The Wedding (Starting Over Book 3) Read online

  It took him a good few minutes and when he cooled to a simmering annoyance instead of a fury, he brought the temperature down even further by wandering over to the fusty old bloke section and picking out some hideous ties for a laugh. By the time he came back to present them to Aled as complementary designs for his best man suit, the irritation had died away.

  And he found Suze trying on a waistcoat.

  “That’s not cut for women,” he said automatically.

  “But I like it,” she argued, doing a little twirl. “Maybe I could wear a suit.”

  “Thought you didn’t want to look frumpy?” Aled interjected.

  Gabriel shrugged. “Tight waistcoat—dark colour—over a white blouse, and a white skirt. And if you want to piss off this pompous mother-in-law, wear a pair of gaudy flip-flops.”

  He’d meant it as a flippant remark, but Suze’s face lit up and she went charging off down the escalators to the women’s section, leaving them both standing there in bemusement. Gabriel pulled a helpless sort of expression to make Aled laugh, then prodded him into putting back the suit jacket he was holding.

  “Pinstripe is ugly.”

  “I’m heading straight for forty, I’m fat, and I work in marketing. Pinstripe is my area.”

  Gabriel leaned in. “You also once locked me in my flat for three days and made me buy my way out with sex.”

  “And I’ll do it again if you don’t behave.”

  Gabriel slipped away and found a much nicer solid grey suit. “I am behaving. Look, I’m being helpful. How about this one?”

  “When you get helpful, I get suspicious,” Aled quipped. “Find me something I could get married in. I’m not buying two posh suits.”

  “What do you need a wedding suit for?” Gabriel asked. “Found someone?”

  Technically, their agreement was that both of them could have relationships with other people, but Aled wasn’t emotionally wired that way. He did sometimes sleep with other people, usually on his work trips when Gabriel wasn’t around for prolonged periods, but he only loved one person at a time.

  “Just you.”

  “You’re not marrying me.”

  “You never know.”

  Gabriel chuckled. “You’ll be waiting a long time for that proposal, sunshine. Here. Go try those one.”

  He sent him packing into a changing room with a black suit and a grey one, and the collection of ugly ties. He leaned up against the wall to wait, returning to his texts with Kevin.

  Me: I’m suit shopping for Aled’s mate’s wedding.

  Kevin: Get one for yours.

  Me: Lay off!!

  Me: Told you before, we’re not getting married.

  Me: Although he did drop a hint a minute ago.

  Kevin: Told you so.

  Kevin: Save some seats at the church for us.

  Me: Fuck off!!

  Kevin: You mind your language.

  Gabriel rolled his eyes but backed out before he could get into trouble. He was rescued from a beating by Suze returning with an armload of clothes and vanishing into the changing rooms. Aled took his time fiddling about with fancy suits, but Suze was quicker. She re-emerged in a matter of minutes in a floaty white blouse, a black women’s waistcoat that emphasised her not inconsiderable chest and an ankle-length summer skirt made of white lace, almost see-through. Gabriel snorted when he took in the bright purple flip-flops that finished her off, with a bright white daisy over each big toe.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s a sort-of dress. And it’s white.”

  “Does it look nice?”

  “You’ll need a proper white skirt underneath. Can see your knickers.”

  She gave him a smirk and a little wiggle. As she twirled, Gabriel cocked his head.

  “Try a short-sleeved blouse,” he suggested. “It’s still a bit matronly on the top half. Or a V-neck. Showing a bit of cleavage will piss off the mother-in-law too.”

  “I like the way you think.”

  She disappeared behind the curtains again, and Gabriel glanced back down at his phone, twirling it around in his hand. Slowly, he pushed off from the wall and went browsing the rails. He’d been planning on just getting something cheap, but—

  Well.

  Never knew when he might need it again.

  Chapter Nine

  When Aled had got married, he hadn’t made a speech.

