Best Man Wakes Up

Gus had been awake since six, and it was honestly kind of insulting. The wedding was over. The vows were said, the cake was cut, the happy couple was somewhere in the main house probably sleeping off the best day of their lives, and yet here he was, at the brunch reception, being responsible again.

He was twenty five, he'd been a barista for six years, and he had poured approximately four hundred mimosas since ten a.m. Somebody had to. Being the dependable one had its own character, you know? People just handed you things. Pitchers, clipboards, crying cousins, lost grandmas. Gus took them all with a smile and a little latte art joke and went back to the bar.

The vineyard estate was gorgeous, he'd give it that. Rolling hills, grapevines going on forever, a big old barn they'd converted into the reception hall. Strings of lights everywhere. The kind of place that made you want to quit your job and move to wine country, which Gus had considered twice already this weekend.

But by Sunday afternoon the party was winding down hard. Guests were sprawled across the lawn in mismatched chairs, sunglasses on, groaning happily about how much champagne they'd had. Kids who definitely belonged to somebody were chasing each other through the vines. A DJ was playing lowkey stuff, like the whole weekend was exhaling.

And Gus was stacking chairs.

"You know the caterers get paid for that, right?" Adam said, wandering past with a plate of leftover croissants.

"Shut up and eat your croissant, man."

"I'm just saying. You cleaned the coffee urn last night. At one in the morning. Nobody asked you to."

Gus hadn't, technically, been asked. He'd just seen it sitting there, gross and empty, and his hands had done the thing. It was a problem. He'd been the guy since college, the one who remembered the hotel reservations and the one who gave the speech that made the mother of the groom cry in a good way.

The speech. Okay, so the speech had gone well. Better than well. People had actually stood up and clapped, which Gus had not expected, because he'd mostly written it in the hotel bathroom the night before the wedding with a wine cooler balanced on the sink. He'd called Danny a disaster human being who somehow lucked into the best woman alive, and he'd made everyone laugh, and then he'd made everyone cry, and then he'd snuck a fart joke in at the end because he wasn't a monster.

Danny and Dina deserved it. They'd been together since sophomore year of college and they were the only couple Gus knew who never made him want to fake his own death at dinner parties. So yeah, he was happy. Genuinely. He just also happened to be running on four hours of sleep and a growing feeling that he'd spent the whole weekend performing the role of Best Man Gus, Responsible Friend, when the actual Gus wanted to do something wildly irresponsible.

Specifically, he wanted to do something about Natasha.

Oh boy. Where to even start with her. Look, you know how there's one person in your life where the second they walk into a room your whole brain does a little card shuffle? That was Natasha, Dina's younger sister, twenty four, bridesmaid, and the person Gus had been quietly losing his mind over for four years.

He'd met her at orientation week, he was twenty-one and she was twenty and both of them were hopelessly lost on campus, and she'd looked at the campus map upside down for a full minute before declaring, "This school was designed by somebody who hates us." He'd laughed so hard he'd snorted, which she'd never let him forget, and they'd been friends ever since.

Except for one night. One night two years ago, at Adam's birthday thing, when they'd both had way too much cheap champagne and ended up on the balcony kissing like it was a sport. Nothing came of it. They'd never talked about it. Not once. Not ever. Every time Gus got close to bringing it up his mouth just said something about coffee instead, because he was a coward with excellent latte foam skills.

And this weekend she was here, in a dusty blue bridesmaid dress, being funny and warm and completely unreadable, and Gus had spent the whole weekend smiling at her like a guy in a toothpaste ad while quietly dying inside.

Around two in the afternoon he escaped to the back deck of the barn, where the caterers had stacked the extra chairs and nobody was watching him. He leaned on the railing, looked out at the vineyards, and exhaled for what felt like the first time since Friday.

"You look as though you need a mimosa and a therapist."

He nearly fell off the deck. Natasha was sitting in one of the stacked chairs, feet up on the railing, shoes off, hair half down from the updo. "How long have you been sitting there?"

"Long enough. Your speech was great, by the way. I cried. Dina's grandma cried. Even the dog cried, and that dog hates everybody."

"That dog loves me."

"That dog peed on your suitcase, Gus."

"That was a compliment in dog language and you know it."

She laughed and kicked her feet off the railing, patting the chair next to her. He went. Of course he went. He'd have walked into traffic if she patted a curb.

"So," she said, tipping her head back to look at him. "Best man of the year. Chair stacker of the century. Coffee urn scrubber at one a.m. When do you ever do anything for yourself, huh?"

"This is me doing something for myself. This is me, sitting down. Living dangerously."

"Gus."

"What?"

"You've got your best man face on."

"I don't have a best man face."

"You absolutely do. It's the face you make when you'd rather be anywhere else but you're doing Something Important For Someone Else. You've had it on all weekend. Actually, you've had it on for like three years."

