Best Man, Wrong Groom

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Chapter One

I woke up on my wedding day at 5:40 in the morning with a feeling in my chest like I’d swallowed a fistful of gravel.

Not nerves. I knew what nerves felt like — the jittery, carbonated hum before a big roastery event, the low buzz when I had to fire someone, the electric lurch in my stomach the first time I kissed Elise on her doorstep in the rain. Nerves had an engine. They pointed somewhere. This was different. This was a stone sitting behind my sternum that had been growing for weeks, maybe months, gaining mass so slowly I’d been able to pretend it was indigestion or exhaustion or the accumulated stress of planning a hundred-and-twenty-person destination wedding in the Finger Lakes in October.

I stared at the ceiling of the groom’s suite — exposed beams, tasteful pendant lighting, a window cracked just enough to let in the smell of cold water and dying leaves — and ran through the timeline in my head. Vendors arriving at seven. Florist staging the ceremony arch by eight. Photographer at nine for getting-ready shots. First look at eleven. Ceremony at two. I could recite it the way I recited our seasonal roast schedule: automatically, the rhythm of competence filling the space where feeling should be.

My tux hung on the back of the bathroom door. Midnight blue, slim-cut, tailored in August when I’d been ten pounds lighter and sleeping through the night. The burgundy pocket square Elise had picked was already folded into the breast pocket, a neat puff that I’d watched a YouTube video to learn. She’d laughed when she caught me practicing. You’re adorable, she’d said, and I’d kissed her forehead and thought, Why doesn’t this feel like enough?

I got up. Showered with the water too hot, stood under it until my skin turned pink, and told myself that every groom feels this way. That the weight in my chest was proportional to the seriousness of the commitment. That a man who didn’t feel something enormous on the morning he was about to promise his life to someone would be the one worth worrying about.

I dried off, dressed in joggers and a t-shirt — the tux could wait — and sat on the edge of the bed with my phone. Fourteen texts from Evelyn, my sister, ranging from logistical (caterer confirmed 2pm, but they’re asking about the backup indoor plan if the weather turns) to emotional (I’m so proud of you, little brother) to classic Evelyn (If Mom asks me one more time whether the napkins are ‘champagne’ or ‘ivory’ I’m going to drown myself in Seneca Lake). Three from Elise: a photo of her dress bag hanging in her suite, a heart emoji, and Can’t sleep either. See you at the altar. ❤️

I typed back: Can’t wait.

My thumb hovered over the send button for four full seconds before I pressed it.

The lie was so small. Two words. Practically nothing. But I felt it land in my stomach like a coin dropped into deep water — the tiny, distant plink of something sinking to a place I couldn’t reach.

I put the phone face-down on the nightstand and pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw sparks.

Get it together, Bellamy. You love her. She’s brilliant and kind and she chose you and this is what people do. They build lives. They make promises. They show up.

I’d been saying versions of this to myself for three months. Four. Maybe longer. The words had stopped working sometime around July, but the rhythm of them still felt like something to hold onto, so I kept saying them, the way you keep turning a dead car’s ignition because the alternative is admitting you’re stranded.

Wes showed up at seven-fifteen, twenty minutes before the photographer, because that was who Wes was. Early. Prepared. Already dressed in his charcoal suit with the burgundy tie Elise had chosen for the groomsmen, looking like he’d slept nine hours and spent an unhurried morning reading the paper, when I knew for a fact he’d driven two hours from his place in Watkins Glen after working a sixteen-hour storm-prep shift at the county emergency office.

“You look like shit,” he said from the doorway.

“Good morning to you too.”

“I’m serious. Did you sleep?”

“Some.” I hadn’t. “Enough.” Definitely not.

He stepped into the room and the air changed. I don’t know how else to describe it. The suite was the same — same beams, same pendant light, same cold lake air through the cracked window — but when Wes walked in, the molecules rearranged. They always did. I’d spent years filing this observation under he’s my best friend and I’m comfortable around him and refusing to open the folder marked why does comfortable feel like a lit match?

“Coffee’s on its way,” he said, setting a garment bag on the chair and pulling out a lint roller like a man who’d anticipated every possible crisis between here and the altar. “Evelyn’s handling the caterer. Your mom is already crying, but the good kind. Your dad is doing that thing where he stands with his hands behind his back and surveys the grounds like he personally commanded the leaves to turn.”

