Nate

I hate wedding days. I mean, I get that it's all part of my job, but I'm always stressed. Mom is like a whirlwind of scheduling with a fake smile, and I have to deal with whatever photography students need a few hours in the field for their coursework as my assistants.

I flip the top closed on my portable case of lenses and equipment that I'll need for the reception and lean against the back of the open van. The ceremony finished up right on time, and the toasts will happen any second. People like pictures of that crap, even though no one can look good fake smiling for as long as some of these toasts go on for.

"Shitty, shit, shit, shit, shit." Brooke does this weird high-heeled baby-step jog toward me while fanning her face like she's about to cry.

"Problem?" I ask, trying not to smile. If her emergencies are like Mom's, then someone forgot a safety pin or extra Advil.

"No microphone for the toast. I'm freaking out. Your mom is pissed. It was on my list, Nate." She grabs my lapels with wide, desperate eyes. "I was supposed to make sure the music guys got here early and have a microphone!"

I pry her hands from my lapels. "Brooke. Please. Breathe."

"I caaaan't." She sucks in as she says the words sounding like a cross between a mule and a camel.

Now I am laughing. "It's fine."

I dig around in Xavier's van because I know he's got something like that in here. I run into a few black boxes and odd scraps of fabric he used to use for street shows, and then I see the small cube of a speaker.

"Here." I hold the speaker out and set it on the edge. "He even has one of those tiny microphones. It's all good."

She's staring at the box with this dumb-founded look on her face. "I don't... How is this here?"

"Xavier collects crap that makes him look cool. Something about this small speaker and microphone makes him look cool. Or did before he got bigger-headed and famous." I glance down at the box. "Apparently."

"Does it work?" She's finally starting to sound hopeful as she begins to wrap the cord around the speaker.

"Probably. He used to do his magic show on the sidewalks instead of at the Aladdin."

"Still awesome he's your brother." She smiles like he's some kind of big deal.

"My brother is a douche." I slide my camera strap over my head and follow her back to the reception.

Brooke gives me an odd look over my comment, but jerks, touches her earpiece and takes off again. I feel like I sort of paid Brooke back for the other morning without actually having to apologize.

Win.

Two hours later Brooke is hobbling in her heels with an armload of Mom's "emergency bridal preparedness" kit.

"How you holding up?" I ask as I wrap up the last lens and set it in the case.

"My feet. Dying. I've never done so much running in heels. Ever."

I flick my cigarette and sit on the back of the van. "Gimme a foot. Quick before the boss calls you again."

Her eyes narrow. "I don't think we're at that point in our friendship, Nate. The one where you get to touch my smelly feet."

I snort. "You had your finger in my mouth brushing my teeth. I'm pretty sure feet are okay. Besides. I've been told I'm pretty good at this."

She slowly sets down the pink boxes of Mom's random emergency items and sits on the van's seat. "Only because I'm desperate."

I slip off her shoe and take another drag while she waves the smoke away with a hand.

"Smoking keeps me busy. I don't want to hear it."

The first thing I do when I pull her foot out is give her heel a nice squeeze.

"Ohh..." she moans. "Holy shit..."

I slide my fingers up the arch of her foot and she moans again. "I'm not getting you off, Brooke."

"This is better right now. Trust me." She leans her head back and closes her eyes.

Brooke looks surprisingly...womanlike, shedding some of that bubbly girl thing she has going on. I watch her for another second before shifting my gaze. Weird to watch her like that. It's Brooke.

"Right now I wouldn't even care if you were some kind of axe murderer, as long as you kept rubbing."

I grab her other foot and do the same thing, starting with her heel, up the high arch of her foot and to her small toes. "You have really tiny feet."

"Uh...huh..." she sighs. "Always can find shoes on sale."

She jumps so fast, I nearly lose my cigarette.

"Boss calling?" I ask, pointing to her ear.

"Yes. If it weren't for the freebies, I'd quit after today." She's teasing, I can tell by her smile, but I also totally get it.

I'm not sure what prompts me to do it, but as she walking away I call to her. "Hey, I always go through a few of the photos after a wedding. Wanna join me?"

She walks backwards a few steps. "If you ditch the cigarettes."

I give her a salute and when I turn back around, I can't remember the last time I got to share my new pictures with someone right away. Not since...yeah...Viv. Back when we were friends and she wasn't having sex with either me or my best friend. Just when I forget her, she comes screaming back into my brain. I light up another cigarette, and pull in a long drag. I hate these damn things.

