Chapter Two #2
“Em,” Layla interrupted, knowing exactly where this was going, and not wanting to dwell there for too long. “It’s really okay.”
Jamie had called Layla last month to tell her he was bringing someone, of course he had.
A call she’d let go to voice mail at first, even though she hadn’t been busy when she’d seen his name—just “Jamie” now, changed from the smug “Husband” nickname she’d added to her contacts the morning after their wedding—come up on her screen.
His voice had been cautious when she finally listened to the message.
Lay, can you call me, please? It’s really important. I don’t want to text.
She had a sense about what he’d say. Embarrassingly, she’d already clocked that he’d stopped posting on his social media recently, and she’d been speculating.
He’s seeing someone. He doesn’t want to flaunt it, not yet. He’s trying to be respectful. Kind.
Amicable.
She’d been right. She knew Jamie, knew him in her bones.
So of course she’d been right.
By then, she’d already accepted Emily’s invitation, and couldn’t bear the thought of how it would look to back out after his call. Couldn’t bear to take him up on his offer to not bring his new girlfriend at all, if it would make things too hard for you.
“I’m really happy for him,” she added now, hoping she wasn’t laying it on too thick. “We’re all here for you.”
Emily nodded and her eyes welled up again, but she rolled them upward in embarrassment, pulling her hand from Layla’s so she could press the sides of both of her index fingers gently against her lower lids.
“I’m so emotional!” she said, with frustrated laughter, and Layla laughed, too. It felt good to release some of the anxious air trapped inside her. She thought of those moments with Willa on the plane, and remembered who she wanted to be for Emily this week.
Pleasant, unflappable.
Supportive.
“I’m sure that’ll happen a lot this week,” Layla said knowingly, slipping into something approaching that big-sister role. Easy enough to maintain it for the next few minutes, for meeting Michael.
Emily dropped her hands and shook them dramatically in front of her, like she was drying them out.
“Okay, but! It’s not going to happen tonight, because we are going out!”
Layla blinked, the Google Doc’s blank spaces a photograph in her mind.
“My parents and Jamie and, you know, everyone”—a deft sidestep, that everyone, Layla thought—“don’t get here until way late tonight, and Rosie and I have a dinner planned. I would love for you to join, really! Rosie adores you!”
Rosie was Emily’s former college roommate and best friend.
Layla had always liked her the few times they’d met, but not enough to abandon the blank space of her Google Doc.
Right now she was thinking about getting a baguette from the nearest bakery and eating it like a turkey leg while fully under the covers in her hotel bed.
It would be disgusting.
“I think I better take it easy tonight,” she said.
“Oh, but you can’t! Rosie will absolutely die if you don’t come; she’ll be so mad. And I’m already in the doghouse because I’m pretty sure she hates the bridesmaid’s dress I picked for her, but you know how Rosie is, so particular about her style!”
As far as Layla could remember, Rosie’s style could be best characterized as “Add a piercing to it,” so probably there were a lot of ways for Emily to go wrong with her choice of bridesmaid’s dress.
But either way, Layla was not in any condition to find out for herself this evening.
She needed alone time, not dinner with two twenty-five-year-olds.
The baguette, the bed. That was the itinerary.
But as she was gearing up to make her excuses—she even thought about bringing up Willa and the bit of work she’d done on the plane to earn herself some more fatigue points—Emily practically vaulted from the couch.
“Michael!”
Layla stood, uselessly smoothing the front of her saggy lounge set, expecting to raise her eyes and see the blond, blue-eyed, and warmly smiling man she’d become superficially familiar with from Emily’s various social media posts.
Instead, her eyes clashed with someone else’s.
Oh no, she thought. No, it can’t be.
But it was.
It was the man in black.
* * *
He was, unfortunately, as striking as he’d been at first sight.
He was also looking at her with that same unimpressed—no, not unimpressed…scornful, maybe?—expression that he’d leveled down at her from beside his business-class seat.
There was a buzzing, electric-shock feeling all along her spine.
Was she hallucinating him?
Had the disgusting bed-and-baguette plan brought it on?
But no: He was really there. She knew because he blinked—flinched, maybe—when Emily bounded to a stop beside him, throwing her arms around the other man Layla now noticed for the first time.
He was a little older than Layla expected, older than he had looked in those probably filtered photos—a slightly receding hairline, deepish crinkles around his eyes.
But when he smiled and bent his tall form to embrace Emily, he looked younger.
He looked like the sort of person who recognized how great his fiancée’s hugs always were.
She probably would’ve been able to appreciate that more about him, but she was too busy snapping her eyes back to the other man, who now stood with his hands in his pockets. A sentient column of smoke.
This was not a coincidence.
Not two separate hotel guests entering simultaneously.
He was with Michael.
He had come here with Michael.
How?
“Layla, hi,” a deep, gentle voice said, and then Michael was in front of her, arms out tentatively for a hug, the sort of introductory embrace you give someone you have a built-in bond with, a we’ve-been-waiting-to-meet connection.
Even through her shock, Layla could tell that he was like Emily: friendly and confident and kind.
She leaned in, her return embrace feeling awkward and stilted. She knew the other man—the man in black—was still watching. Taking in, perhaps, that she had never been a natural at hugging someone new.
“I can’t say enough how much it matters to Em that you came,” Michael was saying as they parted again, his voice soft, as though making his best effort at discretion. “It was a huge ask, I know.”
Closer up, Layla could see that those eye crinkles framed a world-weariness, and she wondered whether he was nearer to her own age than Emily’s, maybe even a little older.
