Other People's Weddings

by Maisey Yates

Genres: Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

The sparkling new enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy from New York Times bestselling author Maisey Yates, perfect for fans of Emily Henry's You and Me on Vacation.

If Poppy Love could just avoid Ryan Clark, her life would be fine.

The brooding photographer hated her on sight when they met at thirteen years old, and the feeling is mutual. And yet somehow he's always . . . there: Poppy's first wedding as a cake designer, the second wedding when a bear ate her cake, and then there was the fifth wedding when. . . well, it's probably best not to mention it, actually.

Now her best friend is getting married and moving to the other side of the world. And as if that impossible heartbreak wasn't awful enough, Poppy, as Maid of Honour, is about to be stuck with Ryan for the whole wedding trip to New Zealand, because of course he's the Best Man.

Perhaps it's time to finally call a truce. Or perhaps it's time Poppy admitted the heat between them isn't truly hate, at all. . .

Release date: June 13, 2024

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 384

Sample

Present Day

Even if I believed in fate, and I don’t, I would never subscribe to the belief that Ryan Clark was the master of it.

Quinn would tell me – and anyone listening – that he was, in fact, the architect of her romantic destiny. The arranger of her stars. The very hand of God.

It makes me want to die.

But I can’t die. I have a wedding cake to bake.

The cake I’m making for my next wedding is the most important cake I’ve ever been asked to bake.

I’m assuming I’m baking her cake, of course. No one else would be able to make a cake that is as quintessentially Quinn as I would.

Nobody knows Quinn better than I do. Well, arguably her fiancé does, I guess. But in the scheme of space and time, I feel that Quinn barely knows him.

They’ve been together ten months. And are now engaged.

In contrast, I lived with the same man for seven years without even a discussion of marriage, before it all fell apart last winter.

I don’t believe in destiny, or the one, or anything like that. That’s the sort of mindset people who don’t want to take charge of their lives buy into. An excuse for why they don’t have to make a relationship work, an excuse for drifting along in life, waiting for love, wealth or otherwise to come slap them in the face.

You have to go looking for special things in life.

If you want to chase your dreams you have to run.

To LA if need be.

At the expense of your child, if need be.

Though, this wasn’t about my mother. Who was certainly better known for playing a mother on TV than being one in actual real life.

But she’d succeeded in her dreams after she’d left me behind. Because we make choices. And that’s okay. How can you argue with a choice that hurts for a while but results in a person’s dreams coming true?

I mean, you can’t. Or at least, I can’t.

Given my personal viewpoint on the whole subject, I can’t really claim that Josh and I weren’t ‘meant to be’. In the end, I think it wasn’t a relationship we wanted to do the work for. And that’s fine.

It hurt when he broke up with me. Especially given I’d thought we were on the cusp of a proposal, not an ending, but I’d grown since then. Painfully, and with great effort.

But that’s my perspective on love in general. It isn’t a matter of ‘meant to be’ or ‘not meant to be’. You work at a relationship, and then you work to get over it. I wish things were as easy as fate.

Quinn says that kind of thing all the time, because Quinn is a romantic. With eleven months between her first meeting of Noah and their engagement, she kind of has to be.

Quinn would say that she and Noah were fated.

How could they be anything else?

After that chance meeting in the Lake Tahoe bar, it had to have come from something bigger than them. Bigger than all of us.

I looked at it this way. If you think a guy in a bar is hot and finagle your way into an introduction, is it fate, or are you horny? No judgment.

And if you then decide that this is going to be the thing you make work, because he makes you smile and he’s handsome and you have an easy time weaving your life into his, great.

I think fate is a very strong word for what are really mundane, daily occurrences that you choose to apply meaning to – or don’t. And once you’ve given something meaning, you tend to hang onto it a lot harder than if you hadn’t.

So maybe it’s more than fate that has Quinn and Noah rushing to get married. Not that I think she shouldn’t marry him. He’s a great guy and she’s the happiest I’ve ever seen her. I just think it’s more choice than magic, that’s all.