He opened his mouth to argue and then closed it, because, well. What was he going to say to that? She'd known him since he was twenty-one. She had a whole filing cabinet of his faces.

"Here's the thing," she said, and she was smiling, but in a careful way, like she was picking her words off a shelf. "You gave this big beautiful speech about Danny finally getting what he deserved. And I sat there thinking, what about you? When do you get what you deserve?"

"I get what I deserve. I get free croissants."

"You get free croissants and a two a.m. coffee urn. Riveting life, Gus."

He laughed, but it came out kind of shaky, because her knee was two inches from his knee and the sun was doing something unfair with her hair.

"You know what I keep thinking about?" she said, and she was looking straight out at the vines now, definitely not at him, which somehow made it worse. "Two years ago. Adam's birthday. The balcony."

Gus's heart just about stopped in his chest. "The balcony."

"Yeah. The balcony. Where we, you know." She waggled her hand vaguely, like the word kiss was too formal. "And then you never brought it up. Not once. I've been sitting on that for two years like some kind of crazy person, wondering if it didn't happen, or if it happened and you hated it, or if you just decided we were going to pretend it was a weird champagne accident forever."

"You thought about it for two years?"

"Did YOU?"

"Natasha, I think about it like every other day, are you kidding me?"

She turned to look at him then, and her whole face was doing this thing, surprise and hope and a little bit of laughing at him all at once. "Every other day? Then why, Gus? Why did you never say anything?"

"Because." He gestured at the world in general, the wedding, the barn, his entire personality. "Because you're Dina's sister, and we're friends, and I'm the dependable one, remember? The guy who doesn't blow things up. The guy people trust with the seating chart. You don't kiss your best friend's sister-in-law-to-be's sister and then deal with the fallout at Thanksgiving."

"That is the worst logic I've ever heard in my life."

"It's very airtight logic, actually."

"It's not. You've spent two years being good about something you wanted, and for what? Nobody died. Nobody even noticed. I noticed, obviously, because I was there, with your mouth, but other than that, nothing happened."

Gus stared at her. She stared back. Somewhere down on the lawn somebody popped a cork and a bunch of guests cheered like it was news.

"Okay," he said slowly. "Okay, so say I believe you. Say I've been an idiot for two years, which, fine, possible. What do you want me to say?"

"I want you to say you're not pretending anymore." She'd shifted so she was facing him fully now, no jokes in her voice, which was rare for her and kind of terrifying. "Because I'm not either. I didn't come out here to stack chairs, Gus. I came out here because you were out here, and I've been working up the nerve since yesterday, and if you tell me you'd rather keep being the responsible one I am going to go get so many mimosas."

The truth was he'd been bored of being good for a long time. Bored of being the guy who scrubbed things at midnight and smiled through everything and went home alone to his cat and his espresso machine. Four years of wanting one specific person and doing nothing about it, and she was right there, asking him, actually asking him.

"Natasha," he said. "I don't want to be good. Not about this. I've wanted to stop pretending since the balcony, and I've been a coward about it for two years, and I'm done."

Her whole face lit up like the string lights in the barn. "Finally. Oh my god, finally. Do you know how long I've waited for you to say one honest sentence?"

"Two years, apparently."

"Two years. You're lucky you're cute, oh my god." She grabbed his hand, right there on the deck, fingers laced through his as if it were trivial, as if it were everything. "Okay. So. Now what?"

Gus looked at their hands, then at her, and grinned for the first time all weekend without checking whether anyone needed anything from him.

"Now," he said, "I think I'm finally off the clock."

"So what does the responsible one do now?" Natasha asked, still holding his hand like she'd forgotten to let go. Or like she had no intention of ever letting go, which honestly Gus could relate to. "Because if you go stack more chairs I'm throwing one of them into the pond."

"I would never stack chairs again. I've stacked my last chair." He meant it, too. Somewhere around mimosas number three hundred and eighty he'd decided that if one more person asked him where the bathroom was, he was going to walk into the vineyard and live there. "I honestly don't know what I do now. I've been the dependable one so long I don't have a plan B."

"You have to have a want, Gus. Everybody has a want. Danny wanted Dina. Dina wanted Danny. The dog wanted your suitcase." She was grinning but her eyes were dead serious underneath it, and she leaned in a little. "What do you want? Say it. Out loud. Right now."

And here's the embarrassing part, the part Gus would normally bury under six years of customer service voice: he froze. Completely. He opened his mouth, closed it, looked at the grapevines like they might offer him an out. She was twenty-four years old and she'd been his friend for four years and she was asking him a question with one possible right answer and he still fumbled it like a rookie.

"I want..." He cleared his throat. Tried again. "I want."

"You want," she repeated, eyebrows up. "Fascinating. Riveting. Go on."

"You." It came out quiet but it came out. "I want you, Natasha. I've wanted you since the balcony, and honestly probably before the balcony, and I keep saying it in my head like it's this big dangerous thing and it's just three letters, it's