Were she able to think about anything else but the stranger still watching her—she was certain he was still watching her—she would’ve been curious about this, maybe concerned about it.
Would have been eager to learn more about what had brought Michael and Emily together, what their relationship dynamic was like.
“Let me introduce you to my best man,” Michael said, and Layla’s stomach flipped. “This is Griffin Testa.”
She moved her eyes to him again, because it would have been rude not to. But he didn’t smile. Didn’t take his hands out of his pockets. Didn’t acknowledge that he had been introduced to anyone at all.
“Hi, Griff,” Em said, in the pause left there, and for the first time, the man broke slightly, shifting his gaze to Emily and offering the smallest tip of his lips. The very barest imitation of a smile.
“Em,” he said, nodding. His voice was less like a lightning bolt for such a small syllable, but that didn’t seem to matter to Layla, who felt the clutching silence from the plane grip her again.
Emily, it was clear, could not abide it.
“This is my…” She trailed off for a second, made a wincing recalibration. “This is my friend Layla,” she finished gamely.
The man—Griffin—said nothing.
And suddenly, that electricity that had been humming through Layla took on a new cast.
It animated her, spreading from her spine out, sparking into her fingers and toes and behind her teeth.
She’d spent the last couple of hours doing her absolute best to be her absolute best, and this man was so needlessly rude for no reason, right here in front of the person he was supposed to be the actual best man for?
It made her…it made her angry.
“We’ve met,” she found herself saying, wishing she could manage something like the cutting sharpness he’d used back on the plane. But still, she could hear a faint coolness in her tone, and that was a victory of a sort.
“What?” Emily said, eyes darting between them now. “Where?”
Layla waited a beat to see if he would answer.
He didn’t.
“We were on the same flight,” Layla supplied.
Emily looked delighted, and then disappointed. “Really? I wish I would’ve realized! Michael could’ve met you at the airport, too. You could’ve all ridden—”
“It’s fine,” Layla said quickly, waving a dismissive hand.
She wanted to feel judgmental of Griffin getting a personalized pickup in a city where public transit options were easy and abundant, but then again, her own public transit plans had folded pretty quickly in the face of that luxury car windfall Willa’s uncle provided.
“Were you sitting near each other?” Michael asked. Layla detected a note of concern in his voice.
“No,” Griffin said. Flat and final.
Layla thought a nice person, a normal person, would follow up with more information, but Griffin Testa was obviously not a nice or normal person.
He was a human black hole.
She cleared her throat delicately. “There was a medical issue near where he was seated. I did some light intervention.”
Emily gasped dramatically. “Oh! Was everyone okay?”
“Everyone was fine,” Layla said smoothly.
Because I handled it, because I was calm and unbothered, mind over matter, like I am now, no matter how this man standing here now made me feel in the moment.
“Just a bit tense,” she added. “You know how flying is these days. Short tempers.”
Michael’s expression changed from interest to suspicion. His gaze snapped to his friend.
“Griff,” he said, making no effort to conceal the note of frustration—of disappointment—in his voice.
But Layla was too busy noticing something else: the slight, nearly undetectable grimace that passed over Griffin’s face.
She hadn’t meant to suggest that he’d started it.
In fact, if she was honest, he’d ended it for pretty much everyone else on that plane.
Except for her.
She waited for him to say something to defend himself in the face of his friend’s censure, but he didn’t. And she shouldn’t care about that, not after how he’d treated her.
How he looked at her.
But as though her mouth had a mind entirely of its own, she found herself speaking again.
“He helped defuse the situation, actually. It was sort of…” She trailed off, searching her mind for a word that was not electric.
“Heroic,” she finished, and then wished she could sink straight into the marble floor.
Griffin looked at her as though she had betrayed him.
She swallowed, at war with herself. Should she stay in this…in this staring contest with him? Should she drop her eyes, a form of apology for what anyone else would take as a compliment?
Michael’s hand clapped heavily onto Griffin’s shoulder, and this time, he more than barely grimaced. He winced, his face contorting unevenly.
“Really, bud?” Michael said, seemingly oblivious to his friend’s discomfort.
“It was nothing.” A dull knife, now, that voice, but it still scraped all along Layla’s skin.
“It was something!” said Michael, and then he turned to Layla. “Griff is afraid of flying. Terrified, really.”
Layla swallowed, her mind flashing to Griffin’s words from before: It will be me who needs medical attention.
She wondered if he had anxiety, if he had been on the verge of a panic attack, if he maybe had—
But when their eyes connected again, it was like she could feel him beaming his other words directly into her brain, his curt, dismissive I said if.
He didn’t want her help or her concern. He didn’t want her to know anything about him.
And that was fine by Layla. She had enough on her plate, dealing with the guests she already knew this week. She didn’t need to spend any of her time learning some other man’s minefields.
She didn’t need someone looking at her like she had something to be ashamed of.
She would have to get used to ignoring him.
But when Michael and Emily both laughed, Layla realized she’d lost herself again in Griffin’s piercing, disdainful gaze, and she knew ignoring him wouldn’t be easy.
And when Em asked her again if she’d come along to dinner, if she’d please please please come, she thought of that bed-and-baguette plan again and could only hear the word disgusting in Griffin’s sharp voice.
She couldn’t have him wrecking her bed or a lovely baguette. She couldn’t have him taking another part of Paris from her.
Not tonight.
So she smiled and looked at her former sister-in-law, and calmly said, “What time?”