“Thank you,” I said, pulling up the app on my phone to tip him as I opened the door. “If you just pop the trunk, I can grab the bags.”
“Are you sure?”
The words were barely out of the driver’s mouth before I heard the distinct squeal of my best friend, and I turned, watching a flailing Morgan fly down the stairs and sprint toward the car.
I smiled — genuinely — for the first time.
“I’m sure,” I said, shaking my head at her. “Trust me, I’m about to have a dozen hands waiting to help.”
The driver smiled at me as I let myself out of the backseat, and as soon as I did, Morgan crashed into me, flinging her arms around my neck.
“YOU’RE HERE! YOU’RE HERE!”
I chuckled. “I am.”
She pulled back, the freckles on her cheeks more pronounced than they had been when we were kids. She had the biggest smile in the world, one that took up her entire face and boasted two, deep dimples — one on each cheek. Her chestnut hair that used to fall all the way to the middle of her back was in a short pixie cut now, one that accented the beautiful heart-shape of her face, and she wore glasses at least three times too big for said-face.
Somehow, they made her look even more adorable.
“I can’t believe you’re here — back in Bridgechester! I thought I’d never see the day!”
Mr. and Mrs. Wagner were on the porch behind her, smiling down at me and waiting for their turn at hugs as Harry grabbed my bags out of the trunk of the Uber, tapping it once it was closed to set the driver on his way. I thanked Harry as he passed by us with my luggage in tow, and Morgan looped her arm through mine, dragging me up the stairs to the porch.
“Jasmine, sweetie,” Amanda — her mom — said first, wrapping me in a gentle hug. She was roughly the size of a seventh grader, with the same chestnut hair as her daughter and the same wide smile. “Welcome home.”
My chest pinched at the sentiment — home.
I’d never felt like I’d really had one, but the Wagner’s was about as close as it got.
“Ayuh, welcome back,” Morgan’s dad said next, wrapping me in a crushing hug that was a stark contrast from the one his wife had given me. “It’s about damn time, kid.”
Robert Wagner was the tallest of the family, a shocking six-foot five, with thick golden hair that was always styled to perfection and the same superhero chin I used to tease his son about when we were younger. Morgan got her kind, hazel eyes from Mr. Wagner, and her athletic ability, too.
I chuckled in his arms, squeezing him once more before we released. “Thank you. It’s good to be back.”
That last part was a lie, but I was good at faking it.
“Harry will take your things up to the Hibiscus Suite,” Mrs. Wagner said. I knew exactly which guest room she was talking about, the one on the third floor that had a sweeping view of the lake.
And yes, they did actually name their guest rooms — that’s how many there were.
“I’m making my famous lobster rolls tonight,” Mr. Wagner added as we made our way inside, and I chuckled at the way he pronounced it — lobstah. Robert was born and raised in Boston, and his accent never let us forget it.
Seven years on the west coast had all but stolen my own accent, which was slight, anyway, seeing as how I spent most of the time in New Hampshire as opposed to the city. But Morgan had developed a bit of her own from her time in college at BU, and hearing the Wagners made me miss what little accent I’d had for the first time.
“Just got the water boiling. Should be about an hour or so, give you some time to wash up and settle in.”
“And tell me all about Jacob,” Morgan added, waggling her eyebrows.
I snickered, head spinning already, as it often did at the Wagners. They were a house full of extroverted entertainers, and this was what they lived and breathed for — having guests.
“Is it just the four of us tonight?” I asked, trying to sound coy, like I was asking after the other members of the bridal party more than anything else.
“Yep! Everyone else gets in tomorrow, and even when they get here, most of them are staying in Boston. They want to explore the city while they’re here. So, it’ll just be us tonight,” Morgan said, bopping alongside me. “Well, and Ty, of course. If he ever leaves his office,” she added with a roll of her eyes and a smirk.
