Diary of a Single Wedding Planner (Tales Behind the Veils Book 1) by Violet Howe

turned out, I wondered if he was upset with me for telling him to go.
    “Oh wow. I guess that didn’t really work out so well, huh? You’re not mad at me, are you? For encouraging you to go? Because I thought . . .”
    “No, Tyler. You didn’t drug me and tie me up and send me on a one-way flight to Seattle. I made the decision to go. What you told me at the time was right. If I wanted to spend my life with Monica, then I needed to go. But evidently she didn’t want to spend her life with me.”
    His face crumpled, and his eyes got glassy. No tears fell, but I could see my friend was still very much in pain. I needed to say something to make him feel better. Something profound.
    “Rejection sucks.”
    Alright, so maybe it wasn’t profound, but it was all I could come up with. We both stood silent for a minute as I tried to figure out how to lighten the mood.
    “I think the first thing you need to do is shave off that god-awful growth all over your face. You look like some maniacal creature who’s been wandering the Alaskan wilderness. Or I guess the Seattle wilderness. Don’t they have a lot of woods there? I’ve never been, but they spent a lot of time in the woods in Twilight .” I smiled at him and hoped he’d smile back.
    “Oh, please. Tell me you did not just use Twilight as your geographical basis of knowledge.”
    Ah, there it was. A bit of a smile. A glimpse of the Cabe I knew and loved.
    “You wanna shave it off?” he asked.
    I walked around the bar into the kitchen and grabbed his beard with both hands.
    “It’s so scruffy and wild. Rough. Do you have anything hiding in there?” I pulled sections of the beard apart, mimicking a monkey grooming its mate.
    “There may be. I don’t know. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time looking in a mirror lately. I guess my masculine pride is a bit wounded since my wife left me for lady bits.”
    It felt odd to hear him say “my wife.” We hadn’t really talked since their spur-of-the-moment wedding, so I’d never heard him say those words or refer to her like that. It bothered me, but I don’t know why. I mean, I knew he was married. Maybe it was because she hurt him so badly, but I felt resentful that she got to be his wife. Not that I wanted to be. Lord, no! But Cabe was an awesome guy. One in a million. Whoever he called “my wife” should have been worthy of the title.
    “Well, if you were trying to establish masculinity by morphing into a grizzly bear, you accomplished it. I think your strong cheekbones and prominent jawline are plenty masculine enough without the beard, though. Even if you do have your mother’s dimples.”
    “Let’s shave it. I’m assuming you have a razor,” he said. He looked excited to get rid of it.
    “Not for that! Good God, man, what the hell do you think I’m shaving here? My legs have never on their worst day been that far gone, and without getting too personal, we’ll say nothing else has either. I think we need a machete or some pruning shears for this beard.”
    “Let’s go buy razors. I want to shave this off. I want you to shave this off. Let’s do it,” he said.
    “Right now? It’s almost eleven o’clock. I have a wedding tomorrow,” I whined, but I was already putting my shoes on and grabbing my purse. I wanted nothing more than to shave that hideous beard off his face. I think for me, and maybe even for him, it was symbolic of Monica and what she’d done to him. I wanted her gone.
    So we went and bought razors, shaving cream, aftershave, some KitKat bars and a bottle of cheap drugstore wine. Then we ventured into my bathroom to rid Cabe’s face of his wife’s betrayal.
    I looked up at him as I sat on my bathroom counter straddling the sink. “Okay. We already established I’ve never had to shave this much hair. What do we do? Do you just wet it and then put on shaving cream like I do with my legs? Should we cut it with scissors first? How will the razor get through all