Rowe
Oh, no.
Looking at Deon, standing in the hall and grinning at me, all I could see was the thousand dollars I had yet to earn floating to the ground. Burning away. Crumbling into dust.
“Deon,” I said weakly, not daring to look down at the back of Xavi’s head in case I gave the game away. “How are you? I’m just here for a wedding.”
“No way!” Deon exclaimed. “Aiden and Cade, right?”
I nodded reluctantly as we stepped out more fully into the corridor. “Small world.”
“And who’s this?” Deon asked, adjusting his gaze lower to Xavi.
I’d known he would ask. It was inevitable.
But this was Deon. Not a stranger. Not one of Xavi’s friends who I was never going to see again. He knew me, and he would still know me after today, and the next time we hung out I was going to have to explain all of this away.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if one person here knew the truth. I could trust Deon. It wasn’t like he was going to go around running his mouth. He was –
“There you are!”
I turned and saw Keaton and Olly coming towards us. Xavi’s best friend. The person he wanted to convince the most. And not just them – behind, I saw Ace and Brody. Xavi’s ex. The person he wanted to convince the second most.
We were screwed.
“We didn’t want to wait in line,” Xavi was saying, turning towards them and stepping out into the hall past Deon.
“Us, either,” Keaton grinned.
“So?” Deon asked expectantly. I looked back at him. I had been hoping he would get distracted.
“This is my boyfriend, Xavi,” I said, sticking what I hoped was a convincing smile on my face. I prayed he wasn’t going to react badly. He knew me too well. He would know this wasn’t the truth.
Deon gave a snort of laughter. “No, he is –”
I pretended to stumble and hit him with my cane, shutting him up before he finished the sentence. I needed him to be quiet. If he spilled the beans here in front of all the others, it was over, and I wouldn’t get the rest of my payment. I needed that money. “Oh, sorry about that,” I said. “Guess I’m just a little clumsy. You haven’t met Xavi yet, right? We haven’t seen each other for a while. The two of us got together since I saw you last.”
It wasn’t exactly a convincing story. The last time I’d seen Deon had been last weekend. One of my shifts got canceled at the last minute because they didn’t have enough customer bookings, so we’d ended up hanging out for a couple of hours. There was little chance I would have managed to get a boyfriend who was serious enough to take me to a wedding as his guest since then.
“What?” Deon asked, but I could see a glimmer of something in his eyes. He had no idea what was going on, but he was a good enough friend that he was going to try to play along as much as he could. I saw realization dawn on his face that that was what he needed to do.
“It’s a small world, isn’t it?” I babbled, aware I was talking just a little too loud and a little too fast. “You know someone in the wedding party?”
“Uh, yeah.” Deon blinked a couple of times and shook his head as if to clear it, then nodded. “I actually work with one of the grooms. Aiden. He’s the head of the physio practice where I work.”
“Oh, right,” I said, snapping my fingers. I should have put two and two together from the start. I knew he worked somewhere like that. “That makes sense. Well, I’m just here as Xavi’s date. I didn’t expect to see anyone I knew.”
Xavi shifted awkwardly at my side. We just stood in silence for a moment. I glanced back and saw that the others had disappeared into their rooms, letting us off the hook. Still, I couldn’t get into it with Deon now – I couldn’t let him know the truth or drop the act. They were behind doors, not behind soundproof barriers. And they could come back out into the corridor again at any time.
“Right,” Deon said, turning into a long drawl that suggested he knew something was up. He must have understood my meaning. That I wasn’t expecting to run into anyone who could spot our lie. “Well, nice to meet you, Xavi, I guess.”
“You, too,” Xavi nodded at him, but it was stiff and sour. He looked back at me immediately, pretty much dismissing Deon where he stood. “We should get back downstairs,” he said. “In case they call us for photos.”
The idea of being in Aiden and Cade’s wedding photographs for all time was disturbing to me – uncomfortable to the highest degree – but I nodded, taking this for what it was on the surface. An excuse to head back to the whole party and not stay with Deon. If he tried to make me get into any of the photos for real, I would have to make some kind of excuse. I couldn’t let these good people have a fake in all of their wedding albums. “Let’s go, then,” I said.
“I’m headed back that way, too,” Deon said. Even as we started to walk, he was sauntering behind us. I stepped to the side of the hall, giving him an apologetic look.
“I’m slow today,” I said. An excuse to avoid the awkwardness of walking down the whole way with him behind us. I could feel the tension radiating off Xavi ahead of me. “You should go ahead.”