She’d asked me out to dinner tonight and I was sure it was going to be the will-you-be-my-maid-of-honor will-you-bake-my-cake dinner. Which meant I needed a truly stunning outfit, because honestly, it made more sense to dress up for your best friend than for a man.

Men didn’t care what dress you had on, in my experience.

Your best friend was the one who would be delighted by effort put into hair, makeup and the perfect shoes.

I’d rather dress for Quinn than some guy any day.

I was half ready when my doorbell rang.

I frowned and wondered if I’d forgotten I’d ordered something I had to sign for – I ordered a lot of kitchen gadgets online during late night doomscrolling sessions before bed and I often had no memory of it.

But when I walked toward the front door, in a clingy red dress, barefoot and with red lipstick on, and saw the top of a familiar head in the high windows in the oak door I froze for a second.

This was not fate.

So there, Quinn.

But as I moved to the door and jerked it open, I realized that Quinn had never even implied that Josh might be my fate.

Which was the prevailing thought in my mind as I came face to face with my ex-boyfriend.

He smiled. Boyishly. I’d always liked his smile. He had dimples and pale blue eyes, blond hair that often fell into his eyes. And I felt a rush of warmth. Familiarity. I missed feeling this comfortable.

But that dissipated when I remembered he wasn’t my boyfriend anymore, he’d hurt me, and I didn’t know why he was here.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Hi. I . . . realized I left some things here.”

“Six months ago?”

“Yes.”

“I . . . yeah come in.”

I stepped back and let him walk inside the house he’d once lived in. An unexpected guest now and not a cohabitant.

Weird.

It felt destabilizing and uncomfortable and I hated it.

I didn’t hate him though. That was the tough thing. I never had.

He’d gotten me through such a hard time in my life. When I’d lost Gran I’d really felt like a part of me had died with her, and Josh had been so good to me. But even outside of the bad times, he’d made me feel important. Needed. And I really, really liked that.

But it was like I couldn’t find that feeling now either. Any more than I could find hate.

He was looking at me like he expected me to say something that would make this situation less awkward, and my brain started to do a desperate tap dance, trying to find the right words because I still wanted to make things easy, I wanted to make him comfortable, even if I shouldn’t.

It was ingrained in me.

After all, why would anyone want to stay with someone who made life harder?

He didn’t want to stay with you.

My mental tap dance ended on a thud.

“I haven’t gone through the closet in your game room,” I said.

“That’s probably where it is. Just . . . my sheets and some stuff from school. My D.A.R.E. t-shirt.”

“Your . . . D.A.R.E. t-shirt?”

“Drug abuse resistance edu—”

“We were in D.A.R.E. together, I know what it is. I didn’t know the shirt was important to you.”

He lifted a shoulder. “I don’t do drugs.”

“Well. I think statistically the program wasn’t very successful, but yay to us outliers, I guess.”

He smiled. “I guess.”

He shifted his weight from one foot to another and it was like I felt it inside my chest. A shift, a weird longing. I didn’t want to kiss him or anything but I wanted to hang onto him. For just a second. Because in the six months since we’d broken up it had felt like I was in a storm with nothing to hold onto. Everything I’d thought about myself and my life and my future had changed, and for a moment I just wanted it to go back to how it had been.

Quinn was getting married.

I felt like a sad, lonely cliché. Gazing at my ex like the past had the answers because the future was a blank space.

“You can go look in the game room,” I said. “I’m getting ready.”

That was so firm. I was proud of myself. I was trying to rescue myself more than I’d been trying to be firm, but whatever.

He nodded and headed back toward what had been his game room. Where he’d had his PC set up for gaming, and a table for D&D sessions – which I’d sometimes participated in too. Dungeons and Dragons was maybe my favorite thing I’d learned from Josh. What wasn’t to like about a few hours of total escapism where you could pretend to be a Druidic Wood Elf instead of a regular girl?

Nothing, that’s what.

I wrinkled my nose and went into the bathroom to finish putting my makeup on. I was getting nostalgic. Nostalgia felt dangerous right now.

