FORGE TO A NEW DAWB
Chapter Nine: The Reception
They made it through the receiving line, through dinner, through two of Aunt Carol's increasingly emotional toasts, on nothing but muscle memory and eight months of watching each other closely enough to fake it, and it was only when the band started the first slow song of the evening that the muscle memory ran out entirely.
"We should dance," JJ said, not quite meeting her eyes. "People are watching."
"People are always watching. That's the whole point of tonight."
"Right."
He held out his hand anyway, and she took it, and they moved onto the floor with a careful foot of space between them that no one who'd watched them at the rehearsal dinner would have believed for a second, both of them going through the motions of a couple while very deliberately not being one, for the first time since the fight.
"I said some things earlier I shouldn't have," JJ said, finally, quiet enough that only she could hear it over the band. "About folders. About needing clean stories. That wasn't fair, you were just scared, and scared people say a version of whatever's actually true underneath, and I threw it at you like a weapon instead of just telling you I was scared too."
"You had a point, though. I do build folders for things I'm afraid of. I've been doing it since I was about twelve, watching Marisol get everything right without trying, and deciding the only way to keep up was to have a system for it."
"I know. I've lived with you three weeks. I built a whole rule sheet around it, remember, half the rules in that document exist because you needed a system to feel safe enough to do this at all. I'm not mad about the folders, Wren. I like the folders. I just didn't want to be filed away in one."
Wren stopped moving, the two of them standing still in the middle of a floor full of swaying couples, and looked up at him properly for the first time since Marcus had cornered them by the drinks table. "You're not in a folder."
"No?"
"No. You broke every category I had. I had a rubric, JJ, a real one, forty two points, and none of it accounted for someone who eats an entire box of cereal like it's a personal grudge, or talks his way past my father in eleven minutes, or gets up at five in the morning to chase a dream he's scared to say out loud in case it doesn't work out. There's no line item for that. I stopped trying to file you around week two."
Something in his face cracked open, unguarded in a way she'd only glimpsed in pieces all weekend, by the kitchen door, on the porch, in the flour-dusted grin at nine in the morning. "Then what was rule seven, exactly, because I have been failing it since approximately the handshake."
"I've been failing it since the cereal," Wren said. "I just had better paperwork to hide it behind."
He laughed, short and startled and real, and some of the tension that had sat between them all afternoon finally broke, and for a second neither of them moved, the band still playing, the rest of the reception spinning on around them, oblivious to the fact that whatever this had started as, a job, a deal, a folder full of rules, it had stopped being any of those things somewhere between a coffee shop and a kitchen doorway and a man named Alvarez saying six a.m.
"So what happens now," JJ said. "In the car, rule four says it ends. That was the deal."
"Rule four was written by someone who thought this was going to stay fake the whole time."
"And now?"
"Now I think rule four might need an amendment," Wren said, and found, standing there in the middle of her cousin's wedding reception, that her heart was going faster than it had all weekend, faster even than during the moment Marcus had waved his phone around like evidence, and that she didn't want it to stop.
JJ reached up, slow enough that she had every chance to step back if she wanted to, and brushed a strand of hair away from her face, the same gesture from the coffee shop, the eight out of ten, except this time there was no witness they were performing for and no scale left to grade it on.
"For the record," he said, "this next part isn't in the rules at all."
"No," Wren agreed. "It isn't."
He kissed her once, brief and soft, the kind of kiss that asked a question rather than making a statement, and Wren answered it by not pulling away, standing on the dance floor of a lake house wedding with her whole careful, color-coded life quietly rearranging itself around one boy who had eaten her cereal on the worst best morning of her semester.
Somewhere near the edge of the floor, Wren caught a glimpse of Aunt Carol pressing a hand to her chest with theatrical delight, and her father, standing near the bar, watching the two of them with an expression that had finally, unmistakably, stopped looking like doubt.
They pulled apart slowly, both of them a little unsteady, and JJ rested his forehead against hers for just a moment, breathing out something that sounded almost like relief.
"So," he said. "Real. Officially. As of right now."
"As of right now," Wren agreed, "though I'm going to need to update the folder."
"Absolutely not."
"There has to be a new document. New rules. This is a completely different negotiation."
"Wren Kessler," JJ said, laughing again, pulling her back in against him as the song shifted into something slower still, "I would expect nothing less."
They stayed on the floor through two more songs, no space left between them at all now, and it was there that Aunt Carol found them, champagne in hand, eyes suspiciously bright.
"I have to say," she said, dabbing at the corner of one eye with a knuckle, "when I wrote that note on the invitation, I did not expect it to work quite this well. Your father and I were only trying to light a fire, sweetheart, we didn't think you'd bring back someone who'd have the whole family charmed by dessert."
"He's good at that," Wren said, and meant it in a way that had nothing to do with the act anymore.
"He is," Aunt Carol agreed, patting JJ's arm like he was already a fixture at every future holiday. "Your father's been telling Uncle Neil for the last hour about some culinary program, very impressed, I don't think I've heard him talk about anyone's plans that much since Marisol got into her program. You'll have to bring him to Thanksgiving properly this year, none of this floating business anymore."
She swept off toward the cake table before either of them could respond, already rehearsing the story for whoever she found next, and JJ looked down at Wren with an expression somewhere between disbelief and quiet, unguarded pride.
"Floating business," he repeated. "I think I just got promoted from rumor to fixture in under four minutes."
"Welcome to my family. It moves fast once it decides it likes you."
"Does it like me, though, or does it like the story."
Wren considered this seriously, because it deserved a serious answer, not a deflection. "Both, probably. But I like you regardless of the story, and that's the part that's actually true, so I think we're allowed to let the rest catch up."
Later, near the end of the night, when the band had wound down to something quiet and the guests had thinned to the die-hards still clustered around the last of the champagne, Wren found her father alone at the edge of the dance floor, watching the water go dark past the windows.
"He's a good one," her father said, without turning around, in the same flat voice he used for everything, except this time there was something warmer underneath it that she hadn't heard directed at her in longer than she wanted to admit. "Don't let the tuition talk make you think this family only wanted proof. We wanted to see you happy. Your aunt just has a strange way of asking for it."
"I know, Dad."
"You looked happy tonight. Actually happy. Not the version you put on for these things." He turned then, and studied her the way he'd studied JJ on the porch three days ago, careful, assessing, and this time landed, unmistakably, on approval. "Keep that one around."
"I plan to," Wren said, and found, saying it out loud for the first time without a folder or a rulebook standing between her and the truth of it, that it was the easiest sentence she'd said all weekend, easier even than the fake ones she'd spent three days rehearsing.