***

Like a champ, Brooke offered to get us a few pounds of Taco Bell while I upload wedding photos. I have a few ideas on some of the beginning shots, and sometimes it's better to play with them while the shoot is still fresh.

While the pictures load I hop on Facebook to check in with the friends I still have. Like a moron I go to Viv's page only to see her and Shane grinning like idiots while on the Staten Island Ferry. This is now her profile picture. It still feels like I can't breathe when I see them together. Maybe Tanner and Kade are up to something interesting. I leave Viv's page before scrolling through all her status updates because I do have some measure of self-control, well, and self-preservation.

Kade and Tanner's page is peppered with save the owls and whales and our local bookstore... Those two make a living out of causes. It generally makes me feel like a slacker, but at least Kade's profile picture isn't a photo of him and Tanner making out like Tanner's normally is. They were in my old New York neighborhood last week, and it sucks I wasn't there to see them. With texting and Facebook I actually can't remember the last time we talked. I click on their photo album of the weekend and freeze when I see a picture of them with Viv and Shane. Of course they'd hang out. I mean, we've all known each other forever. We moved to New York together after high school, it's just-

"Why are all the hot guys gay?" Brooke flops next to me and my heart leaps out of my chest.

"Crap, Brooke. Make some noise." I readjust myself in the chair as I slow my heart down. Her eyes have that sort of deer-in-the-headlights look because I scared her and there's something about her short, compactness that's kind of... She's just adorable as hell.

Brooke squints and her panicked look fades. She peers behind me at the pictures on the screen.

"Are all your friends this hot? I mean the two guys are together, and the other couple looks like they were picked off a magazine ad."

My heart starts pounding and my throat goes dry. "Um... that's Viv. The girl I told you about Friday morning."

"Oh." Her mouth opens. Then closes. Then opens again. "Well, crap. I didn't mean to bring that up."

I shrug, speed-clicking from Facebook to Photoshop. "I didn't mean to bring that up on Friday. But, thanks for helping me."

She spins to face me and then relaxes. "That was no biggie. I'm pretty good at preparing for anything." She stops, tilting her neck slightly to the side. "But don't base that on today. Thank you for that. I even got a damn fine foot rub. I may take you up on one of those after every wedding."

I laugh, which feels weird considering my whole body was tense with Viv. "I don't know about that. My hands stunk of tiny sweaty feet all the way back to my place."

"I think that was your cigarette." She fake grimaces and shoves over some nacho thing that's so big it's in an enormous tray. "Eat."

I grab a loaded chip and shove it in my mouth, but it's just Brooke so I try to talk through it anyway. "So...How was your first wedding? Besides the microphone mishap."

She chuckles. "The makeup girl, the one who I think has been making eyes at you..." Brooke leans in bumping my shoulder with her knuckles because she may have brought it up two or fifty times throughout the day. "She offered me a free makeover and said she has more Clinique and MAC freebies than she knows what to do with. The flower people dropped me a few coupons, which I'm sure will come in handy at some point. I got two free meals from the restaurant that catered the event, a massage from your mom as a thank you, and one of your photographer helpers offered me a hand job."

"Wow." I don't even react to Brooke anymore. "Are you going to take him up on it?"

"No, but..." she trails off.

I skim over photos until I'm at the "candid" shots of the couple after the ceremony, which is where I wanted to work first.

"But?" I prompt because nearly everything Brooke says is entertaining.

"I got a date with one of the groomsmen. Second year law student at UNLV and totally future husband of Brooke material."

I'm immediately suspicious. Who picks up a girl at a wedding unless he just wants to get laid? "So, do you have your first date location planned yet?"

"Yes I do." She smiles wide. "I'm going to step it up a notch because I have the free meal thing, so we thought it might be fun."

"Of course he did." I shake my head. This guy is probably an asshole. I'll have to check him out at some point. "He gets a free meal with a pretty girl."

She stops chewing and looks at me with the oddest expression.

"What?"

A trace of vulnerability passes over her face and it makes me uncomfortable because Brooke is just...Brooke and forward. "You think I'm pretty?"

I shrug. "Not my type, but of course you're pretty."

"Yeah. Your type has a boyfriend." And the moment the words are out, she claps her hands over her mouth before slowly pulling it away. "Wow, Bitchy Brooke moment. Sorry."

I wave her off because I can't talk about this with her. "It's fine, but promise me something."

"What's that?"

"Try... Just try to let yourself loosen up on your levels of dating thing. And seriously, don't have sex on date number three unless you're dying for it. Okay?"