I laughed. It came out rough, more air than sound. “Classic David Bellamy.”

“The man missed his calling as a Civil War reenactor.” Wes crossed to the bathroom door and straightened my tux on its hanger, adjusting the shoulders the way a tailor would, precise fingers finding the drape line without thinking about it. “Weather’s holding for now, but there’s a system moving in from the west. Could get interesting by evening.”

“Define interesting.”

“Sixty-mile-an-hour gusts, possible severe thunderstorm warning, maybe some localized flooding. Standard October lake shit.” He glanced at me over his shoulder. “Nothing we can’t handle.”

We. He said it so easily. Like managing my wedding-day weather emergency was something we did together, a natural extension of the eleven years we’d spent handling everything together — flat tires, bad breakups, the agonizing first year of the roastery when I’d slept on a futon in the back office and Wes had driven up every Friday with groceries and the stubborn insistence that I eat something that wasn’t espresso.

I watched him fuss with the tux and felt the gravel in my chest shift.

“You should get dressed,” he said. “Photographer’ll be here in ten.”

“Yeah. I know.”

I didn’t move.

Wes turned around fully then, and something in his expression softened. Not pity — Wes didn’t do pity. Something more careful than that. He looked at me the way he looked at a weather map when the models were diverging: reading the data, running projections, deciding whether to sound the alarm or hold steady.

“Hey,” he said. “You good?”

No. I am not good. I haven’t been good in months. I wake up every morning next to a woman I love and feel nothing below the neck and I don’t know why, except that I do know why, and the knowing is a door I’ve been standing in front of with my hand on the knob and my eyes shut because if I open it, everything I’ve built falls apart.

“Nervous,” I said. “Normal nervous. Everybody’s nervous.”

He studied me for one more second. Then he nodded, because Wes was also a man who understood when not to push. “Get dressed. I’ll handle the rest.”

The tux fit differently than it had in August. The trousers sat lower, the jacket pulled slightly across the shoulders — nothing visible to anyone who wasn’t looking, but I could feel it, the way you feel a weather change in a healed fracture. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and tried to see what Elise would see walking toward me down the aisle. A handsome man in a beautiful suit. Steady hands. Warm eyes. The kind of groom who’d written his own vows and practiced them in the shower until the words felt burnished.

The vows were in my jacket pocket. I’d written them in August, too. They were good — honest, specific, the right blend of funny and tender. They referenced our first date (a disastrous cooking class where I’d set a towel on fire) and our first trip (Portland, a rainy weekend, a bookstore she’d cried in because it was so beautiful). They promised partnership, patience, the willingness to grow. They were everything a bride could want to hear.

They didn’t say I want you. They didn’t say I burn for you. They didn’t say When I look at you, something in my chest catches fire and I’d crawl across glass to put my mouth on yours.

They said I choose you, which sounded close enough if you didn’t examine the difference.

The tie was the problem.

It should have been simple — a four-in-hand knot I’d tied ten thousand times for work events, investor dinners, my grandfather’s funeral. My hands knew the sequence. But this morning my fingers felt thick and clumsy, the silk slipping every time I pulled the narrow end through. I tried three times. Got it wrong three times. My reflection stared back at me with the panicked composure of a man who was losing an argument with an inanimate object and reading it, correctly, as a metaphor.

“Let me.”

Wes appeared behind me in the mirror. I hadn’t heard him come back.

“I can do it,” I said.

“I know you can. But you’re strangling it.” He turned me by the shoulder — gently, firmly, the way you’d reposition someone who was standing too close to the edge of something — and faced me toward him. “Hold still.”

He was close. Close enough that I could see the individual threads of his burgundy tie, the faint sheen of moisturizer along his jaw, the exact point where the dark brown of his eyes shifted to something almost black near the pupil. He smelled like cedar and clean cotton — his soap, the one he’d used since our twenties, the one I could identify in a room of a hundred men without looking.

His hands came up to my collar. Long fingers, steady, the nails trimmed short and clean. He loosened the mess I’d made of the knot, slid the tie free, and started over. I watched his hands work. I watched his throat as he swallowed. I watched his mouth — the focused set of his lower lip, the way it relaxed slightly as he found the rhythm of the fold.

I want him to keep his hands there.

