The Maid of Honor and the Two Groomsmen No One Seated Beside Her novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Mirror

Colt's POV

I came off the pole at five with creosote on my forearms and a sunburn through my shirt.

The first thing I did in the truck was check my phone.

She had sent me a picture of her closet door.

It was a full-length mirror, framed in white wood, fastened to the front of the closet in her bedroom.

Under it she had written: I'm home. Jesse has a night class. Come take your shower here.

I drove the whole way across Nashville without turning the radio on.

She opened the door in a gray T-shirt with her hair up in a clip and her reading glasses on her head.

She looked at me the way she looked at everything, directly, with her chin a little up.

Brown eyes.

A gap in her front teeth.

I'd been looking at that gap for four days.

"You smell like a telephone pole," Lacey said.

"I climbed one."

"Is that right?"

"That's Jesse's line," I said.

"I know," she said, and took my hand, and walked me down the hall.

I'm twenty-four years old.

I have been the second one in every room I've walked into since I was seven.

My cousin was born first, and he got the bike and the truck and the girl and the toast.

I was the one standing behind him in the photos with a ball cap on.

Jesse came later, and everybody petted him because he was small, and by the time he got big he'd learned to blush on cue.

I got a lot of the thing people say when they mean a different thing.

Steady, they said. Dependable.

I'd come in second in the lineman rodeo two years running, by a hair, in front of my own father.

I was the guy you called when the lights went out.

I wasn't the guy you called for fun.

So I had spent four days with this woman, who looked at me like I was both, and I didn't know where to put it.

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