Don’t trust someone else’s tradition, I thought, feeling my body work its way higher, closer. Trust me. Trust us to find our own path.

Need and pleasure wrestled their way down my spine, hot and urgent. My fingers dug into her hips, shoving her roughly back and forth over me until I could feel it right there, right at the edge, and her whisper, I love watching you come, pushed me over the edge, too.

I came into her with a rough groan, eyes clinging desperately to hers.

“See?” she whispered, face damp with sweat when she pressed it to my neck. “I needed this. Tomorrow is a formality. Right now it feels like we just got married.”

“Tomorrow has been a formality ever since you gave me a hand job at a gross student party.”

Above me, she giggled.

Hanna was gone when I woke up, and her quickly scribbled note left on my pillow—See you at two!—made me laugh out loud in the empty room.

My fiancée: what a goddamn romantic.

The morning was packed with a groomsmen breakfast; greeting guests checking into the hotel; my mother and sisters constantly finding me to double-check seating details, delivery instructions, and musician requests. Sensing my need to just take a fucking shower and get ready for my wedding, Jensen swooped in, taking them to find the Command Center (Hanna’s mother, Helena), who was more than happy to delegate jobs all damn day.

A hot shower, a good clean shave, and three cups of coffee later, I heard a knock at my hotel room door. A part of me wondered if it might be Hanna, but realized that could only be possible if she had escaped her sister, Liv; her mother; George; and both Chloe and Sara. Aka “the Pride,” as Jensen liked to call them, as if they were a pack of lions. If she had somehow managed all that, there would be bodies somewhere, and seeing me before the wedding would be the least of our worries.

“It’s me,” I heard my nearly-brother-in-law say.

I let Jensen into my suite. He was already dressed, wearing the standard tux, and looking pretty damn great. I’d been with him all day yesterday, but somehow in the packed frenzy of the rehearsal schedule, I hadn’t registered that he’d probably lost thirty pounds since I’d last seen him.

“You been working out? You look good, man.”

“You’re marrying my sister,” he said, stepping past me. “Please don’t hit on me today.”

Laughing, I turned back to the mirror to tie my bow tie.

“Marrying,” he repeated, letting out a low whistle.

“I know.”

She was going to be my wife. I would get to introduce her that way.

This is my wife.

I couldn’t stop rolling the word around in my head. Wife. It felt good. It felt substantial. It made me want to climb over her, say it over and over again into her ear, tattooing it in her thoughts.

You’re my wife, Plum.

Jensen jerked me from this train of thought when he clapped a hand over my shoulder. “Married, Will.”

I looked over at him, repeating with a curious smile, “I know, Jensen.”

“To my little sister.” His eyes narrowed as he pointed a mildly threatening finger at me. “That’s weird, right?”

We’d had this conversation one other time: over dinner, after Jensen had walked in on us—me beneath the counter, Hanna bent over it with the skirt of her old prom dress shoved above her waist while I went down on her. Luckily he didn’t see much . . . but he certainly saw enough to deduce what was going on. In true Hanna fashion, she kept on the dress, put on a pair of sneakers, and made us take her out to pho to smooth over the potential weirdness. Jensen had been surprisingly unfazed until the middle of the meal when he dropped his chopsticks with a tiny clack against his bowl and announced, “Holy shit. You’re going to be my brother.”

Hanna and I both knew we would be married eventually, but hadn’t been quite ready then. At the time, we’d laughed. We were certainly ready now.

Jensen walked over to one of the leather chairs near the window and sat down. “Did you ever imagine this day? The day of your wedding, you’re getting ready in here with me, she’s down the hall getting ready with the Pride?”

I shrugged. “I figured I would find the woman for me, or I wouldn’t. I don’t think I gave it much thought.” I lifted my chin, inspecting my handiwork in the reflection. “Now it seems impossible that in some alternate universe I don’t meet up with Hanna. What if she never called me? What if I’d never shown up to run that morning?” Turning to face him, I blinked. “God, that’s horrifying.”

He could have teased me for this rare sentimental view, but didn’t. “I can assure you this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I suggested she call you to hang out,” he said, running a finger over an eyebrow. “But here we are. The next time you see her, she’s going to be walking down that aisle.”

I glanced over at him, having wondered on and off for the past few days how this event felt for him. Hanna and I would be married in the same private garden where Jensen had married his college sweetheart. And where Hanna’s older sister, Liv, had married her husband, Rob. Unfortunately, Jensen’s marriage to his girlfriend of nine years had lasted only four months.

Jensen broke into my thoughts before I could think of what to say. “Are you imagining how it’s going to go down?” he asked.

“Of course. I’m wondering if she’ll trip on her way down the aisle or stop mid-journey to hug someone she hasn’t seen in years. Hanna always surprises me.”

“Or if she’ll give up walking altogether and just sprint toward you.” He laughed quietly. “And it will never stop being weird that you call her Hanna.”

“I can’t imagine calling her Ziggy,” I admitted, and then shivered. “That feels pervy.”

“Because it is,” he said. “You were seventeen when she was ten. When my little sister was ten, you were sleeping with the mother of one of your bandmates.”

I shot him a disgusted look. “Are you trying to make me feel gross?”

“Yeah.” He laughed, standing to clap me on the shoulder again just as Bennett and Max pummeled my hotel room door.

Two

Hanna

I stepped back, staring at myself in the mirror.

“That’s . . . a lot of white,” I mumbled, swiping at the skirt of my dress. Behind me, Mom and Liv gasped emotionally.