Don't Fall for the Best Man

Solen Vael had a rule about beautiful things.

He could admire them. He could arrange them. He could place them in perfect light so other people could see them clearly.

He simply could not want them for himself.

It was not a rule he had written down anywhere. It had arrived in his life gradually, the way most useful rules do, settling into his habits so quietly that by the time he was thirty-one, it felt less like a restriction and more like an orientation. A way of pointing himself through the world.

He stood in the middle of the Halverson event space on a Tuesday morning in late September, holding a clipboard he did not need, and let his eyes move over the room.

The ceilings were good. Seventeen feet, with exposed beams that still had enough warmth in them to offset the industrial bones of the building. The light from the east-facing windows was soft at this hour, diffuse and golden, and it landed across the bare concrete floor in long rectangles that Solen mentally filed away as an asset.

He would put the string lights on the far wall. Not ceiling-hung, which everyone expected, but trailing down in long uneven lengths that mimicked rain. The florist could drape the ceremony arch in eucalyptus and white ranunculus. No roses. Roses were an answer to a question nobody in this room had asked.

He made a note on the clipboard anyway, because writing helped him think.

His phone buzzed on the windowsill where he had set it.

He ignored it.

It buzzed again.

He crossed the room and looked at the screen without picking it up.

Emreth Quill. Three messages in forty seconds, which meant Emreth was either in crisis or bursting with news, and given that Emreth had called him eight days ago to announce his engagement, Solen already knew which one it was going to be.

He picked up on the fourth buzz.

"I need you here," Emreth said, without preamble, without hello, which was very Emreth. "I'm at the Birch Street office. Can you come now?"

"I have a site visit until eleven."

"It's nine forty."

"I know what time it is."

"Sol." There was something in Emreth's voice that was not quite desperation and not quite excitement. Something that sat in the middle of those two things, warm and slightly unsteady. "I need you to meet someone."

Solen looked at the room around him. The long windows. The concrete floor. The ceiling that could hold so much light.

"Fine," he said. "Give me an hour."

---

The Birch Street office was a converted terraced house that Emreth's architecture firm shared with a graphic design company and, inexplicably, a woman who made hand-poured candles on the top floor. The whole building smelled faintly of cedar and overworked radiators.

Solen arrived at quarter past ten and let himself in because Emreth had never once remembered to lock the front door in the three years they had shared a key.

He found Emreth in the kitchen, making coffee with the focused intensity of someone who had decided that brewing espresso was the most important thing happening anywhere in the world at this moment. Emreth was twenty-nine, lean in the way of people who forgot to eat when they were in the middle of a project, and he had the kind of face that photographers called expressive and everyone else called easy to read.

Solen had known him for eleven years. He read that face the way he read floor plans.

"He's not here yet," Emreth said, without turning around.

"Who?"

"Idris." Emreth set two mugs down on the counter and finally looked at him. His eyes were bright. He was trying not to smile and failing. "My best man."

Solen put his bag on the table and sat down.

"You said you needed me to meet someone."

"I do."

"You didn't say it was your best man."

"Would you have come if I had?"

The question landed more precisely than Solen expected. He did not answer it.

"Tell me what you need from me today, Emreth."

Emreth slid one of the mugs across the table. The coffee was strong enough that Solen could smell it from where he was sitting, which was a point in its favor.

"Idris is flying in from Edinburgh. His flight lands at eleven. He'll be here by twelve, probably, knowing him. Maybe twelve-thirty." Emreth sat down across from him. "I want you two to meet before you start working together. He's my best man. You're my wedding planner. You're going to be in each other's space for the next six months. I thought it made sense."

"It does make sense," Solen said.

"Great."

"Tell me about him."

Emreth wrapped both hands around his mug. "He's my oldest friend. We grew up together in Northumberland. He moved to Edinburgh for work about four years ago. He's a structural engineer. He's..." Emreth paused. "He's a lot. In a good way. He is a very good-way lot."

