FORGE TO A NEW DAWB
Chapter Four: Rehearsal Dinner Rules
Devon took one look at them holding hands across the counter of the coffee shop and nearly dropped an entire tray of oat milk lattes.
"No," he said. "Absolutely not. What is this."
"This is practicing," JJ said, not letting go of Wren's hand, which he had picked up approximately four seconds after Wren walked through the door, with the easy confidence of someone who had rehearsed the motion in a mirror, which, Wren suspected, he probably had. "We have a wedding in five weeks. We need reps."
"Reps," Devon repeated. He was tall and skeptical, with the specific weariness of a man who had been JJ's coworker and best friend long enough to see every one of his ideas coming from a mile away and still, somehow, keep getting run over by them. "You two are faking dating for a wedding, and you decided the training ground for this was my coffee shop, during my shift."
"Your shift means witnesses," Wren said. "Rule one, we only practice in front of witnesses. You're the witness."
"I did not consent to this job."
"You consented the day you became his best friend," Wren said, and Devon looked at her for a second like he was reevaluating something, before he sighed, long and put-upon, and waved them toward an empty table.
"Fine. Educate me. What exactly does practicing look like."
It looked, over the next hour, like a series of small experiments that Wren had not fully accounted for when she wrote rule one. JJ ordered for her without asking, and got it wrong on purpose the first time, oat milk instead of her actual order, so she'd correct him in front of Devon the way a real girlfriend would, familiar and a little exasperated. He put his arm along the back of her chair, not quite touching her shoulders, and when she leaned back into it without thinking, the weight of his arm settling naturally behind her, she caught herself a half second too late to pretend it hadn't happened.
"That was good," Devon said, watching them with the clinical interest of a man grading a science project. "Genuinely, that looked real. Do it again."
"We're not doing it again just because you liked it," Wren said, sitting up straighter, putting six inches of daylight back between herself and JJ's arm.
"I need data," Devon said. "For accuracy."
"You need to make my latte."
"Multitasking," Devon said, and did not move.
JJ, for his part, seemed to be enjoying this far more than the situation warranted. He kept finding small excuses to close the distance, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear when a customer walked past and glanced at them, resting a hand at the small of her back when they stood to leave their table for a booth with better light, each gesture delivered with a commentary track of quiet, dry narration only Wren could hear.
"That's a two," he murmured, after the hair thing, "on a scale of convincing. We should workshop it."
"It felt like an eight."
"An eight is what I'm aiming for at the reception. This was practice. You want me lulling you into a false sense of competence."
"That's the opposite of what practice is supposed to do."
"Is it, though."
She swatted his arm, which he caught, casually, like it was choreography they'd already rehearsed a hundred times instead of something they were making up as they went, and held onto her hand a beat longer than the swat required, exactly the way he had at the kitchen table when they'd shaken on the deal, and Wren felt the same unhelpful thing go off in her chest, right on schedule, and told it, silently and firmly, to sit down.
Devon slid into the booth across from them with his own coffee, off the clock now, arms crossed. "Okay, real talk. This is either going to work perfectly, or it's going to blow up spectacularly, and I need you both to understand there is no version where I am not there for the blowup, because I will absolutely be telling this story for years."
"It's not going to blow up," Wren said. "We have rules."
"You have a folder," JJ said. "Which is different from rules working."
"The folder has the rules in it."
"I've read the folder," Devon said. "Rule seven is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a document that also has a rule about emergency stage kisses."
Wren opened her mouth to argue, and found, briefly, that she didn't have an argument ready, which had not happened to her in a negotiation since roughly the third grade. JJ, unhelpfully, said nothing at all, just took a slow sip of his coffee and looked, for one unguarded second, like a man doing very careful math about a question nobody had actually asked out loud yet.
"It's going to work," Wren said finally, "because we're both taking it seriously, as a job. Two people, doing a job, together, for six weeks."
"A job," Devon repeated, deadpan. "Sure. That's definitely what that arm thing was five minutes ago. A real professional moment."
"Devon."
"I'm just saying, as the witness, for accuracy," Devon said, holding both hands up, "that I have seen a lot of fake relationships in this exact booth, because apparently this coffee shop is where all of JJ's disasters come to rehearse, and none of them have looked like that."
JJ, to his credit, did not argue the point, which Wren noticed and chose, immediately, not to think about, filing it instead into the same folder in her head that already held the handshake and the joke about her three jobs comment and the arm along the back of the chair, a folder that was getting uncomfortably full for something that was, according to rule four, not supposed to be real at all.
"We should go," she said, standing up too fast, nearly knocking over her ruined oat milk latte. "We have a schedule to keep to before the wedding. Meeting my parents on video call this weekend, remember, since we're supposedly a couple who's been together two months and they haven't met you yet."
"Right," JJ said, standing too, matching her pace like it was second nature. "The video call. I've got a whole plan for that."
"You have a plan for everything."
"I contain multitudes," he said again, and offered her his hand as they walked out, easy as anything, no witnesses required this time, and Wren took it before she remembered she didn't have to.
Outside, the afternoon had gone gray and cool, the kind of weather that made the walk back to the apartment feel longer than it was, and JJ talked the whole way, about the video call, about which of his three jobs he could rearrange so he'd be free for it, about whether he should wear the good sweater or the slightly-less-good sweater that made him look, in his own words, more premed and less felony.
"You're not supposed to look premed," Wren said. "You're supposed to look like you."
"My actual self did not survive first contact with your aunt's tone of voice on speakerphone. I heard two sentences of that call through the kitchen wall and I already want to wear a tie."
"Don't wear a tie. It'll look like you're trying too hard, which is somehow worse than not trying at all with this family."
"Noted. No tie. Good sweater, no tie, mild eye contact, occasional mention of my three jobs so your dad understands I have a work ethic even if it does not currently include a five year plan in a binder."
"You say that like the binder is a joke."
"The binder is extremely charming, actually," JJ said, and something about the plainness of it, no punchline attached, made Wren glance sideways at him, and he just kept walking, hands in his pockets now that hers had slipped free somewhere around the corner of Fifth Street, whistling something that was definitely, again, a wedding march, and she let herself, just for the length of the block, not mind it at all.
By the time they reached the apartment, she had almost convinced herself that the whole afternoon, the arm along the chair, the eight out of ten, the plain unpunchlined compliment about her binder, had all been research. Data collection. Reps, exactly like he'd said. She almost believed it all the way up the stairs.
Then she opened her phone to check the time for the call, and found a text already waiting from her mother, sent twenty minutes earlier, three words long, the kind of short that meant her mother had typed and deleted several longer versions first. Your father's joining too. Wren read it twice, felt the easy afternoon fold itself back up into the shape of the thing it actually was, and called up the stairs after JJ that they might need the good sweater after all.