As I unload a few fold-up chairs from the trunk, I pretend I’m not nervous, even though I am. Not because I want to bail but because I’m fucking getting married and it’s starting to freak me out. Ethan’s responsibility lecture is fresh in my mind and I keep thinking, What if I screw up? I can’t. Not with Ella.

“You okay, man?” Ethan asks, dropping a few chairs onto a growing pile. “You look a little pale.”

“I’m fine.” I put my foot on the bottom bar of a chair and stomp down on it to unfold it, and then I stand it up in the snow.

“Make sure you line them up straight,” Ethan says as he unfolds a chair and lines it up with the one I just set up. “Lila will chew our asses out if we don’t.”

I smile, but keep my head down as I start forming an even row. It doesn’t take more than a minute to get the few chairs set up, since there’s hardly anyone attending the wedding, but it seems like an eternity goes by. By the time we’re done, I’m fidgety and jittery, a bundle of nerves sparking inside me.

Finally I can’t take it anymore. Adrenaline is rushing through me and my pulse is erratic so I go back to my Chevelle and open the glove box. Digging around beneath a stack of papers, I find a pack of cigarettes that I hid in there ages ago for moments just like these.

“Really?” Ethan questions as I sit down in the driver’s seat with the door open and my feet planted in the snow.

“I just need to calm down,” I say and pop one into my mouth. He shakes his head, laughing under his breath as I grab the lighter out of the pack, cup my hand around the end of the cigarette, and light it. As soon as the nicotine enters my lungs, I feel better and my heart rate starts to settle.

Ethan heaves a large Tupperware bin out of the trunk and drops it onto the ground as I suck drag after drag off the cigarette, my heart calming, my skin warming under my coat and shirt.

“You feel better?” he asks as I graze my thumb over the end of the cigarette and scatter ash across the snow.

I savor another breath of smoke. “Actually, I do.”

He rolls his eyes. Ethan never did like it when I smoked, except I think he used to smoke pot. He would always chew me out, though, for getting ash in his truck and stinking up the upholstery.