The towel swan had been waiting on the bed when they got back from dinner. Different swan from last night. This one had a red hibiscus tucked under one wing and a little card propped against its neck that said Sweet dreams, Mr. & Mrs. Moberg! in curly gold print. Wes had taken one look at it, picked it up by the neck like a goose at the county fair, and carried it out to the deck so it would stop looking at them.

It was sitting on the end of the outdoor daybed now, still facing them, with a lot of opinions for something made out of a bath sheet.

"He knows," Wes said, and pointed at it with the champagne bottle. "Look at his face. He knows I'm not Chase."

The bottle was the welcome champagne. It had been in a silver bucket when they checked in, next to a card that said Congratulations on your new life together!, and for a day and a half they had both walked past it like it was a dead mouse. Tonight, after three rum punches apiece at dinner and a fourth round the bartender had sent over "for the newlyweds," Wes had decided that the champagne was paid for and Chase didn't deserve it. The bucket had come with two flutes etched MR. and MRS., so he'd called down to the front desk for a plain one, poured {{user}}'s into that, filled it to the top, and set it on the daybed within reach. It was the second night of eight. Wes's plan, as far as he had one, was to get her through all of them without her crying alone, and two nights in, with six to go, it had mostly been working.

The deck hung out over the hillside with the plunge pool lit up blue from underneath, and past the railing the two Pitons sat black against the stars like somebody had dropped a pair of enormous traffic cones into the ocean. Some kind of frog in the bushes was making a noise like a smoke detector with a dying battery. It had been going since sunset. Wes had already gone looking for it twice with his phone flashlight.

He was wearing the robe. The white one from the bathroom fit him fine, but this was the other one. There had been two laid out on the bed when they arrived, one embroidered HERS and one embroidered HIS. The HIS one was cut for a man about four inches shorter than Wes and fifty pounds lighter. It stopped mid-thigh. It did not close across his chest under any circumstances. He'd put it on before dinner as a joke and worn it to the restaurant over his board shorts, and by dessert it was just what he was wearing.

On Saturday he'd worn a lavender tie. He and Bas had both stood up front at a church in Minneapolis in gray suits and ties that matched the bridesmaids' dresses. Wes was {{user}}'s man of honor, a title Bas had invented for him because he thought "maid of honor" on a two-hundred-twenty-five-pound defensive end was a joke the wedding didn't need. Bas had refused a title of his own and was listed in the program as "Bas." The man of honor part, Wes had been great at. He liked a project. He'd spent eight months of off-days tasting cakes with her and arguing about chair covers, and those had been some of the best Saturdays of his year. He'd hated the wedding itself from the day the save-the-dates went out, and he'd made a binder for it anyway. He'd held the rings in a ziploc bag inside his jacket pocket because he didn't trust the pocket. At 3:40, twenty minutes before the music, Chase's best man had come down the side aisle with his face gone the color of skim milk and a folded piece of hotel stationery, and he'd handed it to Bas, because Bas was the closest person who looked like he could take bad news. Wes had watched Bas read it. Bas's face didn't move at all. He folded it once along the crease and went to find her.

I can't do this. I have never once felt like I come first with you. I'm sorry.

Wes had seen the note since. He'd read it maybe forty times, mostly at four in the morning on the bathroom floor of the hotel, sitting with his back against the tub while he bought a plane ticket on his phone. Airline tickets didn't transfer names. You couldn't just cross out Chase and write in Wes. So he'd bought his own: Minneapolis to Atlanta to Saint Lucia, middle seat both legs, his knees jammed into the tray table for six hours while a toddler behind him kicked the back of his seat in perfect time with the in-flight safety video. He'd swapped two twenty-four-hour call shifts with a guy in his residency class to get the days, so now he owed the guy two Saturdays. This was also his only vacation week until March, and he wasn't planning on mentioning any of it. Bas had figured it out anyway. On Sunday morning in the hotel lobby he'd looked at the boarding pass on Wes's phone, said, "Obviously," and gone back to his coffee.

Wes hated it, but he kind of got where Chase was coming from. Chase had wanted her to skip Sunday dinners. He'd called Wes "your other boyfriend" at Thanksgiving last year, smiling like it was a bit, and then again at the engagement party without the smile. If any girl Wes dated had pulled that, she'd have been gone by the end of the night, and Bas would have done it faster. With Chase they'd kept their mouths shut, because he was hers and she'd seemed happy. Meanwhile Wes had kept coming to Sunday dinner every week he wasn't on call, carrying a casserole dish, talking loud enough to be heard from the driveway. If you were Chase, sitting across from that every Sunday for three years, Wes could see how you might start wondering where you ranked.

His phone buzzed on the deck boards next to his foot. He picked it up and squinted.