I looked at myself and tried to make a stern face at my reflection before I walked back out of the bathroom and practically ran into him in the hallway.

“Sorry,” I said, feeling silly and awkward as I walked quickly into the living room.

He followed me. “Poppy.”

I turned around and looked at him, standing there holding a cardboard box filled with stuff that was apparently very important to him. “We can be friends, Poppy,” he said. “We were together too long to just be nothing.”

I blinked. “I . . .”

Maybe he was right. I’d been angry when he’d broken up with me, of course I had been. I’d been blindsided. Who would respond to that well?

But we had been together so long.

We’d known each other since elementary school.

Maybe that was part of why I wanted to sink into him now. Because he’d been one of the steady things, one of the constant things, and losing him entirely was absurd.

“Would you think about it?” he asked.

He looked hopeful, and entirely different to the image I’d constructed of him in my head, pasted together from moments during our breakup. I’d fashioned him into a brand-new Josh in my mind, who was only the one that had hurt me because that made it easy to never regret it and never miss him.

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t . . . hate you.”

That was the truth. It surprised me a little.

His shoulders sagged with what looked like relief and my previous statement became even truer.

I didn’t want an enemy wandering around the streets of Pineville anyway.

Well, not another one anyway. I already had the one.

Ryan.

I did not need to think about Ryan now. Anyway, thank God I hadn’t seen Josh’s best friend/my professional nemesis in six months. Not even randomly on the street.

A minor miracle in a town this size.

Which was why what Josh was suggesting was the dream, really. If you had to break up in a small town, wasn’t it better if you didn’t have to cycle through the stages of grief every time you saw your ex?

Friendship was potentially the best solution.

“I’m glad you don’t hate me. I know I said . . .” he winced. “I said some things I wish I hadn’t.”

“Did you not mean them?”

“I did. But I think I might have . . . sometimes it’s hard to know what you actually feel.”

He looked at me expectantly and I realized I didn’t know what he expected. I’d been an expert on that, once upon a time. I’d taken great delight in it. In knowing just what to do. Just what to say. Just how to be.

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “Right.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed. I’d known what I felt.

But then I was reminded of times when I hadn’t known and hadn’t been my best self at all and I felt like I didn’t have the right to say anything at all.

“I’ll get out of your hair. But maybe we can . . . see each other again sometime.”

“Yeah,” I said.

He was gone before I realized he hadn’t said anything about my dress. Proving my earlier internal musings a little too well.

I felt unsettled and weird. He seemed regretful, which was very, very strange considering he’d been the one to break up with me because he’d wanted to see what else was out there.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what you actually feel.

I shoved that thought aside and went to go choose my shoes because I didn’t need the specter of my past romance hanging over tonight.

This was about Quinn. Not Josh. And not the weird tug I felt toward the safety he’d once represented for me.

When Quinn rolled up in the driveway I was a little surprised to see Noah in the passenger’s seat. I’d imagined the dinner was just us celebrating.

It wounded me just slightly that Noah would be here for this, which was silly because it was about Noah and Quinn.

I waved and tried not to telegraph my emotions as I made my way to the backseat.

And stopped.

Ryan Clark was in the backseat.

Like this was a double date.

Ryan. Clark. Who I hadn’t seen since the fifth wedding.

The fifth wedding in four years where I made the cake and he was the photographer. We hadn’t seen each other because I no longer lived with his best friend. Because he didn’t come to my bakery and I didn’t go to his studio. Because we hadn’t worked a wedding together since.

We hadn’t seen each other because we had no reason to see each other.

Unlike with Josh, I didn’t feel nostalgic looking at Ryan.

And this was not fate.

This was Quinn.

I was very aware that I was standing outside the car for far too long, being far too still, with my arms held loose at my sides like one of those dopey, bargain bin cat pillows you could pick up at a truck stop.

I also couldn’t move.

Until he did.

He shifted. Inside the car. Just a little. Not a smile. Just . . . his shoulders lowered. He sat back – just a small movement – and his eyebrows went slack rather than being held tight together, pinching his forehead.

