FORGE TO A NEW DAWB
Chapter Five: The Wedding Weekend Begins
The video call had gone, against all odds, extremely well, JJ's father-in-training charm apparently unstoppable even through a laggy connection and Wren's father's flat, appraising silence, and six weeks had folded into two hours in the car faster than Wren had thought possible, so that now, somehow, they were actually here, gravel crunching under the tires as JJ pulled the borrowed car up the long drive toward the lake house.
"Deep breath," JJ said, cutting the engine.
"I'm breathing fine."
"You're holding your folder like it's a life vest."
Wren looked down. She was, in fact, holding the folder, the actual physical folder, rules and all, against her chest like it might deflect an incoming question about their anniversary. She set it down in the glove compartment, deliberately, and took the deep breath he'd suggested, which did not help nearly as much as she'd hoped.
"Two months," she said. "We met through the apartment, it became something else, we've been official two months. Your favorite color is..."
"I know the facts, Wren. I wrote half of them."
"I know you know them. I need to hear myself say them one more time or I'm going to walk in there and forget my own cover story."
"Okay." JJ turned in his seat, and for a second the joking dropped away, the way it had a few times now, brief windows where Wren caught a glimpse of someone steadier underneath all the deflection. "We've got this. It's one weekend. I've survived harder shifts than a wedding."
"This isn't a shift."
"Every family is a shift, Wren. Trust me. I grew up in one."
Before she could ask what that meant, exactly, and whether it belonged in the folder of things about JJ she was not supposed to be collecting, the front door of the lake house banged open and Aunt Carol came down the porch steps at a speed that suggested she had been watching from the window since the car turned onto the property.
"There she is!" Aunt Carol's voice carried the specific brightness of a woman performing warmth for an audience that had not yet fully arrived. "And you must be JJ. Oh, you're much more put together than I expected, I don't know what I expected, honestly."
"Good things, hopefully," JJ said, taking the hand she offered with both of his, the exact gesture, Wren noted, that had scored an eight out of ten in the coffee shop.
"Wonderful things," Aunt Carol said, visibly charmed, already steering them both toward the house. "Marisol's inside with the caterer doing the final tasting, come say hello, and Wren, your father's on the back porch, he's been asking when you'd get here."
Wren's stomach dropped the specific half inch it always dropped at the words your father, and she felt JJ's hand find hers, not for show this time, or not only for show, a quick, steady press before Aunt Carol turned back around, and she held onto it longer than the situation strictly required.
The lake house was enormous in the way that made Wren's chest tighten on principle, all reclaimed wood and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over water that caught the late afternoon light like it had been ordered specifically for the wedding photos. Marisol was in the kitchen exactly as promised, gorgeous and radiant in the way she managed to be radiant about everything, standing over a row of small plates with a man in chef's whites who Wren recognized instantly, from the eight months of increasingly detailed complaints JJ had made about him, as Alvarez.
JJ's whole posture changed for half a second, some current of pure want running through him at the sight of the man, before he smoothed it back into the easy, unbothered charm he'd been running all weekend, and Wren, watching it happen, understood suddenly and completely how much this weekend actually cost him too, a truth she'd somehow let herself forget under the noise of rules and folders and rehearsed answers.
"Wren!" Marisol crossed the kitchen and pulled her into a hug that smelled like the same perfume she'd worn since high school. "And this is the famous JJ. I've heard nothing about you, which for my aunt means she's saving all the good gossip for in person."
"All good things, I hope," JJ said again, and Wren noticed, with some private amusement, that it was becoming something like a verbal tic for the weekend.
"The best things," Marisol said, and turned, almost as an afterthought, toward the man beside her. "Chef Alvarez, this is my cousin Wren and her boyfriend JJ."
Alvarez glanced up, assessed JJ for exactly one professional half second, the way Wren imagined he assessed a knife before deciding whether it was worth sharpening, and returned to his plates without comment.
"He's like that with everyone," Marisol said, catching JJ's face. "Don't take it personally."
"Wouldn't dream of it," JJ said, and Wren felt, rather than saw, the effort it took him to say it lightly.
Out on the back porch, her father was exactly where Aunt Carol had promised, a glass of iced tea sweating in his hand, watching the water with the particular stillness he brought to every family gathering, like he was conserving energy for the parts that mattered. He turned when they stepped out, and his eyes went, with the efficiency of long habit, straight past Wren to the boy beside her.
"Dad," Wren said. "This is JJ."
Her father held out his hand, and JJ shook it, steady, unhurried, none of the nervous over-brightness he'd used on Aunt Carol, some instinct in him apparently understanding that her father required an entirely different performance.
"Good to finally meet you," her father said. "Wren doesn't talk about you much."
"She's private," JJ said easily. "I've learned to work around it."
Her father's mouth did something that was almost, but not quite, a smile, and for one unsteady second Wren let herself believe this might actually work, right up until he added, without any particular emphasis, in the same flat, assessing voice he used for everything, "We'll see how the weekend goes."
"That's fair," JJ said, before Wren could find a response of her own, and something about the easy, unoffended way he said it seemed to catch her father slightly off guard, like he'd expected either nervous over-explaining or wounded pride and gotten neither. "I'd want to see how the weekend goes too, if I were you."
Her father studied him for a second longer than the moment required, then nodded once, the closest thing to approval Wren had ever seen him hand out on a first meeting, and gestured toward the two empty chairs beside his. "Sit. Tell me what it is you do, exactly. Wren's been vague about it."
"I'm not vague," Wren said. "You never asked."
"I'm asking now."
JJ sat, unhurried, and launched into an explanation of his three jobs that made them sound, in his telling, less like a patchwork of desperation and more like an apprenticeship he'd designed on purpose, delivery routes that taught him a city's whole geography, coffee shop shifts that taught him to read a room in four seconds flat, weekend catering gigs that had put him, more than once, close enough to a real kitchen to know exactly what he wanted and how far away he still was from getting it. Wren watched her father listen, really listen, in a way she rarely saw him listen to anyone, and felt something complicated twist in her chest that had nothing to do with the fake relationship and everything to do with how long it had been since anyone had described their own life to her father with that much unapologetic clarity.
"Culinary school," her father repeated, when JJ got to the end of it. "That's a real plan, or a someday plan?"
"Real plan. I've got an application half finished and a stack of savings that isn't quite where it needs to be yet. Working on it."
"Huh," her father said, which from him was practically a toast.
Wren sat there, quietly stunned, watching her father find something to respect in a boy he'd met eleven minutes ago, faster and more completely than he'd ever seemed to find anything to respect in her own binder full of five-year plans, and she filed the thought away fast, before it could turn into something she'd have to examine later, back in the folder that was somehow always right there waiting for her.
Behind her, through the kitchen window, she could hear Alvarez saying something short and dismissive to one of his line cooks, and Marisol laughing at something JJ hadn't even said yet, and somewhere upstairs a door opened and closed that could only be Preston Vance arriving early, exactly the way Aunt Carol had promised he would, footsteps already coming down the staircase toward the porch with the unhurried confidence of a man who had never once in his life doubted he was welcome in a room.