I was usually the one who did the serving.
I would sit in the wings, catching glimpses of the beautiful view, wishing I were the one at the table who was enjoying it instead. I shouldn’t be here, should I? Not sitting next to Fen. I was having an affair, that’s what I was doing. I was a fraud. A cheat.
A cheater.
But even as I wiped my sweaty brow, close to a minor breakdown, no one noticed. Not even Fen. He was… extraordinarily happy. Maybe even radiant. His bare leg pressed against mineunder the table, and I nearly jumped out of my own skin. He noticed that. Without looking at me, he put a firm hand on my knee, not in a sexy way, but in a calming way. I blew out a long, slow breath and shut my eyes for a moment.
I could do this.
He gently squeezed my knee, and I put my hand atop his. Then we glanced at each other under our eyelashes and broke apart. I looked across the table. Had Jasmine seen us? I couldn’t tell.
“It smells wonderful,” I said.
Fen shook his head. “No need to pretend. We’ll show you. Have you never had Lebanese food back in L.A.?”
I spotted familiar bright pink pickles on the table. “Wait, like Zankou Chicken?”
He gave me a thumbs-up as his mother cheered. “Armenian! There you go, Miss Jane.”
“My dad’s addicted to their garlic sauce,” I admitted, and they pointed it out to me, along with a lot of other dishes, including hummus, tabbouleh, and a meatless tartar made from bulgur.
“Don’t touch the fattoush unless you like soggy bread,” Ani advised when the caterers were out of earshot.
But when they brought kebabs of chicken and shrimp that smelled of lemon and woodfire, everyone dug in.
“Shrimp!” Fen said, cheerful.
“I’m going to weep,” Ari agreed, filling up his plate with skewers of charred shrimp.
“Calm yourself,” Jasmine said. “My goodness, you act like I don’t feed you.”
Fen explained, “My father hates shrimp and throws a fit if it shows up in the house—you know, screaming at a caterer in the middle of a party, blood pressure danger, that kind of thing.”
Jasmine sighed. “We all have our foibles. Let us not spoil this beautiful afternoon. Just eat your shrimp and be well. And if any of you speak of this to him, I will deny it and forget I ever knew your faces.”
Ani grinned and quietly took two more skewers before calling out, “We’re going to need all the prawns you’ve got, please,” to the caterer at the grill. “What? They aren’t actually shrimp, you know.”
Things got better after that. Shrimp or prawn, the coveted kebab actually was worth hoarding—like, craveably, mouthwateringly delicious. We all indulged while talking about food… and about Serj, to Jasmine’s constant exasperation. But that put her on the defense, and as long as she stayed there, it meant I had some breathing room. And most of it was buoyant teasing. Fen never got too angry about his father, and Ari was only casually spiteful, just your average teen with a chip on his shoulder. Nothing serious.
Eventually, though, the conversation turned to the missing Sarafian sibling when Fen called me “one of the fairy folk” because the heels of my feet didn’t touch the patio floor in the seats. Ani began reciting a list of everyone’s heights—like Fen, she definitely inherited her mother’s tall stature.
“Eddie is two and one-quarter inches shorter than me,” she reported.
Ugh. Next topic, please. But it was already hanging in the air,and I could feel Jasmine’s eyes boring into my face from across the table.Please don’t ask me about the apartment.
“By the way,” she said in calm, low voice. “I heard back from Gordon.”
Mad Dog’s lawyer.
“Oh?” I said, thrown off balance. I didn’t really want to talk about this in front of everyone. Especially not Fen. It felt as though she were putting me on the spot, forcing me to play the role of the patient and loyal girlfriend, waiting on news about her noble beau, continents away.
She nodded. “They were involved in a legal snafu with customs. It seems as if Serj’s lawyer is getting it all straightened out, though.”
Uh…? What?
“?‘Legal snafu’?” Fen repeated. “What the hell does that mean?”
Jasmine raised both hands and shrugged slowly. “It’s all I know, my love. Your father is seeing someone about it today in the bay.”