So . . . I took a deep breath like I was diving off a cliff into freezing cold water and opened the car door, got in and closed it in one quick movement. I grabbed my seatbelt and tried to buckle with the same fluidity but found myself fumbling to get the mechanism into the actual buckle and it took three tries. Three impotent clicks. When I looked up my eyes met his. And I know I sneered.

I did know it.

I didn’t mean to.

I meant to smile.

The result was, I could imagine, more like when my grandma’s old Australian Shepherd used to get caught doing something wrong. Just my lips lifted over my teeth.

I stopped. Quickly.

He looked away.

I was going to say hi to him. I was about to.

“Good to see you, Poppy.” That came from Noah who was looking at me in the rearview mirror, and I did manage to smile at him.

“Good to see you too.” I like him. Really. He’s a great guy. My issue isn’t with Noah at all. It’s more timelines and of course fear for my friend’s heart. And the possibility she might choose New Zealand over the US and leave me forever, tapping into all my childhood trauma around abandonment that was recently compounded by the death of my grandmother.

That’s all.

“It’s been a while.”

It had been. Which was a given, since Noah had been in New Zealand the past few months, and that meant the tension in the car was so noticeable we’d been reduced to soap opera speech that barely rose above the level of as you know, Bob. Anything to fill the silence.

“Well,” I said, because if there was one thing I knew it was how to make conversation with a recently engaged couple. “Tell us the whole story!”

“I told you everything,” said Quinn, lifting her hand from the steering wheel very deliberately so that her ring sparkled.

“I want to hear Noah’s point of view.”

And as I thought they would be, they were off. Telling the whole story and stepping on each other’s sentences. It made it a lot harder for me to be worried about it, and them, timelines notwithstanding. They were in love, and it was beautiful.

I just needed to push off the weirdness that I felt from my earlier visit with Josh. That was why I felt so . . . off.

I did not look at Ryan to get a gauge on his reaction. I didn’t care what he thought.

I might not be a romantic, but he was the most anti-romance human being to ever come near the bridal industrial complex. I couldn’t imagine him getting starry eyed over an engagement story.

Or, indeed, anything.

Thankfully, we were close to the restaurant, and I all-but tumbled out of the car when we pulled up to the curb.

Then we walked into the restaurant, and down the stairs to what was a rather cave-like dining room that had been the epitome of class and fanciness back in the 1960s, with its stone walls and red lamps on the tables. I had always been fond of the retro nature of the place.

“You can’t see anything in here,” Ryan said after they sat down at their table.

“I like it. It makes me want a fancy cigarette case and a martini,” I countered, not even being contrary for the sake of it.

“This is why I like Poppy,” Noah said. “She’s a hard case.”

Noah had called me that before, and I was sure he was doing it again just because I’d been so amused by it last time.

I looked at Noah. “Try to explain what that means again.”

He did try, but when the waiter came to take our drink order it got lost in the shuffle, and then we spent the next five minutes talking about wine until the drinks arrived and the appetizer and dinner order were taken.

I reached into the bread basket at the same time as Ryan and our fingers brushed, and I took a half breath and made the deliberate choice not to respond like an angry cat who’d gotten her tail stepped on.

I let our hands stay touching. I lingered even.

His eyes caught mine, and I knew whatever game I’d been playing . . . I hadn’t won.

I pulled my hand out.

And forgot my bread, dammit.

I couldn’t reach for more bread now. It would look like touching Ryan’s hand had flustered me.

I couldn’t have it looking like that.

I watched him butter the bread he’d gotten and felt a little salty about it.

The appetizers arrived, which felt like a blessing because then I got to pretend I’d been waiting for the blue cheese crème brulee rather than awkwardly avoiding the bread.

I attacked it with relish, enjoying the crispy-topped, creamy cheese and trying to ignore that my hand still felt warm.

“Have you thought about theme, Quinn?” I asked. “I think a naked cake would be so good for you. With pines and fresh berries . . .”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said. “I might want something more traditional. With a cake topper.”

That did not please me.