  Suze had been his best woman. Melissa had had bridesmaids. Dads had stood up to speak. But not Aled. He had said boilerplate vows, laughed and cried through other people’s words and never said a thing of his own to all their guests at once, or to his about-to-be-wife in front of their nearest and dearest.

  But he would have to speak at Suze’s.

  And weirdly—despite everything else that needed to go first, and all the time he had to finish it—Aled was struck early on with a sense of urgency about the speech. It was going to be a one-time deal. That much was obvious. And Aled had to pack thirty-odd years of emotion into a single, ten-minute window, for everyone to understand.

  Most of all, Suze.

  He went looking for photos first, hoping they would jog his memory. The first rainy weekend that rolled around, he got out the ladder and went hunting for the boxes in the attic. They were still labelled in Melissa’s neat hand from their last big house move, and—because his wife had been infinitely more organised than Aled—it was easy to find the family albums that he’d inherited from Dad. He took the boxes downstairs to spread them out and decided to lose himself in his own history as the rain hammered on the conservatory roof.

  And it was easy to do. Dad had been snap-happy. He had Aled’s baby pictures, even though Aled hadn’t been adopted until he was a little kid. The earliest picture that Aled could find of Suze was—ironically—their wedding photo. Him in his Spider-Man T-shirt with his hair sticking up all over the place, her in a lacy veil made out of Nana’s curtains and beaming toothily around the wedding cake Mum had made for them.

  “That’s cute,” Gabriel said.

  Aled had spread out the photos on the coffee table, making notes for his best man’s speech and the greatest opportunity he’d ever have to get revenge on all the things Suze had ever done to annoy him. He’d started when he got home from work and Gabriel had flopped down on the sofa behind him with a bowl of homemade soup once he’d returned from the gym.

  “Did you marry your best mate in nursery school?”

  “Didn’t go to nursery school,” Gabriel said. “Mum only made us go to school to stop the social turning up at the door. But I gave a bunch of daisies to Jenny Simpson when we were seven. We dated for a whole week. That’s pretty much marriage for me, right?”

  Aled grinned.

  “I wasn’t allowed to play with Jenny anymore once my mother found out.”

  “Why?”

  “Jenny was black,” Gabriel said simply and Aled grimaced.

  “Your mother just gets better and better.”

  “Tell me about it,” Gabriel muttered. “Why are you giving Suze away, then? What happened to her dad?”

  “Probably back in prison,” Aled said. “He’s been in and out of jail longer than Suze has been alive.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “I don’t think Suze has even seen him since she was about thirteen. Her brother’s the same way.”

  “What about her mum?”

  “Not right in the head,” Aled said. “I don’t know if she was ill before she met Suze’s dad or not, but he certainly didn’t help matters. I don’t know if she’ll come. Suze has invited her, but…yeah, I doubt she’ll show up.”

  “So you’re pretty much the only family going?”

  “Probably.”

  “That’s sad,” Gabriel said wistfully.

  Aled shrugged. “It is what it is. There were a lot of problem families round where we grew up. Suze wasn’t the only one.”

  “I grew up in a tower block in Hackney,” Gabriel said. “Seven of us in one flat. She used to lock us out during the day,
too. No prizes for guessing what my mum did for a living.”

  “On the game?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Is that why you’re touchy about being paid for it?” Aled asked curiously. It had always struck him as a little odd. Nothing got Gabriel angrier than when a hookup left money like he was a prostitute. They could play pretend sometimes, but Aled had rapidly learned not to spring the idea on him out of nowhere. He’d go nuclear if he got the impression he was actually being paid for it, and Aled had always thought it odd for someone who was so sex-positive.

  “Probably.” Gabriel shrugged. “I got out, though.”

  Aled leaned his head back to rest them on Gabriel’s knees. The sofa creaked, and a kiss landed the wrong way up on his forehead.

  “Didn’t think I’d ever make a nice house, a proper job and a steady boyfriend.”

