by Alina Jacobs
“I thought the ratio at these things was going to be in my favor,” he complained as the bartender mixed the drinks with more of a flourish than I really thought was necessary given the circumstances. “But of course, all the women here just flock to the top ten percent of guys.” He jerked his head toward the back of the bar.
I followed the motion to see that Sophie had already ditched me and was in line for an Eddie Redmayne lookalike. “Sorry!” she mouthed from across the room.
“Fair-weather friend!” I mouthed back. “I’ll, um, do a speed date with you,” I told the guy and took a sip of my drink.
“You will?” he seemed shocked.
“Sure,” I said weakly as he led me to a table near the gaggle of women.
“You get out often?” I asked him, taking my seat.
“I try.” He sighed. “I guess you want to know if I have a job and a house.”
“I uh—”
“Well I have a high-paying job, but I live with my mom!” he said defensively.
“Well—”
His eyes narrowed, and he exploded, “You women are all the same! Always judging us men. And after I bought you a drink and everything!”
“Dude,” I said, “I live with my parents. No judgment here.”
“Oh,” the guy said sheepishly. “I just get a lot of flak. I’m a little defensive.”
“I bet,” I said.
“So you want to hook up?” he asked hopefully.
“Can I think about it?”
Thought about it and no.
Gunner came over to the table next to me to herd the women away.
“There are other men here,” he told them. He pulled me out of my seat and pushed a thin blond woman down in front of my former speed date.
“We have to keep it moving,” he told me, shoving me into the seat in front of a dark-haired man who was looking down at his phone.
Great. Another person with zero social skills. I took a sip of my drink then choked on it when the man looked up.
“You!” I hissed as the red alcohol dribbled down my chin.
“You shouldn’t drink that if some strange man bought it for you,” Mark said with a frown.
“I’m not paying twenty dollars for a cocktail,” I said flatly. “So this is a risk I’m willing to take.”
Mark took the glass from me and dumped it into the planter behind him.
“Hey!” I shrieked, “I needed that! You better buy me another one!”
“I did you a favor,” Mark said, crossing his arms.
“Hardly. I think I’d rather go back to speed dating with the future incel over there.” I jerked my head over to my former speed date. But the blond woman was flirting and laughing with him.
“You’re a software engineer?” she asked with a giggle.
“I can hack your phone,” the guy said.
“Oh really?” she snorted and handed it over.
“What’s your password?”
She told him, and he held up the phone.
“See? Hacked!”
The woman laughed.
Mark was incensed. “That woman called me a lunatic!” he hissed at me. “I have more money and all my hair. How is this not working? He even used a cheesy pickup line.”
I rolled my eyes. The speed date was supposed to be five minutes. Only a minute had gone by on the timer.
“None of my pickup lines were that cheesy,” Mark complained.
“You have a list of pickup lines?” I said, raising an eyebrow.
Mark glared at me defensively. “No.”
“Liar. Let me hear one.”
“No,” he said, his arm moving subtly beside him on the bench. Something fluttered.
“You dropped it under the table!” I said loudly. Mark’s eyes went wide when I scrambled under the table for the list.
“It’s mine!” Mark growled, stuffing his huge form under the small café table. The paper was next to his foot, and I grabbed it. He pinned my wrist in his large hand, his other trying to pry open my fingers.
“Good luck,” I taunted, squeezing my fist tight. “You can try to take it back, but I’m a seamstress, and my hands are hella strong! You don’t want me to give you a hand job, because I’ll twist your dick off.”
Mark looked at me apprehensively. “That’s—that’s not—”
I used the distraction to reach down and tickle the bare skin under his dress pant leg with my nails. Mark jerked up and banged his head under the table. The motion made me release my grip on the list. Mark and I both snatched at the scrap of paper, but I was smaller and quicker. Prize in hand, I scrambled back up to my seat.
I read the list aloud as Mark tried to extricate all six foot five of himself from under the table.
“‘Well, here I am. What are your other two wishes?’” I chortled, reading from the list.
“That’s not yours!” Mark protested.
“‘Are you a parking ticket? Because you’ve got FINE written all over you.’” I blew a raspberry. “Lame.”
“Give that back!” He swiped across the table at me.
“These are terrible.”
“Like you could do any better.”
“Of course I could,” I said confidently.
“Oh yeah?” Mark crossed his arms. “Give me your best shot.”
“Okay, the best opening line of all time is, What’s your favorite dinosaur?”
“What kind of question is that?” Mark retorted.
“An awesome one. So what’s your favorite dinosaur?”
“Velociraptor,” Mark said without missing a beat. “What’s yours?”
“Easy. Pachycephalosaurus.”
Mark frowned.
“From The Land Before Time? Duh! Honestly, you can’t ask questions like that if you can’t even name dinosaurs.”
“Velociraptors are far superior.”
“I made a sexy velociraptor costume once,” I blurted out.
“What, why? How does that even work?”