“Oh . . .” I frowned and then tried not to.

“But we haven’t really . . . committed to anything yet.”

I nodded. “Sure. Of course.”

Maybe Quinn didn’t want me to make her cake? It would be okay if she didn’t.

Maybe.

But Brittney Keller had me make her wedding cake and she’d hated me in high school so it would be a little weird if Quinn didn’t want me to make her cake, that was all.

But I was distracted from my cake worry when Noah and Quinn took each other’s hands and gazed meaningfully across the table at Ryan and myself.

“We wanted to bring you both out tonight,” Quinn said, her eyes shining in the dim light, tears shimmering there and making my throat tight even though I didn’t know why she was crying, “because you’re our best friends. Ryan, you brought us together. You’re our North Star.” Noah shot Ryan a rueful smile that seemed to be apologizing for Quinn’s dramatization. “And Poppy, you’ve been there for me always. We don’t have sisters, we have each other.”

Well, that really made me want to cry.

“Poppy, I want you to be my maid of honor.”

“Ryan, I want you to be my best man.”

Ryan and I turned to look at each other slowly, very slowly. Our eyes caught. And held.

“We’re going to get married in Queenstown, New Zealand,” Quinn said. “And we really want to have the wedding party and family there for two weeks. For excursions and sightseeing and just . . . hanging out.”

Quinn’s voice faltered, and I knew why.

She was having her wedding in New Zealand. She wanted us all there for two weeks to spend time together because she was leaving.

She really was leaving.

I’d been worried about this. It had been sitting in the back of my mind, gnawing at my brain for weeks. Months. As she’d fallen harder and harder for Noah and I’d found myself vacillating between joy at her joy and fear over the inevitable change it would bring.

Where would they live?

I asked myself that question a lot.

I’d deliberately avoided asking Quinn.

Oregon was beautiful. My understanding was that New Zealand was one of the few places that rivaled it for beauty.

Noah was from Queenstown, and though I’d never been I had googled it extensively and I, who had never considered leaving Pineville in my life, could even imagine being very happy there.

So I worried.

My worry was founded, it turned out.

Very founded.

She wanted to spend quality time with her family and the bridal party for two whole weeks because she was leaving us forever.

I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t actually handle hearing the words come out of her mouth.

The cake didn’t matter.

Nothing really did.

“I need to . . . excuse me. I need to use the bathroom.”

I hustled up the stairs and down a long hall, and ducked into the tiny bathroom that was in bad need of an update.

I looked in the mirror and silently called myself a coward. My dark hair was askew, my blue eyes red even though I hadn’t shed a tear yet. But I looked shell-shocked. I looked like someone who was afraid of losing her best friend.

“Get a grip, get a grip, get a grip,” I muttered, running cold water over my wrists and splashing some onto my neck.

I just couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to live without Quinn right down the street from me. She’d been my best friend since I’d moved here in second grade and we’d only ever been separated temporarily by college. Even then we’d seen each other here when we were on break.

When I’d come to Pineville I’d clung to people. My grandmother. Quinn. Later to Josh.

I’d lost my gran and Josh. Losing Quinn felt unbearable.

It felt like being a kid who didn’t know when she’d ever see her mom again.

Someone walked into the bathroom and I took a deep breath, and walked back out.

And nearly tripped over Ryan, who was coming down the same hall in the opposite direction.

He reached out and steadied me, his eyes meeting mine. I overcorrected, I admit that. I pushed him. I didn’t mean to. I meant to sort of push off of him like a spring board, to get away from the solid wall of his body, but it really was more of a shove.

“Well. Watch where you’re going,” I said.

It was like I was in sixth grade all over again, when I’d accidentally dropped the bowling ball from my gravity-themed science project onto his solar system.

I’d tried to be nice to Ryan when we’d first met and I’d been given nothing but hostility in return.

The way I coped with my life, with my maternal abandonment, with everything, was to make myself the brightest ray of sunshine around. I was a people pleaser, I knew that. I’d done a stint in therapy in college. I had great reason for my issues.

My mom and I met up. . .