Page 81 of The Wedding Forecast

‘Come in here with me then,’ he shouts back. I am very tempted, but the thought of Hayley sitting alone, guarding a booth table for us, gives me restraint. A minute later, he’s hopping into his clothes, water droplets falling from his hair and body.

He comes up behind me and pulls me into him, kissing my neck from behind. ‘This is definitely wasting time,’ I say, turning in his arms.

‘I assigned thirty seconds of my five minutes for this,’ he says.

It’s the sex haze that makes everything he says unbearably cute—that’s what I tell myself. It’s just a chemical in my brain telling me I feel like this. I don’t really feel like this. I can’t even afford to interrogate what this is.

In the cab, I lean my head on the seat and look at him beside me in the backseat.

‘Why did you wait until now?’ I ask.

‘To what?’ he says, but I know he knows what I’m talking about.

‘To invite me to your place. To make a move.’

‘Because’—he pauses—‘it’s complicated.’

‘Oh god. You have a girlfriend, don’t you?’ I say, my stomach clenching, because in my experience ‘it’s complicated’ means ‘I’m cheating’.

‘No,’ he says, frowning.

‘Then what?’

‘Because. Because it’s messy.’

‘Messy how?’

‘You know how. Everything we said last night. We live in different countries.’

‘Right.’

‘My plan was just to have a nice dinner with you and Hayley, and have that be that. I didn’t want to like you. And I had no idea if you were interested. I thought you might be engaged to Patrick by now.’

‘Patrick and I didn’t pan out.’

‘Huh. That’s a shame.’

‘I was flirting with you that first night. And you were shutting me down.’

‘I know,’ he says.

He knows. Well, that’s embarrassing. I hoped maybe he was just oblivious. ‘But then you suggested hanging out again. So what changed?’ I ask.

‘Despite my best efforts, I really like you. I couldn’t not see you. But I—’

‘You what?’

‘I promised Luke nothing would happen between us.’

‘You, what!’ I feel like my brain just broke. He promised Luke? ‘I don’t understand. How is Luke involved?’

‘He and I were talking about you and Hayley visiting, and he told me not to be with you.’

‘Why would he say that?’

‘In a “don’t be gross and try to sleep with my friend” kind of way.’

‘Oh.’ Luke isn’t normally the kind of guy to be all protective and patriarchal about these things. I’m not sure how I feel about that. ‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t follow his advice.’