“It was for a Halloween contest. A lot of people just do straight-up bras and panties with a tail, but I went above and beyond!” I bragged. “See,” I said, flipping to the photo on my phone. “I made a skimpy catsuit with the holes in the pattern of reptile skin. You can’t tell me that this isn’t more reptilian than a stupid bra and panties with a tail tacked on like some ‘seamstresses’ did. I totally should have won the costume contest,” I said, zooming in on the picture so that Mark could fully appreciate the detailing on the outfit. “I had to have a friend sew me into it too.”
Mark made a strangled noise. It was then that I realized that Mark probably was not, in fact, impressed by the intricate lacing I’d done to make a pattern and was instead more than likely concentrating on the barely-there bodysuit that scarcely covered my tits and had a stripe down each leg that dissipated into a thin lace pattern on the outsides of my thighs. It was also obvious that I was not wearing anything in the way of undergarments.
Mark swallowed.
“Er—it’s, ah, crazy that I didn’t win, right? It’s um…” I shoved the phone back in my bag. “It’s pretty wild.”
Marks eyes had a sort of glazed look, but it wasn’t bored glazed.
It IS boredom, I told myself furiously, because I didn’t think I could handle it being anything else.
10
Mark
Why had Brea showed me that image?
“Did you meet anyone?” Finn asked me.
Why was Brea even there?
“Hellooo?”
“What?”
“Did you meet the love of your life at the speed dating yesterday?” Finn joked.
Don’t think about that picture.
“No,” I said gruffly and turned back to my computer to try and fail to work.
“You didn’t get a single number?” Finn prodded, settling on the edge of my desk.
“I don’t need a collection of phone numbers from a bunch of gold diggers.”
“They couldn’t have all been bad,�
� Finn cajoled. “Surely there was someone there who liked you for your sparkling personality.”
I looked up at him. “Is there something you need from me?”
“I just wanted to see how you were.”
“All of you need to stop treating me like I’m some sort of invalid,” I snapped, knowing I was being too harsh but unable to stop it. “I don’t need a girlfriend, because she’s just going to distract me, and you and my family are doing quite enough of that.”
Finn was silent for a moment.
“Sorry. I just need to get some work done,” I told him lamely.
He patted me on the shoulder.
For all my misplaced ire, I still couldn’t concentrate after Finn left. Normally, over the last couple of years, when I was having trouble concentrating, my thoughts turned to that night when my world had ended. But now? Now all I could think about was Brea.
Why had she shown me that picture?
Over the next few days, I barely accomplished anything on my to-do list. I had trouble sleeping. I spent hours scrolling through Brea’s Instagram feed. I had no idea how anyone could post thousands of pictures, but there they were—usually her modeling or displaying something she had sewn. By the time I finally started to calm back down, it was time for yet another wedding-planning meeting.
Of course Wes had flaked out. I was regretting agreeing to be the best man, especially when I saw the long wood table in the Weddings in the City office covered with a dizzying array of paint swatches, pictures of flowers, fabric swatches, and a small-scale model of the Holbrook estate ballroom.
I felt nauseous. That was where it had happened, when my whole family had almost died, and it was all my fault.
“I can’t stay long,” I told Liz after greeting her.
“Why? Do you have another speed-dating extravaganza to attend?” Brea interjected.
“You went to speed dating?” Liz exclaimed. “I’ve done those before. The men are usually weirdos.”
Brea snickered.
“But you’re not a loser, Mark,” Liz added.
“Thank you for the vote of confidence.”
“Since you’re supposed to be the stand-in for everyone’s favorite Holbrook,” Brea drawled and gestured to a plan of the Holbrook estate grounds, “how do you feel about having the ceremony on the terrace? The other alternative is to set it up out in the gardens.”
I tried to focus past the anxiety about having to go back to the Holbrook estate. Over the last year and a half, my mother had been in charge of organizing the rebuilding effort after the fire, but I had refused to visit the property.
Don’t think about it. You can come up with some excuse not to be there.
But I would have to be there for the wedding.
There will be alcohol. Anything can be withstood with alcohol.
“I’m not sure if we should put the open bar here or here,” Brea said, pointing to two locations on the site plan. “It could really change the flow of the whole space. What do you think, Mark?”
I shook myself. “I—sorry, what was the question?”
Brea gave me a smug look. Suddenly it all made sense.
“While he gets that big brain going, I need a restroom break,” Liz said, standing up.
“I’ll show you where the powder room is,” Ivy said, leading her away.
As soon as they were gone, I turned to Brea, eyes narrowed. “You’re trying to make me quit,” I hissed at her.
“No, I’m not!” she said indignantly.
“Yes, you are. The excessively long meetings, the discussions about trivial inane details…”
“No detail is too small for the perfect wedding!” Brea protested.
I leaned over the table, palms pressed flat against it. “You’re trying to live your dream of being a bride vicariously through Liz.”
“Never.”
“Admit it.” I jabbed a knife hand at her, since it was rude to point after all. “But there’s one thing you sorely miscalculated on.”
She glared at me, and I smirked at her. “I was in the Marines. All I did, all day long, day after tedious fucking day, was suffer through boring meetings complete with hideous text-heavy PowerPoint presentations. Now that I run a company, I spend my day in more boring, tedious meetings. I’m not going to be the one who quits. You are.”
