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“Keep it to yourselves all you want. Marriages are public record, so we’ll know—”
“Alicia, I can see that you’re worried about Bash.” Ava’s soft voice cut through my future mother-in-law’s smug comment. I could’ve kissed her. “We need to focus on the important parts, though. He and Em have found love and in today’s dating landscape, that’s an incredible thing.” She gave me a knowing look. “Can we be happy for them and let their relationship play out how they want it to?”
Alicia opened her mouth, and I braced myself, knowing it wouldn’t be good. Before she could actually answer, Ava adopted even more of her nanny voice and clasped her hands. “Oh, the guys are back. Who’s ready for s’mores?”
“S’mores?” Alicia muttered, slightly dazed, as if she didn’t know what Ava had just done to her, but she knew she couldn’t come back from it.
“S’mores?” my dad repeated. “I’ll get the fire going.”
He clasped Bash and Mac on the shoulder, sandwiching himself between them. “The roasting sticks are in the shed.”
“This piece looks good.”
“Put it on top.”
Bash added a log to Mac’s growing pile of wood—we had already exhausted all the jokes we could think of two minutes into collecting branches for the fire.
Bash found another decent-sized piece and added it to the stack.
I walked a few steps behind them, wondering how to bring up the topic of legal marriage. In an ideal world, the three of us could lawfully wed each other and carry on with our lives. But this wasn’t an ideal world and our love was largely frowned upon if the articles and our parents’ reactions were any indication.
“What’s on your mind, Pink?”
Mac’s gray-green eyes were grayer in today’s cloudy weather, especially now that the sun was going down. It was supposed to be hot weather at home, but we were so far north, the weather was drastically cooler. The break from the heat was nice, but the lake house wasn’t providing me with any sense of relief. Not like it used to.
Bash had stopped walking and the two of them were watching me. Waiting for me to speak. But I didn’t want to talk. It was a conversation we’d have to have eventually, but I wasn’t sure if feelings would be involved and how those feelings would play out.
Glancing around to make sure no one had followed us as we gathered firewood, I sat on a stump and dropped my head in my hands.
“Woah, what’s wrong, Em?” Bash squatted next to me, his hand resting on my knee.
“Our moms—”
The concern on his face switched to anger without warning. “What did they do?”
“They brought up a really good question.”
“Which was?” Mac asked, shifting the wood to the side to see us better.
“Which of the two of us are going to legally get married? If any?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Mac admitted.
“Me either.”
“I have,” Bash said softly.
Both of us whipped our heads toward him, waiting for him to elaborate. He smiled at me and then at Mac. And I knew.
“You think I should marry Mac?”
He nodded.
“How’s that fair to you?”
“It’s not about fair.” He took the bundle of sticks and logs from Mac and lowered them to the ground. Pulling me to my feet, he grabbed our hands, and we stood in a small circle.
“I trust both of you with my life. I know that we’re end game. And that’s exactly what I want in life. But—”