  Aled smirked, then said, “Me neither, actually.”

  “Why? Wasn’t your mum a doctor?”

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t that smart. And I was violently kinky. I figured that out pretty young, really, and I figured I’d end up in prison for something awful like Suze’s dad,” Aled said. “I had a good few years being fucked up about it. Without Suze, I wouldn’t have made it out.”

  He leafed through the pictures until he found one of their teenage years. Both in the ugly green uniform, him looking like a Christmas tree thanks to the combination of a bottle-green jumper and bright red hair. Suze with her natural brown and a mouth full of braces. And Melissa, too, with her fiery red mane and beautifully superior expression.

  “Jesus,” Aled muttered. “Look how fucking young we were.”

  Gabriel leaned over his shoulder to look and laughed. “Oh my God. What are you, twelve?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “I was barely at school yet.”

  “Thanks,” Aled drawled and dropped the picture again. He shifted up the pad on his knee and wrote a couple of words.

  “What’s that?”

  “Going to be my speech.”

  “You going for funny or sentimental?”

  “Ideally both,” Aled said. “And embarrassing. Can’t forget embarrassing.”

  “Oh, of course not.”

  Gabriel switched on the TV after a while and let Aled work in peace, but the truth was that Aled wasn’t sure what to write. Suze was essentially his sister. He had a lifetime of ammunition. Over thirty years of things to say—and it meant that he didn’t know what to say. Did he tell the story of their pseudo-wedding when they were little kids? Did he tell them about Suze daring him to ride his bike over the lock at Canal Lane and Dad going mad when he inevitably fell off and broke his arm? Did he tell about the time she didn’t know how to dump her boyfriend in sixth form, so snogged Aled outside their English class to make the boyfriend dump her instead? Did he tell of the day she nearly burned the flat down, their first year in university, because she hadn’t figured out that pasta was boiled in water and not pan-fried at two in the morning when drunk?

  Did he say Tom was mad for marrying her, or that he was the luckiest man in the world?

  Did he say what she meant to him, or leave it lying in the spaces between them, where they both knew full well what the other meant?

  Did he disturb a lifetime of never needing to say it?

  Suze is my best friend.

  The words appeared under his hand like magic. He felt as though he was watching someone else write them as they began to flow, and sat back to see what came out.

  She is my sister, my friend, my confidante, my cheerleader, my coach and my rock. We grew up together. I don’t have a biological sister, but Suze was as good as. She has been there for almost my entire life and is woven into every aspect of it. She knows everything there is to know about me and, unfortunately for her, I can say the same. So what can I say about her in front of an audience? What can I share in front of all the important people in her life that won’t result in my death by the end of the evening?

  He didn’t pause.

  I could tell you about the fact that I married her first. We were best friends from the day we met, and we married not long afterwards. I wore my best Spider-Man shirt. She wore her brightest wellies. She punched me for trying to take the first slice of cake and wore my Haribo ring for a whole week before eating it. And she was sick for a whole day afterwards, which she richly deserved for eating my wedding ring in the first place.

  Over his shoulder, Gabriel chuckled. Aled smiled but kept going.

  I could tell you about her first proper boyfriend. He was terribly interesting, because we were thirteen and he had a real tattoo that his older brother had given him. He smoked, too—it took a while before we all figured out they were just menthol cigarettes, but nobody said we were smart at our school. But Ryan decided that he didn’t like Suze having a male best friend who lived five doors down and had seen her in her training bra more than he had. Suze decided she didn’t like his arm after that and broke it in two places. Understandably, they split up. That was Suze’s first foray into the world of romance.

  “Seriously?”

  I could tell you about the day I met my future wife, when Suze shoved me out onto the playing fields and said if I didn’t go and introduce myself to the girl I’d been staring at for weeks, then she’d burn my entire comic collection. She used the exact same threat when I was dithering about whether to propose to the same girl, years later. It was just as effective.

  “Nerd.”

