“Right.” I bobbed my head more than necessary.
If I was going to be a convincing fake fiancée, I was going to have to get a lot better at standing up to questioning from my closest friends.
Lunch arrived as usual,at once too early for an adult to eat and too late for kids who desperately needed to get their wiggles out. I’d managed to catch a few glimpses of Ryan as he toured the school with Lauren and Stella, and again when the phys ed teacher invited him to join some activities with the kindergarten class.
Ryan’s jumping jacks were outstanding.
When I got back to my room after dropping my class off in the cafeteria, Grace, Jamie, and Audrey were already waiting for me at the back table like a friendly little firing squad.
My ass hadn’t even met the seat when Grace said, “Something happened with you and the dude.”
I took my time unpacking my lunch and opening a can of seltzer. I didn’t really know what to tell them because I didn’t know the answer myself. And I didn’t want to disclose too much and mess things up for Ryan’s business deals. These women were not about to call up a sports podcast and drop the inside knowledge, but if this was serious enough to get married, it was probably serious enough to keep to myself.
But I had to tell them something. It would be weird to show up here in a few weeks and announce we were engaged after insisting we were just friends. So, I stayed as close to the truth as possible.
“When we were in high school,” I started, tearing my kinda-stale pita into triangles, “we promised to marry each other if we weren’t already married at thirty.” I wrenched open the container of hummus without glancing up at them. “He hit thirty at the end of March. I’ll be there in June. And neither of us are anywhere near married.”
I stuffed a huge chunk of pita into my mouth and shrugged.
“I’m sorry,” Grace said. “What?”
“You’re in a marriage pact,” Audrey said, pointing a celery stick at me. “WithRyan Ralston.”
“I believe you,” Jamie said. “Obviously, I love you and trust you and would never doubt you. But if anyone else told me that story, I’d say it was a darling work of fiction.”
“Believe me, it’s the truth.” I scooped an obscene amount of hummus onto my pita. “I have it in writing.”
“You—you what?” Grace stared at me like she’d never seen me before. “Like, a contract?”
I scrolled through my photos, going way back to high school again, and swiped until I found it. “Like I said, we made a promise at the end of high school. And we wrote it down.”
I put my phone on the table and they leaned in to see the photo of my inscription in Ryan’s yearbook. A minute passed while they read and I ate the mismatched snacks I’d grabbed on my way out of the apartment this morning.
“Why was the cutoff thirty?” Audrey asked.
“Because we were infants and we thought we knew everything,” I said. “Thirty seemed a million years away.”
“You signed it, ‘Love forever, Your (probably) future wife,’” Jamie said, zooming in on the screen. “You also wrote that it was a binding contract and even if he tossed his yearbook off a pier, you’d always have proof.”
I held out my hands. “Yes, to answer your question, I have always been excessively dramatic.”
“You know that sort of thing isn’t binding unless a witch blessed the bargain,” Jamie said.
I laughed. “I didn’t know that, but he agreed to the deal.” I reached for my phone and swiped to the next photo, the one Ryan had texted to me all those years ago ashisproof. It simply read,I’ll hold you to it. Your husband.
“Goddammit that’s romantic,” Audrey sighed.
Grace brought a hand to her mouth. “Wow.”
“He’s here,” Jamie said, awe in her voice, “because he’s come to collect. You texted him on his birthday and he wanted to see youthatweekend.”
“He waited until it was time,” Audrey said. “After all these years.”
“He wants to go through with it,” Grace said.
I managed a bumbly nod. “I mean, yeah, that’s kind of what we’ve been talking about recently.”
“How serious is this?” Grace asked. “Are you actually considering it?”
