I never should’ve brought up sex.

There was already enough awkwardness about our wedding night, and then I’d gone and made everything weirder between us by saying I was open to getting it on. With the girl I’d known since grade school. One of my best, longest-standing friends.

What a fucking idiot I was.

As we walked the couple of blocks back to my car, I held her hand mostly because I thought a groom should hold his bride’s hand on the evening of their wedding, and Chloe let me.

“Did you bring extra clothes?” she asked as we rounded the corner outside of the courthouse, which was lit up dramatically now that the sun had fallen below the horizon.

“I did.” As soon as I said it, it hit me that that might sound as if I’d been expecting more than a platonic wedding night, and hell, now that I’d made that one blunder, everything felt wrong. “Just in case we wanted to stay somewhere. We could even get two rooms if you’d prefer—”

“I’ve got it taken care of,” she said as we reached my Mustang. I opened her door and held her hand as she got in, then made sure the white dress that did great things to her figure was tucked away from the door.

I closed her in and got in the driver’s side. “What’s the plan?”

I knew there were a couple of chain motels in town. Nothing worthy of a wedding night, but maybe I needed to stop calling it our wedding night, because that was misleading. All we needed was a crappy but preferably clean room with a couple of double beds. We could do a king if we had to, but tonight, it felt safer to have that separation. It’d been hard enough not to reach out to her in the middle of the night when I hadn’t seen her in a flattering, subtly sexy white dress all day or exchanged vows with her to love, honor, and cherish. It lodged ideas in a guy’s head. Ideas I needed to get the hell out if we were going to make this work.

Chloe was messing with something on her phone, pulling up the map app, I realized. “Start heading west.”

I started the car and followed her directions, trying one more time to ask her where we were heading, to which she replied, with no lack of mystery, “You’ll see.”

It didn’t take more than five minutes for us to reach the outskirts of the county seat, and then with another blink, we were on a dark country road, per Chloe’s directions, with no other traffic in sight. This wasn’t the road to Dragonfly Lake nor was it the way to Nashville.