Solen was already making mental notes, because that was what he did. Best man. Structural engineer. Flew in from Edinburgh. A lot.

"Does he take direction well?"

Emreth laughed.

It was not a reassuring laugh.

"He takes everything in his own way," Emreth said. "But he shows up. That's the thing about Idris. He always, always shows up."

---

Idris Faure arrived at twelve fourteen, which was closer to Emreth's earlier estimate than his later one, and he arrived the way Solen suspected he arrived everywhere: slightly louder than the room expected.

Not loud in volume, necessarily. Loud in presence.

He was tall, which Solen registered first because it was the most immediate fact. Somewhere over six feet, with the kind of build that suggested he had done physical work at some point in his life and not entirely left it behind. His hair was dark blond, somewhere between unkempt and deliberately tousled, and it was slightly damp from the rain outside.

He came through the kitchen door already talking, already mid-sentence, already laughing at something he was apparently finishing saying to himself, and he dropped his bag on the floor and wrapped Emreth in a hug that lifted him two inches off the ground.

"You look disgustingly happy," Idris said, setting Emreth back down.

"I am disgustingly happy."

"It's repulsive. I love it." He stepped back, and his eyes moved to Solen.

Solen held very still. It was a habit he had developed for moments like this, for the particular kind of assessment that happened between two strangers trying to figure out what they were to each other.

He had not expected the assessment to feel like being read.

Idris's eyes were grey, or green, or something between the two that shifted depending on the light. They moved over Solen with unhurried attention, and Solen had the distinct and unsettling sensation of being seen more clearly than he had intended.

"You're the wedding planner," Idris said.

"Solen Vael," Solen said, and offered his hand.

Idris took it. His grip was firm without performing firmness, which Solen noted and did not know what to do with.

"Idris Faure." He smiled. It was a good smile, the kind that reached the edges of things and changed the whole landscape of his face. "I've heard a lot about you."

"I've heard very little about you," Solen said, which was true.

Idris laughed. "I like him," he said to Emreth.

"I knew you would," Emreth said.

Solen picked up his coffee and did not look at either of them, because something in the room had shifted in a way that he had not accounted for, and he needed a moment to catalog it before he could proceed.

It was nothing, he told himself.

It was simply the arrival of a loud, easy-smiling, rain-damp stranger in a room that had been quiet.

It was not anything else.

It was absolutely not anything else.

He looked down at his clipboard and made a note about the eucalyptus.

Outside, the rain was starting again, and Idris Faure was already filling every corner of the small kitchen with the fact of his existence, and Solen had six months of this ahead of him.

He wrote: white ranunculus. No roses.

He underlined it twice.

Solen did not take personal notes about people.

He took professional notes. Measurements. Timelines. Preferred color palettes. Dietary restrictions for the reception menu. Notes that had a function, that fed into a spreadsheet or a vendor brief or a seating chart.

He did not write things like: arrives like weather. Fills a room without trying.

He did not write those things because they served no purpose and had no place in a wedding planning file, and yet on the train home from Emreth's office that evening, he found himself staring at a blank page in his notebook with those exact words forming somewhere behind his eyes.

He closed the notebook.

He looked out the window at the darkening city and told himself to be professional.

The meeting had lasted two hours. After the coffee, Emreth had laid out his vision for the wedding with the organized chaos of someone who had been storing ideas in the wrong folders for months. There was a mood board, technically. It was a folded piece of paper covered in magazine clippings and paint swatches that all somehow conveyed the same feeling, which Solen privately identified as: expensive garden party, slightly melancholy, extremely beautiful.

He had asked the right questions. He had written the right notes.

Idris had sat across the table from him for the entire two hours, and Solen had been aware of him the entire time, which was the problem.

Not in a loud way. Idris was not distracting in the way of people who demanded attention. He was distracting in the way of something you kept catching in your peripheral vision, something that moved at the wrong moment, something that made you look even when you had decided not to.

