FORGE TO A NEW DAWB
Chapter Three: The Deal
By the time they sat down to actually negotiate it, JJ had made a list, which surprised Wren so much she almost didn't argue with item one.
"You made a list," she said.
"I live with a woman who scored me forty two out of a hundred on a roommate questionnaire. I adapt."
They were at the kitchen table again, the cream envelope propped between them like a piece of evidence in a trial neither of them had asked to be part of, and JJ had a single sheet of notebook paper covered in handwriting that leaned so far right it looked like it was trying to escape the page.
"Rule one," he read. "We only do this in front of witnesses. No practicing alone in the apartment like a couple of weirdos."
"Agreed. Rule two."
"There isn't a rule two yet, I was hoping you'd write some, this is a collaborative document."
Wren pulled the paper toward her and uncapped a pen, and for the first time since the envelope had arrived, something in her chest loosened slightly, because a list was a thing she knew how to build. A list had edges. A list you could actually win.
"Rule two," she said, writing as she spoke. "We keep our stories straight. Where we met, how long we've been together, basic facts. If Aunt Carol catches us contradicting each other for one second, the whole thing falls apart and it's worse than if we'd never tried."
"Where did we meet?"
"The obvious answer is the truth, minus the cereal. We're roommates. It became something else."
"How long have we been something else?"
Wren considered this with the seriousness of someone building a spreadsheet. "Two months. Long enough to be real, short enough that nobody expects details about anniversaries or meeting each other's whole extended family."
"Two months," JJ repeated, writing it down like it was a real date instead of a number she'd invented forty seconds ago. "I can work with two months. Rule three, and this one's mine. Whatever happens at that lake house, you help me get five actual minutes alone with Alvarez. I don't care if you have to invent an allergy and drag me into the kitchen to check ingredients. Five minutes."
"Deal. Rule four." She hesitated, pen hovering, because this was the one that mattered most and she wanted to get the wording exactly right. "Nothing that happens this weekend is real. Whatever we say to my family, whatever we have to do to sell it, it ends the second we're back in the car."
JJ looked at the paper for a second before he nodded, and something about the pause made Wren glance up, though when she did his face had already smoothed back into its usual easy grin, so fast she decided she'd imagined the pause in the first place.
"Ends in the car," he agreed. "Got it. What counts as selling it, though. Like, specifically. I want parameters before I'm improvising in front of your entire extended family."
"Hand-holding is fine. It's expected, honestly, or it looks suspicious if we don't. A hug hello, a hug goodbye. If somebody makes us dance, we dance, because refusing looks worse than doing it."
"What about dinner conversation? If somebody asks how you knew you liked her, or whatever people ask at these things."
"We say the truth, mostly. That I moved in expecting one person and found a much better one by accident. It's not even a lie, technically, it's just missing some details about cereal."
"That's disgustingly charming for something you invented on the spot."
"I contain multitudes," JJ said. "Your turn. If somebody asks you the same thing."
Wren thought about it, chewing the end of the pen, aware that she was taking this more seriously than a fake answer to a fake question strictly required. "I'll say you make me laugh when I don't want to laugh. Which is also true. Also missing some details about cereal."
"See, now we're both disgustingly charming. Nobody's going to believe a word of it."
"People believe what they want to believe, especially at weddings. Everybody there wants a happy story, they're not going to interrogate it."
"Kissing?"
The word sat there on the table between them for a second too long, and Wren found herself looking very hard at the cream envelope instead of at JJ, which did not stop her face from doing something warm and traitorous that she was going to blame on the kitchen's questionable ventilation for as long as she possibly could.
"Only if there's absolutely no other option," she said. "And even then, it's, it's not a real thing. It's a prop. Like a stage kiss."
"A stage kiss," JJ said, in a voice that suggested he found this description both accurate and, for reasons Wren did not want to examine, slightly funny. "Understood. Emergency stage kiss only, break glass in case of grandmother."
"This is a serious document, JJ."
"I am taking it extremely seriously. Rule five. I get final say on the outfit. I've seen your closet, it's very color-coded, very organized, extremely lacking in anything that says boyfriend material as opposed to substitute teacher."
"That's insulting and also probably fair."
"Rule six," JJ said, and this time his voice dropped a register, lost the joke entirely, and Wren looked up to find him watching her with an expression she hadn't seen on him yet, something closer to the version of himself he kept mostly hidden under the nicknames and the deflections. "If it stops being fun, if it stops feeling like a plan and starts feeling like something else, either one of us gets to say so, and we call it. No explanations required. We just stop."
Wren wrote it down exactly as he'd said it, word for word, and did not ask him what he meant by something else, mostly because she was fairly sure she already had a guess, and writing the rule down felt safer than testing it.
"Rule seven," she said instead, brisk again, "is mine. You don't fall for me. I don't fall for you. We're both very clear-eyed adults executing a mutually beneficial arrangement, and in six weeks we go back to being two people who happen to share a lease and occasionally fight over the shower schedule."
"Rule seven," JJ said, and wrote it down himself this time, in his slanted, escaping handwriting, right underneath rule six, close enough that the two rules looked, if you squinted, like they were arguing with each other.
"Deal?" Wren asked, holding out her hand across the table, because a handshake felt like the kind of thing that belonged in a document this serious.
JJ looked at her hand for a second, then took it, his grip warm and a little rough from three jobs' worth of deliveries and dish pits, and he held on maybe half a second longer than a handshake strictly required, which Wren noticed and decided, immediately and with great determination, not to think about.
"Deal," he said. "Two months, hand-holding, emergency stage kiss, and absolutely, categorically, no falling."
"No falling," Wren agreed.
Neither of them let go right away.
She pulled her hand back a beat later than she meant to, and busied herself folding the list into thirds and then into quarters, the way she folded anything she wanted to feel finished with, and slid it into the color-coded folder she had produced, without comment, roughly four minutes into the conversation.
"You really did bring a folder," JJ said, delighted all over again, like it was Christmas.
"I told you there would always be a folder."
"I'm going to need you to make me a copy. Laminated, ideally. I want to be able to consult rule seven under duress."
"You're not allowed to make fun of rule seven. Rule seven is load-bearing."
"I'm not making fun of it," he said, and for just a second the joke dropped away again, quiet and unguarded, before he caught himself and grinned it back into place. "I take load-bearing rules very seriously. Ask anyone. I have three jobs specifically because I take things seriously."
"You have three jobs because you can't say no to anyone who asks you for a favor."
"That is also a kind of seriousness, if you squint."
Wren laughed before she could stop herself, a real laugh, not the dry, careful kind she usually rationed out, and the sound of it seemed to surprise them both. She stood up quickly, folder tucked under her arm like a shield, and announced that she had reading to do, which was true, and also not remotely the reason she needed to leave the kitchen for a while.
Behind her, she heard JJ start humming something that sounded suspiciously like a wedding march, off key and entirely on purpose, and she did not turn around, because turning around would mean letting him see that she was smiling, and rule seven, whatever else it did or did not survive, deserved at least that much cooperation from her, this early in the deal.