11
Brea
“Why are there men at this bridal tea?” Elsie asked a week later, wrinkling her nose as she arranged an elaborate tier of tea sandwiches on the buffet table.
“There aren’t supposed to be,” I said in shock. I had spent the last week carefully planning a tasteful feminine event with imported teas from Asia and Russia and light games.
Now there was a group of tall, dark-haired men in suits crowded around the front of the room next to one of the alcohol tables.
“Oh, Brea, don’t be mad!” Liz said. “I had to bring Wes. I hardly ever get to see him. And he was only going to come if he was allowed to bring reinforcements.”
Mark took up one of the champagne flutes, each with a plump raspberry for decoration, and drained it.
“I think the raspberry could have been sweeter,” he drawled, coming over to me. “I would have thought you would have caught that.”
“You can’t be here. We don’t have enough food,” I said flatly to Mark.
“Another demerit against your so-called excellent wedding-planning skills,” he said, loading up a plate of sandwiches.
“You need to put some of those back.”
Mark leveled his gaze at me and turned the plate over. The little sandwiches bounced onto the tiered glass platter. I bit back a curse and hastily rearranged them.
“That green one is in the wrong spot,” he said, watching me.
“It’s a cucumber sandwich,” I shot back. “And you’re supposed to take one of each. This party is providing light refreshments, not a meal.”
“Hm,” Mark grunted. “I figured it would be one of those parties where the food was more decoration than anything else. Fortunately, I brought snacks,” he said as he walked away.
“You—” My eye twitched, and I trotted after him. “You brought outside food?”
Elsie was going to kill me! She was very serious about her catering and would take it as a personal insult if someone had brought other food in. As it was, I knew she was fuming that I hadn’t told her that four large, hungry men were going to be at the party.
Mark sat down at a table and opened up a large pink-and-silver gift sack he had with him then began placing carton after carton of food on the table. A glob of glistening barbecue sauce dripped on one of the white linen tablecloths.
I hastily wiped it off with my hand. I didn’t have a napkin, so I just stuck my finger into my mouth.
“Kinky,” Mark said, and I kicked him.
“Is that barbeque?” Liz asked, eyes wide with pregnancy cravings. She made her way over. She wasn’t quite big enough for it to be a waddle, but she was starting to do a pregnant-woman shuffle.
That baby is going to be huge, I thought, looking between her and Wes.
“We have tea sandwiches,” I told Liz. But as I smelled the smoked meat, even my mouth was watering.
“Right,” Liz said, staring at the food like a starving person.
“I brought you your own personal container,” Mark said, sliding a greasy carton across the table to her. “Macaroni and cheese, baked beans, coleslaw, pulled brisket, tangy barbeque sauce.”
Liz opened the container and took a large bite, letting out a moan. Then she looked around guiltily. “I shouldn’t.” She took another large bite than hastily closed the container. “Right. We’re having a tea and light refreshments.”
“But barbeque!” Carter said, taking a bite of his own pulled-pork sandwich. “It’s so satisfying.”
“Did you bring enough to share?” Allie, Carter’s girlfriend, admonished as he took a mouthful of coleslaw.
“No, they did not,” I said, taking the barbequ
e out of Liz’s hands.
“The baby is hungry!” she complained.
“Then the baby can have cucumber sandwiches,” I retorted, closing the container and shoving it back at Mark.
“I can’t even have alcohol. I should at least get barbeque!”
“There’s not enough for all the other guests.”
But even I could tell it was a losing battle. The smell of barbecue permeated the historic venue. As soon as the guests walked in and the smell of mesquite hit them, they all immediately craved barbeque. The fact that four very attractive men were doling out the yummy food just made the proposition even sweeter.
“Brea!” Elsie said in horror. “They’re ruining my bridal tea!”
“I thought these high-society women were supposed to perpetually be on an alcohol-and-lettuce diet,” I complained. “How are they suddenly all about to eat a giant plate of barbeque?”
It seemed as if a riot was about to start. The macaroni and cheese had run out, and Liz was hormonal and pregnant and not sharing what was in her own special container.
“Where’s the rest of the food?” one young brunette asked me.
“Cucumber sandwich?” I offered.
“I missed the macaroni and cheese?” she asked in annoyance.
Mark smirked at me. Then he announced at the top of his voice, “Anyone want more barbeque?”
The women clamored around him, and I pushed my way through the crowd. “You’re going to start a riot!” I hissed at Mark. “Besides, how are you going to turn three bones and some cheese grease into enough to feed the masses?”
He smirked. “Unlike you, I planned ahead.” He let out a piercing whistle, and an army of servers carting racks of foil-wrapped barbeque and sides filed in. “Problem solved!” Mark said smugly.
“You created a problem that you’re solving!” I shrieked as the crowd of women eagerly shoved forward as the servers laid out pans of mac ’n cheese over hot Sterno cans and salty, fatty brisket with vats of the tangy barbecue sauce.
Mark shoved his hands into his pockets and walked back over to the ignored table of adorable ladylike snacks.
“This is my one chance at a perfect wedding, and you’re trying to ruin it for me!” I scolded as I raced after him.
