“We do. We know Nick.”
Carly stared at her. “Nick … Jacobs?” she managed, her heart thudding.
“Yeah, Nick Jacobs! He’s a big deal photographer now, right? Marcus says he’s killing it.”
Carly gave a mirthless laugh. “Absolutely not.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s so—”Pretentious. Uptight. Smug. Judgemental.Carly swallowed all those adjectives and searched her brain for something neutral. “Busy. He’s busy doing wedding stuff.”And making me miserable.She schooled her face into the easiest and breeziest it had ever been, hoping it was enough to fool Heather. “I told you, I’ll figure it out on my own. You don’t need to worry about this. You don’t need to worry about anything, you’re the bride!”
Heather gave her another skeptical look, confirming Carly’s suspicion that she might have slipped from easy and breezy into maniacal and crazed. She tried to pull it back a little.
“Nick is great,” she lied, “but I don’t think he’ll want to help me.”
She could just imagine how he’d respond if she asked.Euhhh, no. She blinked hard so she wouldn’t roll her eyes at the memory of his verbal tic, which he threw around like he was desperate for everyone to know he’d danced at POB.We get it Nick, you’re a smoking hot success with an Australian accent who also speaks fluent French.
“You could at least ask.”
I could also dance the entire second act ofSwan Lakewearing nothing but dead pointe shoes.
“I don’t think so,” Carly said, and she turned to face the beach and started to wade back toward the sand.
“Why not?” Heather said, following her. “Do you not like him or something?”
Oh God. That wasn’t good. Carly didn’t need Heather worrying about her career prospectsorabout her desire to feed the best man to a hungry shark. She needed Heather happy, carefree, glowing. After everything Heather had been through, that’s what she deserved.
“I like him just fine,” Carly lied again, exiting the water and heading for their bags and towels. She picked up her towel and prepared for the acting performance of a lifetime. “I see why Marcus likes him so much.” A lie. “And he’s been a great guide to Sydney.” Also a lie, the man was allergic to maps. “And he’s not bad to look at.” Not strictly a lie, but irrelevant.
Heather nodded as she dried herself off. “Right? I’m engaged and everything, but my eyes work. And uh, yum.”
Sure, if you like your men haughty and superior.“Mmhmmm,” Carly said, hoping Heather took the sound as agreement and not as an unwillingness to open her mouth in case she blew her cover. As far as Heather needed to know, she and Nick were getting on famously.
“Marcus is so glad to have him back. He’s been gone forever, and they were really close when they were younger. Marcus considered asking Alice to be his best man, but she called dibs on officiating about five seconds after we told her we were engaged, so Nick was the obvious choice.”
Carly smiled, hoping she looked charmed and touched. If only Alice had demanded to be best man. “Well, Nick and I are going to make sure this wedding is everything you’ve dreamed of. Which won’t leave any time for photography.”
“If it’s going to get you promoted, you should at least give it a try. What’s the worst that could happen?”
One of us could end up mysteriously devoured by a crocodile?
“I don’t …” she started, but she had no idea how to finish the sentence. No idea how to tell her friend that the last person she wanted help from was Marcus’s condescending, big deal best man. Instead, she threw Heather what she hoped looked like a confident smile, as though that thought didn’t make her queasy. “I promise that if I can’t think of a solution myself, I’ll ask him.”
Which meant she would absolutely, positively, have to think of a solution herself. Something that didn’t require help from her best friend or her parents, she thought, as she dried herself off, a little more vigorously than was strictly necessary. Or from a man who’d made his disdain for her very clear.
Except that, by the time she got into bed that night, she hadn’t figured something else out. She sat on the bed in her apartment, staring at Catherine’s email. Then she pulled up her calendar app and swiped, yet again, through the weeks until she arrived at the start of rehearsals for the spring season. Not even a month. She went back to the email, even though she had it memorized by now. Asking Heather to put in a good word for her was out of the question. So was letting her parents “help her out a little,” which was how they would describe donating several new Steinways for NYB’s accompanists.
She sighed and opened Instagram. One hundred and three followers, and most of them were company members or cousins. She tossed the phone down onto the covers and groaned petulantly at the ceiling and accepted the awful reality. Heather was so sensible, so wise, so right all the time, goddammit. But did she have to be right this time, too?
Chapter 8
Nick’s stomach grumbled as he pulled his T-shirt over his head. He’d woken up well before his alarm and laid in bed, unable to go back to sleep. And now he was suddenly ravenous. He’d decided to give up on sleep and head downstairs for breakfast and was just reaching into a drawer for a pair of shorts when there was a slow, quiet knock on his door.
“One sec,” he called. He pulled his shorts on hastily, noticing as he did that the bruises on his knees and at the backs of his legs had turned an unpleasant vomit-green colour, and zipped up his fly as he walked to the door.
He pulled the door open, one hand still on the button of his fly, and felt his head jerk back in surprise.
It was Carly, a takeaway coffee cup in each hand, and a brown paper bag hanging from her wrist. She was wearing denim shorts and a loose pale blue linen blouse, under which he could just see the thin black straps of a bra. Her hair was pulled up in a high bun this morning, but a few curly red strands had already fallen out and were stuck to the sides of her long neck. It made her look frazzled, an impression reinforced by the serious little frown on her face.
