Alex scowled. “You roll your eyes at one more compliment, and I promise you won’t be able to stop me from going over to Ben and handing his ass to him.”
The genuine malice in his tone took her aback, and she realized her response to his kind words only served to prove how much her confidence had taken a beating this past year. “He only knocked me down for a little while, Alex. I’m getting back up. Don’t worry.”
“Try as I may, I can’t figure out what you saw in the dick to begin with.”
“Trust me, I have no answer for that right now.” She looked around the room, seeing it through a tequila haze.
Things were starting to go a bit foggy, everything unfocused flashes of color.
The last shot seemed to have pushed her out of tipsy range.
She was drunk.
She reached for her glass of water.
Better hydrate.
Best to have her wits about her for later.
“It’s funny,” she said. “I’ve been looking forward to this wedding for months, but tonight hasn’t turned out at all like I expected, what I’d hoped for.”
“Better?”
There was no denying tonight was beyond anything she could have imagined. This night with Alex was like something out of a dream.
But the problem with dreams was you had to wake up.
Come morning, her notch was going to be in his bedpost—something that didn’t feel abhorrent at all anymore—and Alex would be on a flight back to Baltimore.
And then, it was Operation Perfect Guy.
Which in reality meant it was most likely going to be her and her vibrator for the foreseen future.
At least, she’d have the memory of tonight to help get her off.
“What did you hope would happen tonight?” he asked when she didn’t respond.
Charley lifted one shoulder.
She didn’t want to confess what she’d really thought because it would be too embarrassing to let Alex see how stupid she’d been.
“Tell me,” he urged.
Unfortunately, the tequila loosened her tongue, pushed her inhibitions out of the way. “Honestly? I kind of planned to convince Ben to elope with me tonight. It is Vegas after all.”
Alex frowned. “You really would have married that guy?”
Damn.
She shouldn’t have started this conversation.
Now that she had, there was no turning back.
“Yeah. I mean obviously that plan dissolved the second I found out he was cheating on me, but I want to get married. Want to settle down, have kids.”
Alex scoffed, and the sound tweaked her temper for some reason.
“What do you have against marriage?”
Alex crossed his arms. “This conversation isn’t about my life choices. It’s about yours.”
She didn’t like the way he dodged her question. It was a perfectly valid one.
She’d heard enough about Alex from his sister over the years to know the guy was a serious commitment-phobe.
“Fine,” Charley said. “Yes. If Ben hadn’t dumped my ass for Beverly, if we’d still been a couple, I would have married him. We would have come to this wedding, danced, gotten tipsy on red wine, and I would have suggested we go to one of those tacky little Vegas chapels to elope.”
“I thought women wanted the big white wedding, the expensive dress, the flowers.”
She crinkled her nose, disgusted by what he described. “Jesus. Can you see me in a fucking wedding gown? Carrying a bunch of froufrou flowers?”
He laughed. “I can’t. But I also can’t stand the thought of you standing in front of some Elvis lookalike, vowing to spend the rest of your life with fucking Ben Jerome.”
“Yeah. That would have been a huge mistake. Ben did me a favor.”
“Hmph. When you put it like that, I’m actually a lot less pissed off at the dude.”
“Saved me from myself?”
He nodded. “Something like that.”
“You’re gonna laugh, but I’m not so different from other women. I did dream about my wedding growing up. I’ve imagined it countless times.”
What she didn’t say was pre-Ben, the groom always changed.
Sometimes it was Zac Efron, sometimes Ryan Reynolds, and—God help her—more than a few times, it was Alex standing next to her at the altar.
“I knew it,” he said, smugly enough that she couldn’t wait to let him know he didn’t know a damn thing. “So you did want the dress, the big dog and pony show?”
“Nope. My dream wedding is—and always has been—eloping in Vegas.”
He studied her face, clearly waiting for her to say “just kidding,” but she wasn’t.
Cliché or not, she’d always pictured herself catching a flight to Vegas on a whim, racing to one of the chapels, and exchanging vows with the man of her dreams.
“Why the hell would you want to elope?”
“Big white weddings are exactly what you just said. A big-ass production,” she explained. “I’ve never really understood why people stress themselves to the max, trying to prove to their family and friends that they love each other enough to stick it out for the long haul. Weddings should be just for the couple and, honestly, if you care about someone so much that you’re willing to say something as serious as ’til death do us part’”—Charley didn’t miss Alex’s slight wince as she said the words, but she ignored it—“you should have fun while you do it. I want to stand in some cheesy chapel, pledging my love to the man I want to spend the rest of my life laughing with, joking with, growing old, but not growing up, with.”
“And that was Ben?”
Alex was on the wrong end of her broken relationship. “At the beginning…yeah. I mean, come on, Alex. I’m not without any self-esteem, not a complete moron. Though I’ll admit the last few months haven’t been my finest moments.”
He leaned back and considered that for a minute. “Good. I’m glad to know it wasn’t all bad. I still think the guy is a tool, but if he made you happy for a little while…”
Charley glanced Ben’s direction, allowing herself to recall the first couple years of their relationship—the pizza nights, watching hockey, the spur-of-the-moment road trips to Niagara Falls and the Finger Lakes, as well as their standard Friday night date night.
There had been a lot of laughs at the beginning…before shades of his father started emerging, and climbing the ladder at work became the primary focus in his life. “He did make me happy. But I guess now that my eyes have been opened to some hard truths, I can see he’s not the type to do the Vegas wedding. He would have wanted the show. And that should have been my first clue that we’ve spent the last three years growing apart, not together.”
“Three years is a long time to figure something like that out.”
Charley grinned, even as she shook her head at the obvious horror in his voice as he said the words three years like it had been some life sentence in solitary confinement. “Which brings us back to you. Seriously, dude. What’s your hang-up with marriage? Your parents have a great one. So do your brothers. It’s not like you don’t have ideal role models in wedded bliss.”
“Why is it a hang-up to say you don’t want to get married? Why do people act like it’s some shortcoming, some broken strand of genetic coding? Who says people have to live in pairs? Jesus, between my parents, my sister, my brothers, half my teammates, and now you…you’d think I had some major character flaw.”