Page 17 of Shameless With Him

Chapter 4

Caleb

“Wait. What?”I asked as I leaned forward across the café table. I pushed the coffee from beside my elbow so I wouldn’t spill it and, thankfully, missed the danish when I knocked my elbow into the small plate.

We were in a place called Taboo, that wasn’t all that taboo from the outside. Maybe the owner was taboo, but I didn’t know. Instead, it had really fucking good coffee and pastries…and cinnamon rolls. With that really thick frosting and the way they made the edges just perfect. I was a fan of the edges, not the centers. Of course, my sister called that sacrilegious, but I didn’t want to go there.

And now, I was thinking about cinnamon rolls, and my mouth was watering. I had to keep my mind on track and on exactly what my friend John Yi was saying.

“Caleb. It’s fine. It’s not that much work.”

I blinked over at John and just shook my head. “I said I’d be one of your groomsmen. Not the best man. Not that I’m not the best,” I said with a wink and a loud laugh. “But don’t you have like a cousin or something to do that? One that’s known you forever?”

John shrugged, then went back to tearing at his napkin. John had always done that, ever since I’d met him. The guy got nervous and proceeded to tear a napkin into tiny little pieces or scraped the label off a beer bottle. It didn’t matter if everything was going a hundred percent perfect in our lives, or if there was no stress at all, John would always find something to be anxious about. And he would pick. He would tear. I hated seeing it, mostly because I knew that John hated having that outward tell, so I ignored it.

Instead, I let out a sigh. “Sorry about that,” I whispered.

“No, it’s okay, really. And I do have other friends. I just consider you all equal. So, I created a bracket of sorts and flipped a coin to figure out exactly who was going to be my best man. You beat Matt by a head versus a tail.”

I just shook my head. Of course, that’s what John had done. My brilliant friend, who was socially awkward yet a really great guy.

I thought of myself as slightly socially awkward sometimes, though not as much as John. It mostly stemmed from the fact that over the past ten years or so, I had been around the world, mainly in the Alaskan wilderness, and I didn’t interact with that many people. John had been one of those people, though, and now he was getting married. I liked his fiancée, but I didn’t know her all that well. I did, however, know her big sister, Zoey. And that meant I had a feeling I knew exactly who was going to be the maid of honor.

Great. I liked Zoey. Except for the fact that every time I was near her, my dick decided to do things it shouldn’t. It always pressed against my zipper, wanting out. I’d saw a meme once where...

Not going there.

“I’m honored, John. But I’ve never been a best man before. Not even in either of Dmitri’s weddings.”

“Devin?” John asked, and I nodded.

It would have been easy for me to be the best man, too, considering Devin had already done it once, but I had offered to let Devin take the best man place again for Dmitri. “Dimitri finally found his perfect person, so we wanted to do it right. You know?”

“Well, Lacey is going to be my one and only. I’m not doing this again. So, I really want you to be my best man. You’re a good guy, you like Lacey, and you like me.”

“We all like you, John.”

John shrugged. “Maybe. But, it’s still hard to forget those times in elementary school when kids made fun of my last name or how I looked, or the fact that I used to talk to myself when I was doing math problems.”

“That’s how you get math problems done quickly. You talk it through. It’s fine.” And it was fine, I really didn’t care that John was quirky. Hell, so was I. I couldn’t fix the fact that little kids were taught by their parents to be racist assholes, but I could either hold John’s coat when he beat the shit out of them now, or beat the shit out of them myself. After all, if I were going to be his best man, I figured I would have to take matters into my own hands if things got out of hand.

“I’ll be your best man,” I said quickly, noticing the way John’s shoulders started to droop. I liked John, I liked Lacey, I could do this. Not that I knew what I was doing.

“Great. And I swear it’s not going to be a lot of work.”

“So, I just have to like plan your stag party, right?”

John blushed. “No strippers or anything, okay?”

I snorted. “We’re really not stripper kind of guys.” Which would probably surprise anyone who thought they knew me. They all thought I was the bad boy or whatever the hell other label that they wanted to put on me. Sure, I’d been wild as a teen, gotten into a few scrapes, and gotten caught by cops a couple of times and sent home with the flashing lights in the window to wake my parents up. But I wasn’t that kid anymore. And I had a lot more things to worry about now rather than when I was going to see my next pair of boobs.

“I’m not taking you out to some fancy tea or something,” I said, grumbling.

John snorted. “Not that either. Maybe we’ll go see a game or something. I don’t know. You decide. I already have a lot of other decisions to make.” He started to rub his temples, and I snorted.

“Lacey having fun?”

“I love her. I love her with every ounce of my being. But the number of spreadsheets that go into planning a wedding? There are flow charts, Caleb. Actual flow charts.”