FORGE TO A NEW DAWB
Chapter Seven: Too Real
The toasts ran long, the way wedding toasts always do, and by the time the tables broke up for coffee and the last of the cake, Wren found JJ had disappeared from the porch entirely, and traced him, on instinct, to the kitchen.
He was standing just outside the swinging kitchen door, hands in his pockets, watching through the small round window like a man looking into a world he wasn't entirely sure he was allowed into, and inside, Alvarez was moving through the wreckage of the tasting plates with the brisk, unbothered precision of someone who had cooked a thousand weddings and would cook a thousand more.
She had almost missed him entirely, caught up as she'd been in the last of the toasts, Marisol's new husband getting choked up over a joke about their first apartment, Aunt Carol dabbing at her eyes with a napkin she'd clearly brought specifically for that purpose. It was only when she scanned the porch for JJ's easy grin, out of habit now more than necessity, and didn't find it, that she'd gone looking, and found him here instead, half hidden by the kitchen doorframe like a man casing a building he didn't think he was allowed to enter.
"You could just go in," Wren said.
JJ startled, then recovered fast, the easy grin sliding back into place a half second too late for her not to have seen underneath it. "Caterers get territorial about their kitchens on the day. Rule of the trade. You don't just wander in."
"You've been talking about this man for eight months. You're not going to get a better chance than tonight."
"I know."
"So why are you standing at a window instead of walking through a door, when you have been talking about this exact chance since the day I met you, cereal bowl in hand, before I even knew your last name."
JJ was quiet for a second, long enough that Wren almost regretted asking, and when he answered his voice had none of its usual quickness, stripped down to something plainer and more tired. "Because if I go in there and he tells me I'm not good enough, I'd rather it happen some other night. Some night that isn't already the best night I've had in a while, for reasons that have nothing to do with cooking."
Wren went very still. "JJ."
"I know, I know. Rule seven. Forget I said it."
"That's not, I wasn't going to quote the rule at you."
"You were thinking about it, though."
She had been, in fact, thinking about exactly that, the folder, the handshake, the whole careful architecture they'd built to keep this from becoming the thing it was very clearly, quietly, becoming anyway, and she found, standing in a hallway that smelled like lake water and cut flowers, that she didn't actually want to reach for the rule at all.
"I was thinking," she said slowly, "that you've spent this whole weekend being braver about my family than you are about your own dream, and that seems backward."
JJ looked at her for a long moment, something unguarded and a little startled moving across his face, and then, before either of them could decide what to do with the sudden, unplanned honesty of it, the kitchen door swung open and Alvarez himself stepped out, wiping his hands on a towel, looking mildly surprised to find two people loitering outside his kitchen like teenagers outside a principal's office.
"You're the boyfriend," Alvarez said, to JJ, not unkindly, just factual, the way he seemed to say everything. "Marisol mentioned you work the Fifth Street route. You delivered to my place twice last winter."
JJ blinked. "You remember that?"
"I remember the guy who didn't complain about the stairs in the rain and still tipped himself out of his own pocket to cover a short order. That's not nothing, in this business." Alvarez studied him another second, the same quick, assessing look from earlier, except this time it didn't move on right away. "You cook?"
"Trying to. Applying to a program. Trying to get somebody like you to look at the application before I send it, actually."
"Huh." Alvarez glanced at Wren, then back to JJ, and something in his face shifted, not quite a smile, but close. "Come by the truck tomorrow morning before the ceremony. Six a.m. I need an extra set of hands on the appetizer trays anyway, and I'll look at whatever you bring me while you work. No promises."
He disappeared back through the swinging door before JJ could do more than stammer out a thank you, and Wren watched the moment land on him in real time, the sheer disbelieving joy of it breaking across his face in a way she hadn't seen all weekend, not the performance grin, not the eight out of ten, something entirely unrehearsed and entirely his own.
"Six a.m.," he said, half to himself. "Wren, six a.m."
"I heard him."
"I have to be there. I have to actually be good tomorrow, not just charming, actually good, in front of the one person whose opinion on this has ever mattered."
"You will be."
"You don't know that."
"I do, actually," Wren said, and meant it more than she'd meant to let herself mean anything all weekend. "I've watched you talk your way through my entire skeptical family for three days straight without a single crack showing. Whatever you bring that man tomorrow, it's going to be good, because you don't know how to do anything half-hearted, even the fake stuff."
JJ looked at her like she'd said something enormous, which, she realized a half second too late, she probably had, and the hallway went very quiet, the noise of the reception muffled behind the door, the lake dark and glinting somewhere past the windows, and for one unbearably long second neither of them moved, or spoke, or reached for a rule to hide behind.
"Wren," he said, low.
"Don't," she said, though she didn't move away either. "Not here. Not with Marcus somewhere in that room deciding whether to run a background check on our anniversary."
"Right," JJ said, and stepped back first, giving them both the distance the moment needed, though his voice had gone rough in a way that told her the retreat had cost him something. "Not here."
They walked back to the reception in silence, close enough that their hands brushed twice without either of them quite reaching to close the gap.
Inside, the party had shifted into its later, looser stage, the band playing something slow, Marisol and her new husband holding onto each other in the middle of the floor like the rest of the room had gone quiet just for them, and Aunt Carol making the rounds with a glass of champagne, collecting compliments about the venue like a woman gathering flowers.
"There you two are," Aunt Carol said, spotting them at the edge of the dance floor. "I was starting to think you'd run off. Go on, dance, it's practically required at this point in the night, everyone's watching the happy couples."
Wren felt the word land, happy couples, and glanced at JJ, who held out his hand with a small, rueful smile, an unspoken acknowledgment that neither of them had the energy left tonight to argue about whether this counted as a rule one situation or not.
They danced slower than the song technically called for, JJ's hand warm at the small of her back, Wren's cheek close enough to his shoulder that she could hear him breathing, and for a few minutes neither of them said anything at all, the easy performance of the last three days folding into something that didn't need commentary or witnesses to justify it.
"Six a.m.," JJ murmured eventually, into her hair. "I should probably actually sleep tonight."
"You should probably actually sleep tonight," Wren agreed, not moving.
"I'm not currently doing that. Sleeping. Or moving toward it."
"Neither am I."
The song ended, and another one started, slower still, and across the floor Wren caught Preston watching them with an expression she couldn't quite read, something between confusion and something that looked, unexpectedly, almost like envy, before he turned back to his own conversation and let it go. She spent the rest of the night watching JJ instead, laughing at Aunt Carol's stories, letting Preston's small digs slide off him like water, glancing over at her more than once in a way that had stopped, sometime in the last hour, looking like performance at all, and thinking, with a kind of quiet dread she hadn't expected to feel about her own fake relationship, that rule four was in considerably worse shape than either of them had planned for, and that no amount of folders, rubrics, or carefully worded rules was going to be enough to put it back together the way they'd left it before this weekend began.