My stomach fell to the floor, blood draining from my face at just the mention of his name. It was like a flash of memory from a dream long ago, the way his smile blurred my vision like a lightning bolt in that moment. I could see him so clearly, as if he was already there in the foyer with us.
I could feel his hands in my hair, pulling me closer…
I forced a smile, shoving that memory away as fast as it had come, but didn’t offer a word otherwise.
“Come on, let’s go sit by the pool,” Morgan said when her parents excused themselves back to the kitchen. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
My smalt blue eyes stared back at me in the mirror of my private bathroom hours later, lined in coal and lashes painted black. The tan I’d been working on made the blue even brighter and more striking. They had always been my favorite feature, and I stared at them, through them, wondering why the strong woman I had become was shaking like a scared little girl.
I knew, of course — but I didn’t want to admit it.
I sighed, running my fingers through my bright locks to situate them the way I wanted over my shoulders. My hair was long and straight, the roots darker than the bleached strands and tips. I’d put on just a touch of makeup — enough to cover the dark circles under my eyes, but not so much that it would look like I tried. And though I knew dinner with just the Wagner family would be casual, I still put on a fresh pair of white jeans and my favorite dusty blue top, one that tied in the front and showed just a tiny sliver of my stomach. I’d had a board-like, athletic build my entire life, and where I used to pray for boobs and hips and an ass that wasn’t flat as a shelf, I’d come into my figure over the last several years, appreciating it for what it was.
With one last turn and glance at my outfit, I sighed, shutting off the bathroom light and making my way downstairs to face the music.
I had to get it over with at some point.
Morgan and her parents were in the kitchen, her dad putting the final touches on dinner while she and her mom sat at the kitchen island, each with a glass of red wine in hand. As soon as I joined them, Morgan poured one for me, too.
“How long’s it been since you had a proper lobster roll, Jasmine?” Robert asked.
“Too long.”
“I’d say,” Amanda chimed in. “By the way, what’s with your accent? You turning valley girl on us now?”
I chuckled. “I live in Oakland, not LA. And just because I’ve learned to pronounce my r’s doesn’t make me any less of a New England girl.”
“A New England girl would be back to visit more than one time in seven years,” a deep voice said, and I closed my eyes, my entire body tensing at the sound.
Tyler strode into the kitchen with the same brooding arrogance he’d always had, leaning against the refrigerator and crossing his arms as he took in the sight of me. I avoided his eyes for as long as I could, but when I finally looked up, he was staring right back at me in the most unapologetic way. His gaze even dropped slightly, taking in my full frame, and he cocked a brow in appreciation before a smirk found his stupid, full lips.
“Nah, you’re a leaf peeper now.”
Morgan said his name in a chastising tone, but it earned a chuckle from his father.
I just narrowed my eyes, doing everything in my power not to notice how tall he’d grown, how his toned and tanned arms crossed over his built chest, how his russet brown hair was still a bit long and boyish, making him look so much like the boy I left behind that I nearly doubled over at the sight.
“It’s summer,” I pointed out. “If I was a leaf peeper, I’d be here in October.”
; “I’m just saying, you can’t call yourself a New England girl when you talk and look like that,” he said, eyeing me. “And when you haven’t set foot in New Hampshire in almost a decade.”
“I can call myself whatever I damn well please.”
He surged forward with a challenge in his eyes, leaning over the kitchen island until his stupid grin was right in my face. I leaned back in the same instant.
“Hmm… let’s test it. How do you pronounce the scenic highway all the leaf peepers like yourself drive through every fall?”
I crossed my arms. “Kancamagus,” I answered, putting emphasis on the mog. “But most of us don’t pronounce it at all, since we just refer to it as The Kanc.”
Tyler smirked, leaning in a little closer, his dark eyes fixed on mine like he saw every single thing I was trying to hide. “Now, say, ‘wicked.’”
I flipped him off, and the entire family laughed, Robert pointing the wooden spoon covered in lobster salad at me. “I always loved that you had moxie, kid.”