The thought arrived without permission, clean and complete, like a notification I couldn’t swipe away. Not I like Wes being close to me. Not Wes is a good friend. Something specific and physical and undeniable, lodged in the same part of my brain that used to light up when Elise slid her hand down my chest — except it hadn’t lit up for Elise in a long time, and right now, with Wes’s knuckles brushing my Adam’s apple, the whole circuit board was blazing.

I swallowed hard. His eyes flicked up.

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

“You’re doing that thing where your jaw goes rigid.”

“I’m not—”

“Cam.” He tightened the knot with a precise tug, smoothed the tie flat against my chest, and let his hands rest there for a half-second longer than necessary. His palms, warm through the cotton of my shirt. His fingertips just below my collarbone. “Breathe.”

I breathed. It came in shallow and useless, all chest, no depth. Wes’s hands were still on me. He was watching my face with that careful, assessing expression — the emergency manager reading the weather — and I had the wild, lurching thought that if he could see what was actually happening inside me right now, he’d evacuate.

He dropped his hands. Stepped back. Looked at me with something I couldn’t name, something quick and shuttered, and said: “There. Camera ready.”

I turned to the mirror. The tie was perfect. Centered, dimpled, sitting exactly where it should. My face, above it, looked like a man who was about to do something he couldn’t take back.

I thought about correcting that impression and then realized I didn’t know which thing I meant.

The venue was a crime against my nervous system.

Eighteen months of planning had produced something devastating: a lakeside ceremony site framed by copper-leafed maples, the water a sheet of hammered silver behind the altar, dark-red dahlias and burgundy ranunculus massed in oxidized copper urns along the aisle. Forest-green velvet draped the chairs. Taper candles in amber glass holders lined the stone path from the lodge to the clearing. The air smelled like woodsmoke and late-season roses and the cold, mineral tang of lake water.

It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever built with another person.

I walked the rows and checked every detail — candle alignment, program placement, the angle of the floral arch so the photographer could shoot through it to the lake — and tried to feel what I was supposed to feel. Pride. Anticipation. The swelling, cinematic certainty that this was the first day of a life I’d chosen with my whole heart.

Instead I felt the gravel. Heavier now, pressing against the base of my throat. I adjusted a program that didn’t need adjusting. Straightened a candle that was already straight. Touched the petal of a dahlia and thought about how Elise had spent three hours at the floral consultation choosing between “wine” and “merlot” and I’d sat beside her and said whichever you love, babe and meant it, genuinely meant it, because I loved watching her care about things with that kind of precision. I loved her taste, her decisiveness, the way her eyes narrowed when she was weighing two options that looked identical to everyone else.

I loved everything about her except the part where I wanted to spend the rest of my life having sex with her. And somewhere in the last year, that missing piece had gone from a quiet gap to a canyon I was trying to paper over with seating charts and tasting menus and the relentless, grinding machinery of event planning.

I stopped at the altar. Two chairs. Two microphones. The officiant’s lectern with a little shelf for water glasses. Beyond it, the lake stretched out flat and gray, and the sky above it was bruised — dark at the edges, yellowish where the light broke through. Wes was right about the weather. Something was building in the west.

My phone buzzed. Elise again: The dress fits perfectly. I feel amazing. I can’t wait to see your face when I walk down the aisle.

I looked at the message and felt love. Real, genuine, marrow-deep love for this woman who’d spent two years building a future with me, who trusted me enough to walk toward me in front of everyone she cared about, who deserved a groom whose pulse spiked when he imagined her in that dress.

My pulse didn’t spike.

My pulse had spiked twenty minutes ago, in a bathroom, with another person’s hands on my collar.

I closed the message. Put the phone in my pocket. Pressed my palm flat against my sternum and felt the gravel shift.

This is normal. This is pre-wedding anxiety. Every groom feels this way. I will stand at that altar and I will see her face and it will all make sense.

I said it to myself with the same mechanical conviction I’d been using for months, and for the first time, the machinery didn’t turn over. The engine was dead. I was stranded. And the weather was coming in.

Wes found me on the lawn behind the reception tent, standing by the water with my hands in my pockets, watching the sky bruise darker by the minute. The wind had picked up — not dramatically, not dangerously, but enough to set the tent fabric snapping and the candle flames bending sideways in their glass holders.

