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"I want to."

He took a breath.

"I've been engaged three times." Flatly. "None of them took. Two ended sensibly — grown-up conversation, split the deposit, nobody destroyed. The third one I found out about at the altar."

The trio kept playing. Absolute professionals.

"That's the part nobody warns you about." His face didn't move at all. "Everybody sitting down knows before you do. You're up there with your heart racing, and behind you there are two hundred people looking at the back of your head, and every single one of them has already worked it out. Either you're making the worst mistake of your life or you're about to be left standing there. The room knows first."

Lance stopped laughing.

"So." Benny raised the bottle. "That is why I'm an excellent wedding planner. I've had a great deal of training. To the groom."

"Which one?" I said.

"To the tent, then," said Benny, and drank again.

Then he stepped off the riser and immediately began stacking plates, because he is physically incapable of standing still.

Lance had to be dragged up there, which I would like everybody to appreciate, because I have personally watched that man work a red carpet in a rainstorm.

"I don't do this," he said. "This is the one thing I don't do. I’m an actor. My job is saying other people's words."

"Say some of your own," I called out.

"I'd rather be shot." He looked into his champagne flute a moment. "Fine. Blaine Solstice Cauthorne. Whom I love. Who has never once asked me what it's like to be famous — which is precisely why he's my closest friend, and why I'd get in a car for him at three in the morning."

"Lance—"

"Don't interrupt the toast." He swallowed. "Every person in that meadow today was looking at you. Every single one of them. And I sat in the second row and thought, thank God. Thank God it isn't me. And I'd like everybody here to realize how pathetic that is."

Benny put the plates down.

"I am so tired of being looked at," Lance said. "That's the toast. I'm an actor, and I’ve built an entire career out of being looked at, and I would pay a serious amount of money to walk into a room and have nobody notice me at all."

He raised the flute.

"To the tent."

"To the tent," we mumbled.

"Gregory," said Blaine. "You're up."

"No."

"Why not?"

He was looking straight at me, and I had about a second and a half to decide how honest to be, which is a second and a half more than I usually allow myself.

"Because this isn't mine," I shrugged. “Not my day.”

Nobody had anything to say to that, so Benny announced the cake.

It was still under its linen cloth. Four tiers, cream and gold leaf, sugar work down one side that had taken a woman two days. Lance whipped the cloth off like an auctioneer.

"The top tier is meant to be frozen," Benny said. "You freeze it and eat it on your first anniversary." He heard himself. "I'll stop talking."

Blaine lifted the entire top tier off the stand with both hands, set it down on the linen, and began eating it with his fingers.