He had opinions about the wedding. He had offered them when asked and not when he was not asked, which was a better ratio than Solen had expected from someone Emreth described as a lot. He wanted the music to be live, not recorded, because recorded music at a wedding was, in his exact words, like eating a photograph of a meal. He wanted the speeches short. He had concerns about the parking situation that were entirely reasonable and which Solen had already identified himself.

"You're very quiet," Idris had said at one point, directly to Solen, while Emreth was on the phone with his fiance in the other room.

"I'm working," Solen had said.

"You're watching."

Solen had looked up from his notes. "Same thing, in my job."

Idris had tilted his head slightly. Not in challenge. In something closer to consideration. "What have you figured out so far?"

"About the wedding?"

"About me."

The question was so direct that Solen had felt it land somewhere in his chest before he had time to deflect it.

"That you love him," Solen said. "That you're here because he matters to you, not because you enjoy wedding planning discussions."

Something had moved across Idris's face. Not surprise. Something quieter.

"Fair," he said. "What else?"

Solen had looked back down at his notes. "That's enough for today."

He heard Idris almost-smile. It was a sound, just barely. The particular shift of breath that happened before someone smiled but did not quite get there.

He had not looked up to see whether he was right.

On the train now, he opened his notebook again.

He wrote: confirmed vendors — florist, venue deposit, catering tasting scheduled for the 14th.

He did not write anything else.

He was very professional about it.

The catering tasting was on a Thursday, and Idris was twenty minutes late.

Solen had noted the time of arrival without comment, which was a thing he did when he was being very patient. He was aware that it was a thing he did. He suspected Emreth was also aware of it, because Emreth shot him a look across the tasting table that said: please do not be like that, he was probably delayed by something real.

Solen was not being like anything. He was simply noting the time.

Idris arrived in a light rain, coat open, slightly out of breath, and said "I know, I know, I got on the wrong train" before he had fully come through the door, which suggested he had expected consequences and was preempting them.

Solen said, "The duck confit is already on the table."

Idris stopped. Looked at him. "That's it?"

"That's it."

Something passed across Idris's face that Solen could not categorize immediately. He filed it for later and gestured to the empty chair.

The restaurant Emreth had chosen for the tasting was small and honest about itself, the kind of place that had seven tables and a chalkboard menu and a chef who came out mid-meal to argue pleasantly about whether the lamb needed more acid. Solen liked it. He would not have chosen it himself, which was how he knew it was right for Emreth and his fiance, Brynn.

Brynn Solace had arrived ten minutes early, which Solen had logged as a point in her favor. She was compact and precise in the way of people who had organized their lives deliberately, with sharp dark eyes that assessed a room before she sat in it. She was a marine biologist, which had surprised Solen slightly and then stopped surprising him the moment she began talking. She had strong opinions about table settings and stronger opinions about the ocean, and she delivered both with the same calm certainty.

Emreth watched her talk about seagrass beds with the particular expression of someone who had found the thing they had been looking for and could not believe it was real.

Solen had watched them watch each other for approximately four minutes before he had to look away and recalibrate.

This was the part of his job that no one warned you about. Not the logistics, not the vendor negotiations, not the moment when a florist called at eleven at night because the peonies were wrong. The part no one warned you about was bearing witness to love in its early and most honest form, over and over, until the specific quality of it became something you carried without knowing where to put it down.

"What do you think of the sauce?" Idris asked, beside him.

They were on the third course. Solen had been making notes.

"It's good. A little sweet for a main."

"I was thinking the same thing." Idris reached for the bread. "Are you always this focused at dinner?"

"This is a working dinner."

"We're eating food in a nice room. That's dinner."

"It's a tasting with a strategic purpose."

Idris put the bread down and turned to look at him with an expression that was not quite amusement. "Do you do anything that doesn't have a strategic purpose?"

Solen considered the question seriously, because he considered most questions seriously. "I walk without a destination sometimes. On Sundays."

"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard."

"It's not sad. It's restorative."