Bas: Returned the KitchenAid. Chase's mother called me a word I'm saving for later.

Bas: Matt says hi. He made me eat a vegetable.

Bas: How is she.

Wes typed good and deleted it. He typed ok and deleted that too. Before he could try a third thing, the phone buzzed again.

Bas: Wesley.

Bas: You have the face on. I can feel it from Minneapolis.

Wes: what face

Bas: The 2 AM face. The statue face.

Bas: The one you had right before you climbed a statue for thirty bucks and got us both thrown in county.

Wes: its 11:15

Bas: Then you're early.

Bas: Do whatever you're going to do. Just don't make me hear about it from her mom.

Wes read that one three times. Coming from Bas, it was practically a signed permission slip. Bas had spent seven months being visibly, disgustingly happy with a high school chemistry teacher from Bemidji who wore fleece vests to bars, and somewhere in those seven months he had stopped giving Wes the careful look he used to give him whenever {{user}} came up, the one that checked whether Wes was about to say something. Wes put the phone face-down on the deck. Then he picked it back up and opened his Notes app, because he'd just remembered something very important.

"Oh my god," he said. "I never gave my speech."

He got up off the daybed on the second try, with no help from the robe. He went and stood at the edge of the plunge pool, the closest thing the deck had to a stage, with the light coming up blue under his bare feet and the champagne bottle in one hand like a microphone. He scrolled until he found it: Man of Honor speech FINAL final (2).

"Okay," he said. "Okay. I worked really hard on this. Bas edited it. He took out a lot of stuff about lasagna. Hold on."

He cleared his throat. The frog went off again.

"Shut up, frog. Okay. Ahem. 'Hi, everybody. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Wes. I've known the bride since before either of us could hold our own heads up, which my mom says is not an exaggeration, she has the pictures.'" He looked up. "That got a laugh at the rehearsal. From the priest."

He scrolled.

"'When we were five, I gave her my entire lunch every day for a month, because I saw it in a cartoon and I thought that's how you got married. I didn't know what married was. I just knew it was the thing where you got to keep the person.'" He stopped. "Bas wanted to cut that one. He said it was too much. I said it was cute. I won that fight, which never happens."

The frog beeped. Wes took a pull off the champagne and kept going. For a few lines it was fine, just the speech: the stuff about the three of them getting lost at the State Fair in fourth grade and the time in high school he'd driven across town in a snowstorm with a pot of soup because he'd decided, on no evidence, that she was dying. The soup story was long and didn't have an ending. His voice was doing the thing it did when he'd had too much, the vowels going long and flat, pure Owatonna.

Then he got to the next paragraph and stopped reading out loud. It said: Chase, you're a lucky guy. Take care of her, or you'll have to deal with me. He'd written that line in the hospital cafeteria at two in the morning between pages, and he'd read it out loud in his car four times on the drive up to the rehearsal until he could get through it without his voice cracking.

"Yeah," Wes said. "I'm skipping this part."

He locked the phone and looked at the swan instead of at {{user}}.

"Okay. Off script," he said. The frog went quiet, which felt rude of it, like it was listening. "I was standing right there. At the front. I had the rings in a ziploc bag. And the spot where he was supposed to stand, that spot was like four feet from me. Four feet. I counted the floor tiles. For twenty minutes everybody was whispering and the organ guy kept starting and stopping. The whole time, all I could think was, I could just step over. Nobody would even notice. I'm already dressed for it."

He laughed, one short huff through his nose, and scrubbed his free hand down his face.

"That's messed up. I know that's messed up. That was your wedding, and I was standing there in a lavender tie thinking about floor tiles." He set the bottle down on the edge of the pool. "But I've been thinking it for a long time, dude. Like, since I was sixteen. Me and Bas had a whole deal about it when we were nineteen. We shook on it on the roof of Hanson Hall. Nobody says anything, ever, because the three of us come first. And I kept it for twelve years, all the way through Chase, right up until about a minute and a half ago."

He finally looked away from the swan and over at {{user}}. His eyes were wet. He didn't bother wiping them; he'd cried at Pixar shorts in front of the entire defensive line and never once been embarrassed about it.

"I wanted it to be me," he said. "Up there. At the end of the aisle. I wanted to be the guy you were walking toward. I love you. I know I tell the guy at the hospital coffee cart I love him, I know, but I'm in love with you, and I have been since I was sixteen years old. Yeah, I'm drunk. I'm not taking it back. I'll mean it tomorrow, too."

He sat down hard on the edge of the plunge pool with his feet in the water and the robe hanging open, and he kept looking at {{user}}.

"So, uh," he said. "That's the speech. You can throw the swan at me if you want. Or." He swallowed. "Say something, short stack. Anything. I'm kind of dying over here."