"And if I'm dying for it on date one?" she asks with a smirk.

"Go for it." I pause when I find the close-up shots of the couple. I really don't want to think about Brooke screwing some guy. I must feel more protective of her than I thought.

"Fine. But..." She bumps my arm with her elbow. "I think you should ask out makeup girl."

"I'm pretty sure Celeste has a boyfriend." Celeste has been one of the regulars that Mom contracts with since...since I can remember. Most of the people who help at the wedding don't work directly for Mom, they're contract-labor for specific tasks. Like Celeste nearly always does the makeup when the bride asks Mom to find someone. Also, her boyfriend is an asshole, so I'm probably not her type.

"Not anymore," Brooke whispers. "The catering guy saw them arguing before a wedding at Caesars Palace two weeks ago and his girlfriend works with Celeste's boyfriend at the Bellagio, and apparently it's over."

I stop and shove a nacho in my mouth. "You're almost as busy as a little old cat lady, aren't you?"

Brooke shrugs unapologetically. "She's got that long dark hair you seem to like so much, but I want you to try my one, two, three dating thing because it totally works."

"Fair enough." I start touching up the shiny spots on the groom's forehead. It was wicked hot for an outdoor wedding today.

"You're giving in that easy?" she asks.

"I'll probably take Celeste out on five level-one dates," I tease. "Unless she's annoying and doesn't make it past the first one, or we're both dying to get laid before we eat." I wink but with the way she doesn't flinch, I can tell she's going to ignore my joke.

"Will you be needing me to call you with an 'emergency photo session?'"

"Well, that's your point of date one, right? Something easy and light so I don't need to be rescued?"

"Exactly." There's still enough tease in her voice that I know she gets how scheduled she is and that it's not normal. Not that I think she has any idea of changing that about herself.

She takes a bite that's half the size of her burrito, and I figure it gives me license to also make a pig out of myself and I shove in another loaded chip.

"How are you skinny?" I point to her mound of Taco Bell.

"Woo.. out," she tries to say through a mouthful of food.

"What?"

She chomps a few more times, swallows, and sucks down half her soda. "I work out. Last week was Jillian Michaels, this week is P90X and next week will be that Insanity workout. After that I found this really cool schedule on runner training, but I also have two Pinterest boards of workouts, and I thought it might be fun to try some of those for a week. I just need to get some kind of rating system figured so I know which ones to use later and which ones can be erased."

"You plan this?" I ask, though I really shouldn't be surprised.

"Of course, don't you?"

"I plan as little as possible, but I do a little Tae Kwon Do on the weekends, like since I was a kid. Aside from that an occasional run or bike ride followed by push-ups and sit-ups, usually in front of the TV...whenever I feel like it."

"Whenever...right." She takes another impossible big bite. "Sorry. I've been staring at food all day but never had time to eat. I'm starving."

I have no idea why she's apologizing for eating, but whatever.

I'm still tweaking the photo because the couple always wants to see a handful of the pictures right away, and I never send them out untouched.

"Oh..." Brooke's hands go to her chest.

"What?"

"That gorgeous moment in time!" Her finger presses against my computer screen. "So, so perfect."

I push it away. "That is not a perfect moment in time."

"But look at how he's looking at her..." Brooke pleads still staring at the photo. "With their foreheads together and smiling shyly with her beautiful hair and dress and...just...wow..."

"They're both tired and over-stressed. The groom was sweating so hard that all I've been doing since pulling this picture up is erasing the beads of moisture from his forehead. He's in a suit he probably didn't pick and she tugged on her dress for half the shoot. She's wearing shoes that are a size too small for reasons I didn't understand, and I told them how to pose. I have about sixty pictures of variations on this pose, and the only reason they look happy is because I directed them to it. This is smokescreens and bullshit."

She chokes. "You are so completely unromantic that you can't see this for the great moment of after-ceremony bliss this is."

"Bliss is waking up next to a gorgeous girl who didn't bother to get dressed after sex and fell asleep next to you because she trusts you that much. It's the moment where you can watch her, and the moment when her eyes open and she smiles because she's thinking her version of your thoughts. The thought that simply waking up next to someone you love is a small miracle in itself."

Brooke's eyes are wide, and I swear she dabs at the edges of her eyes like she's crying. "Okay." She sniffs. "You are romantic. Fine. Now eat something because if all this food disappears and all you've eaten are a few chips, I might die."

"Fair enough."

Funny that I didn't expect my best friend in Las Vegas to be a girl, but after the past couple weeks, that's exactly what's happened.