"Solen." Idris said his name with a kind of gentle weight, like he was picking it up carefully to see what it felt like. "A Sunday walk with no destination is only restorative if you also do things during the week that require restoring."

Solen looked at his notebook.

He did not have a response to that, which was unusual. He always had a response.

He wrote: sauce too sweet — consider herb jus instead.

Across the table, Emreth fed Brynn a piece of the duck confit, and she laughed, and the sound of it was so unguarded that Solen felt it like a small bright pressure somewhere behind his ribs.

He kept writing.

They left the restaurant at nine forty-five.

Emreth and Brynn walked ahead, shoulders touching, falling into the particular rhythm of two people who had already learned each other's pace. Solen watched them from three steps behind and catalogued it without meaning to. The way Emreth tilted slightly toward her when she spoke. The way she reached up once to fix his collar without breaking stride, as if she had always had the right to do that.

Idris fell into step beside Solen.

It was a narrow pavement. There was not much choice.

"Good night," Idris said.

"Productive," Solen agreed.

"I said good. You said productive."

"They're compatible assessments."

Idris made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "What's the difference, to you? Between a good evening and a productive one?"

Solen thought about it. He was aware that most people would deflect this question with something easy, something social. He was not built for that.

"A productive evening advances something," he said. "A good evening doesn't have to advance anything. It can just be."

"And you don't do just be."

"I'm working on it."

The admission surprised him slightly. He had not meant to make it. It was the kind of thing that came out when he was tired, when his filters were operating at reduced capacity.

Idris did not pounce on it the way some people would. He simply walked beside Solen in silence for a moment, hands in his coat pockets, watching the street.

"I build things," Idris said eventually. "Structures. Bridges, mostly, for the last few years. And there's a thing that happens when you're designing load distribution, which is that you have to account for the weight the structure is actually carrying, not the weight you'd prefer it to carry."

Solen glanced at him.

"I'm not talking about bridges," Idris said.

"I know you're not."

"Just checking."

They walked another half block in silence. The rain had stopped and the pavement was wet and bright under the streetlights, and the city had that particular quality it sometimes had at this hour, quiet but not empty, full of a kind of contained energy.

"I don't usually talk about myself to clients," Solen said.

"I'm not a client. Emreth is the client."

"You're adjacent to the client."

"Adjacent is not the same as."

He was right, technically. Solen filed that away.

"What made you become a wedding planner?" Idris asked.

It was a question Solen had a prepared answer for, a smooth professional answer about logistics and creativity and the satisfaction of executing complex events. He gave that answer to clients, to journalists who occasionally featured his work, to people at parties who asked with the polite curiosity of people who did not really want the full version.

He opened his mouth to give the prepared answer.

"I went to a wedding when I was twenty-three," he said instead. "A colleague's wedding. I didn't know them well. I was just there because I was invited, and I almost didn't go." He paused. "The ceremony was in a garden. It was raining slightly. Nobody had planned for the rain and the chairs were getting wet and the officiant's papers kept sticking together, and none of it mattered because the two people getting married were so completely absorbed in each other that the whole broken afternoon just fell away."

He stopped.

He had not told that story to anyone.

"And you thought: I want to make that happen for people," Idris said quietly.

"I thought: I want to make sure the chairs are dry and the papers don't stick. So that nothing gets in the way of that."

Idris was quiet for a moment.

"That's a very you answer," he said.

Solen did not ask how Idris Faure, who had known him for less than two weeks, already had a category called very you.

He did not ask because he was not certain he wanted to know the answer.

Ahead of them, Emreth and Brynn had stopped at a corner and were apparently having an argument about which direction the taxi rank was, both of them pointing in different ways, both of them laughing.

Solen watched them.

"They're going to be fine," Idris said, very quietly, just for Solen.

"I know," Solen said.

He did know. He had known since the moment he watched Brynn fix Emreth's collar without breaking stride.

Knowing did not make it easier to watch.