  “Shut up,” Aled said, ears heating.

  “It’s okay. Nerds make great sex gods.”

  Aled snorted.

  I could tell you about the day she met Tom, when she texted me that some spotty git at the student cafe had asked her out and asked if I’d set her up. I told her that I hadn’t, but given she had a shit taste in men, the fact she didn’t like this one probably meant he was her future husband, so she’d better say yes.

  “Suze had a shit taste in men?”

  “Before Tom,” Aled murmured as he wrote. “Every single one of them was a controlling prick. At best. At worst, a couple of them were downright abusive. Talking to her never worked, so I used to provoke them into slagging me off in front of her, because that usually did. I even tried to pick a fight with one of them and he completely destroyed me, but it worked.”

  “Define destroyed you,” Gabriel said.

  “Put me in the hospital with three cracked ribs.”

  I could tell you about the day she texted me, maybe six months later, and admitted she’d run into the spotty git again and there was something about his smile. I said he must have turned into a shitbag since asking her out the first time, so to avoid him. Naturally, she didn’t listen to me.

  Gabriel turned the TV down and leaned over Aled’s shoulder, looping both arms around his neck to watch the words unfold.

  I could tell you about the day she turned to me in a third-year lecture and said, “I think I’m in love with Tom. And it doesn’t feel like the last time.” That’s the day I saw today coming. That’s the day I thought, “This is serious.” That’s the day I realised that my best friend had fallen in love and I wasn’t going to be the only man in her life who was good for her anymore.

  “Does that sound too arrogant?”

  “Read it all through when you’re done and see.”

  “Okay.”

  And that was one of the happiest days of my life, ladies and gentlemen. Because I have loved Suze since the day I met her. She is one of the most important people in my life and to see her finally fall in love with a man who deserved it, who deserved her, was the most incredible privilege.

  He paused. The pen hovered. Then—

  Suze is and always has been a force of nature. She is beautiful—never more so than today—and she is clever. She is unstoppable. She is the sun in a sometimes dark and lonely world. She is nothing short of glorious. And I could stand here and tell you stories until the sun sets, but the one I actually want to tell you is this one.

&nb
sp; Gabriel squeezed lightly.

  Once upon a time, there was a girl who met a boy. The girl was one of the most brilliant women ever made. And the boy knew that. He took one look at her and knew. He looked at her like she was going to achieve her dreams, with or without him. He looked at her like she was beautiful, from when she was dressed to kill to when she rolled out of bed at two in the afternoon with her makeup halfway to her knees. He looked at her like she was everything he ever wanted, even when it had been so long that the girl was a woman, and the boy was a man. He looked at her like he was meeting her for the first time, over and over again, and never was it clearer than today.

  The pen was shivering faintly in his fingers.

  I gave my sister away today, and even if that phrase were literal and this was the last time we spoke, I would do it all again. Because today I gave my best friend’s hand to the man who has worshipped the ground she’s walked on for all these years. I watched her marry a man who knows how lucky he is to have her, who has never been ashamed to say he loves her, who has never shied from challenging her when she needed it, and never failed to step up and support her when she wanted him to. There aren’t many men who deserve a wife like Suze, but Tom is one of those men.

  Lips touched his ear lightly, and their warmth pierced him right through to the middle.

  This has been one of the proudest and happiest days of my life, and I would invite you all to join me in a toast to Thomas and Suzanne Hooper.

  Gabriel reached out and toppled the pen from Aled’s grip with a single finger before locking both arms back around his neck and squeezing tight.

  “You old romantic,” he murmured.

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Why don’t you write me love notes like that, hm?”

  “Marry me and I might.”

  “It’s not that good,” Gabriel said with a laugh.

  “Anyway, you squirm and get embarrassed when I say something nice to you.”

  “That’s why you write it down and leave it somewhere for me to find where nobody’s watching,” Gabriel teased, then pushed himself up off the sofa. “Want anything from the kitchen?”