Tyler licked his bottom lip, eyes roaming over me for longer than necessary before he shoved back from the island again, dipping into the fridge and grabbing a Sam Adams Summer Ale and popping the top off on the edge of the kitchen counter. That earned him a slap on the wrist from his mother, but he just winked at me before putting the bottle to his lips and taking a long, slow pull.
I flushed, tearing my eyes from his just as Robert said it was time to eat.
I managed to calm down during dinner, mostly thanks to Amanda and Morgan filling any empty space in the conversation. Every now and then, one of them would ask me something, like how California was (beautiful as always), how work was (wonderful, the podcast is growing more and more every day), or, my favorite, how Jacob and I met (at a networking event for local influencers, he was the most charming man I’d ever met — and I made sure to say that last part loud and proud).
But, for the most part, the conversation hinged on the upcoming wedding.
The wedding that would take place on the Cape two weeks from today.
It should have surprised all of us when Morgan said she was marrying a guy she’d dated less than a year, and in two weeks, nonetheless. But, the fact that no one in this family batted an eye is a testament to how well we knew our girl. She had always been impulsive, and not in the way that she’d buy a pair of three-hundred-dollar shoes on a whim. No, for Morgan, it was always the big things — huge changes that she’d make up her mind about overnight and no one could ever talk her out of it.
She cut off all her hair without ever looking back. She changed majors her senior year of college, just because she felt in her gut that it was the right thing to do. She got her first tattoo at a basement party in Boston and bought a horse she kept at a stable outside of town without ever having ridden one in her life.
It was as if she mulled on what her next move would be constantly, and once she decided, that was it. There was no other option.
So, when she met Oliver Bradford during her girls’ trip to the Cape last summer and told me with the utmost confidence that she’d be marrying him before her twenty-sixth birthday, I didn’t doubt it for a second. And when she called me last week to tell me he’d proposed, it didn’t surprise me at all that she wanted to get married on June twentieth.
Four days before her birthday.
I didn’t fight her on it, didn’t try to talk her into waiting or taking her time to plan. I knew my best friend well enough to know there was no use in even trying.
So, instead, I hopped a flight.
And I came back to the town I swore I never would.
After dinner, we all gathered in the backyard around their stone fire pit, and Morgan handed out binders about an inch thick with Wagner/Bradford Wedding Itinerary printed in perfect script on the cover.
“Christ, sis,” Tyler said, shaking his head as he turned the binder over in one hand, inspecting.
“Like you expected anything less from me,” she teased back. Tyler murmured something under his breath, and she bonked him on the head with her own binder before taking a seat next to him.
He was directly across from where I sat, and his eyes lingered on me over the flames from the fire before they fell to the binder in his lap.
“So, I know this is extra,” she admitted as we all flipped through the binder. There was a schedule of events for every single day leading up to the wedding, and an even more in-depth schedule for the day of. “But, I’ve been working with the wedding planner all week to get this set up. And we still have a LOT to do.” She shrugged. “Turns out it’s kind of hard to plan a wedding in two weeks.”
“You don’t say,” her mom mused.
Morgan ignored the jab, and I smiled as she ran through everything we’d be doing over the next fourteen days. When she stopped to take a breath somewhere around the day we’d be doing centerpiece design, I raised my hand like I was in class.
“Yes, Jazzy?”
“Um… I will have time to work during all of this, right? I’ve got two episodes to edit for And All That Jazz, and I’m doing a guest appearance on another big podcast based in New York.”
“Oh, absolutely. Anything not on here is totally free time.”
She answered so confidently, but when I looked at all the time that was planned out, I struggled to find where the off time was.
“I’m sure your fans will survive if you go a week or two without an episode,” Tyler said, the first words he’d spoken directly to me since before dinner.
I didn’t bother looking at him, just licked my thumb and flipped to the next page in the binder. “At least my fans aren’t all junior high girls.”
Morgan laughed at that.