“Here.” He held out a coffee. Paper cup, black, one sugar. He hadn’t asked how I took it. He’d known for eleven years.

I wrapped my hands around the cup and let the warmth soak into my palms. “Thanks.”

“The photographer wants you in ten. Getting-ready shots.”

“Already did getting-ready.”

“Apparently she needs candids of you looking pensively out a window. Very editorial. Very bridal-magazine.”

“I’ve been staring pensively at things all morning. She can use any of those.”

Wes almost smiled. Almost. It got to the corners of his mouth and then stopped, like he’d caught it and put it back. He stood beside me, close enough that our arms nearly touched, and looked out at the lake. The silence between us was the kind that had always been easy — eleven years of shared drives and late-night phone calls and mornings at the roastery counter had built a quiet that didn’t need filling. But today it felt different. Today it felt like the silence was holding something, and if either of us moved too quickly, it would spill.

“Weather service just upgraded the watch to a warning,” he said. “System’s moving faster than they projected. Could hit by late afternoon.”

“During the ceremony?”

“Maybe after. Maybe during. Hard to say.” He paused. “I’ve already talked to the venue coordinator about an indoor backup. She’s not thrilled, but she’s got a ballroom that’ll work.”

Of course he had. Because that was Wes — two steps ahead, already building contingencies, already solving the problem before I’d finished identifying it. He’d been doing it since the first week we met, junior year at Cornell, when he’d walked into my dorm room and found me trying to unjam a printer at two in the morning before a deadline and had said, without preamble, Move. You’re making it worse. He’d fixed the printer, made me coffee, and never once asked why I hadn’t gone to the twenty-four-hour computer lab like a normal person. He’d just shown up and handled it.

Eleven years of Wes showing up and handling it. Eleven years of Wes standing next to me in every room, at every event, through every crisis. Eleven years of feeling a specific, electric ease in his presence that I’d labeled friendship and trust and family because those were words that fit inside the life I’d constructed, and the other words — the ones that lived in the dark of the folder I wouldn’t open — did not.

“Cam.”

I looked at him. The wind was pulling at the collar of his suit jacket. The burgundy tie — Elise’s choice, matched to the dahlias — sat flat against his chest. His dark eyes were steady, reading me the way they always did, with a patience that made me feel like the most known person on earth.

“You good?” he asked again. The same question from the room. Gentler this time. Like he already knew the answer but wanted to give me a chance to change it.

I took a sip of the coffee. It was perfect. It was always perfect. The man had memorized my coffee order before we’d shared a last name’s first letter, and somehow that single fact — he knows exactly how I take it, and he’s known longer than Elise has — landed in my chest like a blow.

“Perfect,” I said.

The word tasted like metal. Like a key turning in the wrong lock. Like a lie so practiced it had almost become true, except it hadn’t, and standing here next to the man who knew me better than anyone on earth, I couldn’t even pretend anymore that the lie was working.

Wes nodded. He didn’t believe me. I could see it in the way he looked away — not dismissively, but carefully, the way you look away from someone who’s holding a wound they haven’t shown you yet. He was giving me room. He was always giving me room.

The first fat drops of rain hit the lake surface, making circles that spread and disappeared.

“We should head in,” Wes said. “Before the photographer sends a search party.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t move.

He waited. He always waited.

I drained the coffee, crushed the cup, and followed him back toward the lodge, walking half a step behind so I could watch the way he moved — confident, unhurried, a man who walked like he’d already assessed every possible threat between here and the door and decided none of them warranted changing pace.

I thought: That’s the person I look for in every room.

I thought: That’s not what grooms think about their best man.

I thought: I’m going to stand at that altar in four hours and make a promise I can’t keep.

The rain came harder. Wes held the door. I walked through it and didn’t look back at the altar, because I was afraid of what my face would do if I saw it one more time — all those beautiful flowers, all that careful planning, all that borrowed certainty — and felt nothing but the gravel in my chest and the ghost of warm hands smoothing a tie against my collarbone.

Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.

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The Skylight — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Cam and Wes’s wedding night at Hemlock Lodge. The skylight. The burgundy tie. One year of learning each other’s bodies, and one night to prove that the man who couldn’t name what he wanted has become the man who takes it. Restraints, starlight, and the kind of devotion that wrecks you.

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