A Guy Walks Into My Bar - Lauren Blakely Page 0,113

heavily.

“Oh,” I say it heavily too, since I have a feeling this conversation is about to become more intense than the game. “Is there something going on with you and her?”

Leo shakes his head adamantly, like he can’t stop shaking it. “No, just no. No, no, no.”

“So, what is it?”

He takes a drink of his beer, sets it down, and sighs. “Do you have any idea how lucky you are that you’re not madly in love with your best friend’s wife? That you haven’t been for years?”

The logic there kind of falls apart for me, but now’s not the time to break it down. “You’ve been in love with Lulu since she married Tripp several years ago?”

“Since before she married him,” he admits. “And there is nothing I can do about it.”

“Well, yeah. Since she’s married and all.”

“I know. I know,” he says.

Then he keeps talking. He doesn’t shut up. He tells me about the day he met Lulu. He tells me about how Tripp fell for her too. He tells me about Tripp’s battles with alcohol, and how he and Lulu are trying to help him get to rehab, and it’s all really fucking intense, since he’s crazy for her too.

“But there’s nothing I can do.”

I nod, wishing I could dig into a secret box of bartender advice and give him the perfect solution for being in love with his best friend’s wife.

“All you can do is be his friend. And be her friend. That’s all you can do,” I say.

“Yeah. It is,” he echoes.

Later, after Fitz wins, notching an epic slap shot that I cheer the loudest for, my fiancé curls up with me in bed. “Did you have a good time at the game?”

“Always.”

“And how’s Leo?”

I shake my head. “You can’t imagine the ass-kicking that love is serving him right now.”

“Yeah?”

I don’t go into the details. It’s not my story to tell. Instead, I give him a one-sentence summary. “It makes what we went through to get here seem easy.”

Fitz arches a brow. “Was it hard though?”

“I dunno. Was it?”

“It’s hard now.” He nudges me with his pelvis.

I crack up, feeling the evidence. “You have such a one-track mind.”

“I know, but some things are always hard, babe. I can’t help it. I’m in bed with you. It’s just always going to be hard.”

“Get your lips on mine.”

When he kisses me, all thoughts of other people’s love lives fall out of my head, because mine is just too damn good.

And it’s not because we’re lucky.

It’s because we made it happen.

And this summer, I’m marrying him.

The First Epilogue

Fitz

I was right.

My mom loves Dean.

All my sisters do too. Emma, Carrie, and Sarah. They’re all here in New York for a June wedding.

We’ll meet them in Central Park later.

For now, I’m getting ready at our home with my guy. My fiancé. The other groom.

We’re not doing the whole don’t see each other before the ceremony thing. That’s not our style.

Our style is this—he wears a tailored dark-blue suit. Mine is lighter blue. I fasten his tie. He knots mine.

And then I step back and take a look at the man who’s going to be my husband. “You clean up well, Dean Collins.”

“Same to you, James Fitzgerald.”

“Picture time,” I say, holding up my phone in the living room as I snap a selfie on our wedding day. I show it to him.

“Keeping it. Definitely keeping it,” he says.

And we head to the park in a limo together. We walk in together. And we meet our families together.

That’s how we walk down the aisle, which is really the stone walkway at Bethesda Terrace. Hand in hand, my mom on one side, his dad on the other, then it’s just us at the front with a justice of the peace.

Everyone I care about is here. Everyone he cares about is here too. All his friends from London, Naveen and Anya, Taron and his fiancé, Maeve and Sam, and Dean’s father and his girlfriend, Penny.

My friends from New York, who are now our friends.

Most of my teammates too.

Everyone we love.

But I only have eyes for one person.

“Do you, James Fitzgerald, take this man to be your husband?” the justice of the peace asks on a warm summer day as the sun shines brightly above us.

I say the easiest words ever. “I do.”

“And do you, Dean Collins, take this man to be your husband?”

The guy I love madly, beyond anything, more than anyone else in the whole universe, locks his eyes with mine and makes me