“Well, we’re going in.” I take his hand firmly and march him through the doors held open for us.
I take the deepest breath my lungs can manage, and walk through into an entire room half filled with Templemans.
Chapter 23
In a pretty room adjoining the ballroom, we spend nearly two hours mingling in various states of awkwardness in an endless champagne reception. When I say mingling, I mean me carrying Joshua through a succession of social encounters with distant relatives while he stands beside me, watching me glug champagne to dull my nerves, which burns my empty stomach like gasoline. Every introduction goes like this.
“Lucy, this is my aunt Yvonne, my mother’s sister. Yvonne, Lucy Hutton.”
When his duty is completed, he begins occupying himself with stroking my inner arm, spreading his hand across my back to find the bare skin under my hair, or linking and unlinking our fingers. Always staring. He barely takes his eyes off me. He’s probably amazed by my small-talk ability.
After a while, he is taken by his mother out into the side garden, and I watch through the window as he poses with various combinations of family. His smile is forced. When he catches me spying, I’m beckoned out, and he and I pose together in front of a charming rosebush. When the shutter clicks shut, the old version of me shakes her head, wondering how we ever got to this point. Me, and Joshua Templeman, captured side by side in the same photograph, smiling? Every new development between us feels like an impossibility.
He turns me and cups my chin in his palms, and I hear the photographer say, Lovely. Another shutter click, and I forget the world in the instant his lips touch mine. I wish I could shake off my old mistrusts, but this all feels too much like a summer afternoon daydream. The sort I might have had once, and then hated myself for it.
I watch Patrick and Mindy across the lawn, now clinched together romantically in front of another camera and I realize that I’m clinched in a fairly romantic pose myself. The man who’s hated me for so long is now showing me off, tugging me close to his side. When we go back inside, he kisses me on the temple. He drops his mouth down to my ear, and tells me I’m beautiful. I’m turned another ninety degrees, presented to another set of relatives. He’s showing me off.
What I haven’t worked out yet is, Why?
In every introduction, after discussions on how lovely Mindy looked and how nice the ceremony was, the inevitable question always comes next.
“So, Lucy, how did you meet Josh?”
“We met at work,” Josh supplied the first time when the silence stretched too thin, so it becomes my default answer.
“Oh, and where do you work?” is the next question. None of his family has even the slightest idea where he works, or what he does. They’re awkward about it; like being a Med School Dropout is something to be deeply ashamed of. At least a publishing house sounds glamorous.
“It’s so lovely seeing you with someone new,” another great-aunt tells him. She gives me a Meaningful Look. Perhaps he’s also rumored to be gay.
I excuse us and pull him aside behind a pillar.
“You have to make more of an effort. I’m exhausted. It’s my turn to stand there and feel you up while you talk.” A waiter passes and offers me another tiny canapé. He knows me by now because I’ve eaten at least twelve. I’m his best customer. I’m obsessed with dinner, which I’ve been promised by the waiter is at five o’clock sharp. I watch the hands on Josh’s watch, knowing I’ll probably die of hunger before then.
“I can’t think of anything to say.” He notices a paintball bruise on my upper arm and begins silently fussing over it.
“Ask people about themselves, it usually works.” I am acutely aware of how many people keep taking little peeks at us. “You need to tell me why everyone’s looking at me like I’m the Bride of Frankenstein.
No offense, you big freak.”
“I hate being asked about myself.”
“I noticed. Nobody knows a flippin’ thing about you. And you didn’t answer my question.”
“They’re looking at me. Most of them haven’t seen me since the Big Scandal.”