“Sounds like someone’s jealous of my four-million YouTube subscribers,” he taunted back.
I met his gaze then. “Do they count if they’re under the age of eighteen?”
Tyler’s eyes burned fierce over the fire, but I held my cocky smirk as best I could.
Tyler was a financial advisor — following his father’s footsteps just like we always knew he would. He’d had a fascination with money and investing ever since I first met him. But, where his dad made his fortune by working with the affluent in New England, Tyler was making a name for himself in more of the everyday common people realm. He’d started a YouTube channel in college, around the same time that I’d started my podcast, and in our own respects, we’d both taken off.
Of course, my podcast grew from content.
His channel grew because he quickly became known online as The Hot Money Guy.
It started slowly, with him dressed in a suit in his dim-lit office rattling off advice on budgeting and managing credit card debt. But the more videos he did, the more the comments started shifting from should I do a Roth IRA or a Traditional IRA to Oh my God, this guy is so hot I don’t even care that I understand nothing he’s talking about.
More and more, his videos got attention from the female crowd, and his videos got shared, and word spread that there was a hot money guy on YouTube taking the financial world by storm. He was invited to speak on other noteworthy channels, like one owned by a famous housewife from a reality TV show in the early 2000s, and though I was sure he really did help a lot of people struggling with finances, he was mostly famous for being sexy and rich — a double whammy.
To his credit, he didn’t fight the name. In fact, he embraced it, changing the name of his channel to The Hot Money Guy and even doing some episodes shirtless or while working out.
Not that I watched any, of course.
“I love that you two still bicker,” Morgan said fondly, her eyes wide as she looked from her brother to me. “I swear, it feels like high school, the three of us being together again. The Wagner Kids — Plus One.”
Tyler and I shared a somber look then, because we hadn’t been The Wagner Kids — Plus One since the night he and I crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed.
Since he used me, then rejected me, and I lef
t, and that was the end of that.
I cleared my throat, drawing Morgan’s attention back to the schedule by asking a question about flowers, and she was sufficiently distracted.
Somewhere around page six, I started to lose focus, my mind racing with how it felt to talk to Tyler after all these years. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but maybe that was because I never expected to ever see him again — period. And now, I couldn’t tell if he was teasing me the way he used to when we were younger, or if he hated me.
If he did, I had no idea why.
It was him who ignored me. It was him who said what happened between us was a mistake.
It was him who broke my heart.
He didn’t have a right to be pissed at me, and for some reason, it really bothered me that he seemed to think the opposite.
It was me who should hate him forever, not the other way around.
“… the cake tasting, which I’m not even sure I want a cake. I mean, yes, it’s tradition, but I love donuts. What if we did a donut truck, instead?” She gasped, snapping her fingers. “Could we do apple cider donuts?! I know that’s a fall thing but, I mean, it is a wedding. I think exceptions could be made. Oh,” Morgan continued, talking just as fast as she always had when we were growing up. “And we’ll head down to the Cape that Monday before the wedding, so we’ll have to wrap some of this up there… we can talk about who takes what regarding decorations and such. Oh, my God!”
Her sudden exclamation made me jump.
“Ty, is Azra flying in tomorrow?”
Morgan’s excitement at the mention of whoever the hell Azra was might as well have been a living, breathing thing for how it wafted off of her.
Tyler cleared his throat. “Um, not tomorrow. She’s got two back-to-back shoots this week, and a philanthropy event next weekend. I think she’s going to meet us on the Cape.”
Morgan pouted. “Aw, I was really hoping she’d be here for the bachelor and bachelorette party.”
Tyler swallowed, avoiding everyone’s eyes. “Sorry.”
“Well, it’ll make getting down to the Cape even more exciting,” Morgan decided. Then, she reached toward me with spirit fingers dancing. “Oh my God, Jaz. You will love Azra. She’s so much fun.”
Ritual: A New Adult College Romance (Palm South University Book 5) Page 29