‘There is no universe in which I’m letting that high-school mean-girl shit stand,’ Dylan said. ‘I got a lecture afterwardsabout how I need to rein myself in or the audience is going to see me as this angry monster—’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Babe, no need,’ she said. ‘I know this is all for TV and they want us all to play these perfect simple characters, but I want – no, Ineed– to stay me, or I’m going to lose my mind.’
The drawn, worried look was coming back onto her face, so I nudged her with my elbow. ‘Thank you for this morning, too,’ I said. ‘For making everyone listen to me with the shopping list thing.’
Dylan smiled again, and the clouds cleared. ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘You ever need something shouted, you come to me. My mum voice can be heard across the other side of a soccer field.’
‘I wish I could get people’s attention like that,’ I said wistfully.
‘Well, I wish I had your organisational skills,’ she said. ‘Putting together that meal plan was like solving a fucking Rubik’s cube.’
‘It wasn’t that hard.’
‘Yes, it was,’ she said. ‘If you ever get sick of mechanic-ing, you should go into, like, project management. You’d be great at it.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘If I could ever get people to listen to me.’
‘We could be a project management duo, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll shout at ’em, you organise ’em. You be the carrot, I’ll be the stick. Perfect team.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ I said. ‘Now we just have to think ofa name for our new project management company, and we’re in business.’
‘We could Brangelina our names together,’ she said. ‘Dylanda. Dylandie. Dylda. Dyldie – nope, we should probably stay away from anything that sounds like dildo.’
‘We might get some interesting clientele.’
She laughed. ‘Oh God, totally,’ she said. ‘What about… Amandylan? Mandylan?’
‘That last one might be the winner,’ I said. ‘One, it’s got both our names. Two, it’ll remind everyone how we met.’
‘Hmmm?’
‘Man Dylan,’ I said. ‘We met dating Man Dylan.’
She laughed again. ‘That’s absolutely it, then. Mandylan Project Management Pty Ltd, at your service.’
‘What do you think of him?’
‘Hmmm?’
‘We never really got a chance to talk about it, with everything that happened,’ I said. ‘Not properly. What do you think of Man Dylan?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hot. Super hot. Absolute flames. Hottest Romeo they’ve had in years.’
‘Do you think they’ll make him take his shirt off today? Get his abs out?’
‘For photo shoot day? Definitely,’ she said. ‘He’s a professional sportsman. He has to be ripped. Plus, he probably already used up like fifty per cent of his allowable Shirt Wearing Screen Quota for the season last night.’
‘I just hope we get the chance to talk to him some more,’ I said. ‘I had such a lovely conversation with him last night. He’s so sweet. So nice. I want to get to know him better.’
I meant it, too. I wasn’t sure entirelywhenI’d decided it – sometime between Dylan standing next to me in the kitchen in that swishy lime green dress and making everyone listen to me, and my eight thousandth lecture to myself about how I was making only good choices from now on – but I had.
Encouraging my attraction to Dylan was a bad, self-sabotaging, friendship-destroying idea. But she wasn’t the only Dylan onMarry Me, JulietI could nurture an attraction to.
In fact, if you ignored the whole thing where I looked into Dylan’s eyes and various tectonic events occurred, the First Night Party had gone as well as it possibly could have. I liked Romeo-Dylan, genuinely liked him. And it seemed that he liked me back, or he wouldn’t have given me the first necklace. I could do a whole lot worse than that lovely, kind-eyed man as a rebound.
‘Oh, sure,’ Dylan said airily. ‘But, like, pace yourself.’
