Weston

## Prologue *Weston, 27* Weston had three rules in life. Never lend money you expected to get back. Never trust a person who said, “I’m not usually like this.” And never, under any circumstances, get married. The first two were negotiable, depending on the situation. The third was not. At twenty-seven, Weston had heard every argument in favor of marriage. He'd heard the speeches about finding your person, building a life together, growing old side by side. He'd watched people get engaged with tears in their eyes and married with promises on their lips, only to spend the following years discovering that forever was a significantly longer time than they'd anticipated. Romantic, really. In the same way that skydiving was romantic if you ignored gravity. He wasn't bitter. That was the part people never seemed to understand. He wasn't secretly heartbroken, nursing some tragic past, or sitting around at night wondering why love had never worked out for him. He liked women. He liked dating. He liked the excitement of meeting someone new, the easy chemistry, the late-night conversations that somehow turned into three in the morning. He liked having someone to call when he had something to say. He liked making someone laugh. He even liked the occasional argument, provided the other person could keep up. What he didn't like was the idea that any of it had to end with a ring. "You're twenty-seven," his mother had reminded him approximately six hundred times. As though he hadn't been there for the entire twenty-seven years. "And?" "And don't you think it's time you started thinking seriously about your future?" "I think about my future all the time." "Weston." "What? I do. I think about where I'm going to travel next summer. Whether I should buy a new car. If I want to move apartments. Very serious things." "Marriage is a serious thing." "Exactly. Which is why I don't want to do it." The silence that followed was usually spectacular. He'd perfected the delivery over the years. A perfectly straight face. An innocent shrug. The faintest hint of a smile that suggested he knew exactly how irritating he was being. It was a gift. Or so he liked to think. The truth was, Weston didn't believe love needed a contract. He didn't believe a relationship became more meaningful because someone signed a piece of paper, and he certainly didn't believe that promising to stay with someone forever was more romantic than choosing to stay with them every single day. If you loved someone, you stayed because you wanted to. And if you stopped wanting to, you were honest about it. Simple. Clean. No grand declarations. No expensive rings. No promises neither person could guarantee they'd keep. People called him cynical. He called himself realistic. And since he was the one living his life, he figured his opinion counted for something. Besides, he had better things to do than spend his evenings arguing about an institution he had absolutely no intention of participating in. Which was why, on an otherwise ordinary evening, Weston found himself sitting across from a woman who was looking at him as though he'd personally insulted every married couple in the world. He took a sip of his drink. She continued staring. He lowered the glass. "Is there something on my face?" "Unfortunately, no." His mouth twitched. "That's disappointing. I was hoping for a more interesting explanation." "Do you ever take anything seriously?" "Quite a lot of things, actually." "Like what?" "Food. Sleep. My personal space." He paused. "The correct way to load a dishwasher." She looked unimpressed. He looked delighted. This was already going well. "You know," she said, leaning forward slightly, "for someone who claims not to care about marriage, you have an awful lot to say about it." "That's because people keep asking me about it." "Maybe because you're twenty-seven and you talk about marriage like it's a contagious disease." "Well, I haven't caught it yet." She let out a disbelieving laugh. There it was. The first crack in her composure. Weston liked that. He liked people who didn't automatically agree with him. People who challenged him, who pushed back, who didn't seem particularly impressed by his usual combination of confidence and sarcasm. They were much more entertaining. Unfortunately, they also tended to be the people who asked questions he preferred not to answer. "So let me get this straight," she said. "You genuinely believe you'll never get married?" "Correct." "Ever?" "That's generally what never means." "And you're completely sure?" Weston leaned back in his chair. He had answered this question a thousand times. He knew exactly what to say, exactly how to say it, and exactly how to make the conversation end before anyone could turn it into an intervention. He smiled. "Absolutely." He said it so easily that anyone listening would have believed him. He believed him, too. At least, he thought he did. Because Weston had spent twenty-seven years deciding what he didn't want. He knew what he thought about love, what he thought about commitment, and what he thought about the institution everyone else seemed so eager to defend. He knew his rules. He knew his limits. And he knew, with the absolute certainty of a man who had never been given a reason to question himself, that there was nothing in the world capable of changing his mind. He had no intention of falling in love. No intention of making promises. And absolutely no intention of getting married. Weston was very good at making rules. What he hadn't yet learned was that life had a particularly inconvenient habit of introducing you to people who made you want to break them. And the worst part? They never asked for permission first.