safety of the buffet table, grabbing a fresh porcelain plate and staring blankly at the carving station with the intense, unblinking, thousand-yard stare of a man whose adrenaline had just entirely bottomed out, leaving him hollow.

I walked slowly across the room, stepping up beside him. I leaned my shoulder against the edge of the buffet table, crossing my arms over my chest. I didn't say anything at first. I just watched him.

He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling rapidly under the rented suit jacket. He blindly picked up a pair of silver tongs, aggressively transferred three cocktail wieners onto his plate without looking at them, and then finally shot me a cautious, sideways glance.

"I panicked," he stated flatly, his voice tight.

"You did," I agreed calmly.

"I yelled it. Like, really, really loudly. In front of your grandmother."

"You squeaked it, actually," I corrected gently, a smile playing at the corners of my mouth. "But it carried beautifully. You have excellent projection. Very theatrical."

Warren closed his eyes, dropping his chin to his chest in defeat. "Chet was going to ruin everything. He was looking right at you. I could see his face. I just... my brain went completely blank, the dial tone started, and then my mouth just started making noises to make him stop." He opened one eye to look at me, a deep, furious blush creeping back up his neck and disappearing into his collar. "Are you mad?"

I reached out. I took the plate of cocktail wieners out of his trembling hand and set it firmly on the pristine white tablecloth next to the carving station. I stepped deliberately into his space, closing the distance between us until I was close enough to smell the cheap cologne he had borrowed from his step-dad, masking the faint, lingering scent of powdered sugar from the dessert table.

"Does my fuzzy Alpha want to dance with his definitely not an Alpha boyfriend?" I asked, a slow, genuine smile spreading completely across my face. I bumped my knee gently against his. "No homo?"

Warren’s blush deepened to a violent shade of crimson. He let out a long, frustrated, shuddering breath, blowing a stray piece of blonde hair out of his eyes.

"Shut up!" Warren grumbled, glaring at me defensively.

But despite the protest, his hands immediately found their way to my waist. He gripped the charcoal fabric of my suit jacket like it was a life preserver, like it was the only thing currently keeping him tethered to gravity.

"And I'm leading!" he insisted fiercely.

"Of course you are," I murmured, stepping backward and letting him pull me toward the edge of the illuminated dance floor.

He had absolutely no idea what he was doing.

His rhythm was atrocious, completely out of sync with the bass line. His stance was entirely too rigid, his shoulders locked with tension. He stepped heavily on my left toe within the first four seconds of the song. But he was holding onto me in the absolute center of a crowded room, bathed in the flashing, ridiculous lights of my sister's chaotic, tragic wedding, and he wasn't pulling away. He wasn't hiding behind a magazine, or a ski mask, or an excuse.

I slid my arms up around his neck, resting my hands comfortably against the warm skin at his nape, my fingers threading lightly into his messy hair. He exhaled, a long, shaky, profound sound, and the rigid, defensive posture finally melted as he pulled me a fraction of an inch closer, pulling me securely against his chest.

We were a total disaster.

The town we lived in was a suffocating joke, the wedding happening around us was built entirely on a foundation of desperate lies, and my ex-boyfriend was currently sweating out a chemical breakdown at the head table while my sister pretended not to notice. Everything was a mess.

But as Warren stumbled through another terrible, uncoordinated box step, quietly humming along off-key to a pop song he didn't even know the words to, holding me securely under the spinning disco ball for the entire town to see, I realized I had never felt more like a protagonist in my entire life.