How to Ruin a Wedding(23)
I down the final wineglass. “This is unexpected.”
The waitress comes over and drops our plates, pausing our conversation a moment before I ask her for another flight of wine, which earns me a chuckle from Anders.
“I’ll let you eat before I overwhelm you with information,” he says as I stare at the plate of burger and truffle fries.
“I can multitask.” I pop a salty fry in my mouth. “But before you waste your time—no offense, really—you should know that I am very expensive.”
He raises a brow. “And?”
I shuffle through the hazy and blacked-out files in my brain and pull out the folder of our first hour together when we participated in the official Get to Know You Handbook of asking: What do you do? Where are you from? Do you have siblings? Do you think the moon landing was fake? Want to get so drunk we forget our names? “You’re a graphic designer, aren’t you? I’m sure you make a decent living, but my clientele is usually the annoyingly rich who couldn’t tell you the price of milk if you asked.”
He looks at the ceiling and chews on his bottom lip like he is shuffling through our night’s files together. When he finds what he’s looking for, Anders brings his gaze back down and catches me staring at his bottom lip. “You need twenty thousand to buy your share of the shelter. I can pay you that.”
My eyes widen. “Excuse me?”
“Do you want more? Tell me a price.”
I drop my next fry onto the plate and hold up my hands. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me you have twenty thousand dollars to spare? Are you a thief in the night? What exactly is it that you do?” I’ll have Taina vet his funds first thing, though he doesn’t seem like a liar.
“I’m not sure if I should take your shock about my wealth as an insult or not.” He leans back. “You must have been more drunk that I thought, seeing as we had this conversation before. But I own a share of Lightshop—”
“The search engine?”
“Yes.” He nods, casually, like having stock in the second most used search engine in America behind good old Google is no big deal. “Through pure luck of knowing Lucas, meeting him in college. His family created it. He gave me a share one Christmas, before it became as big as it did.”
“That explains affording a stay at the most expensive venue on the planet,” I say, mostly to myself in awe.
“That makes me more than enough, but I still do design on the side—mostly book covers.”
“A joy to be able to work for fun and not for survival.” I blow out a breath. “I didn’t mean that bitterly,” I get out quickly. “I mean, not at you, specifically. Just in general. I am bitter. But bitter toward, say, the universe itself. Does that make sense? I’m rambling, let’s move on.”
His chuckle is low and light as it reaches me. “So, will you consider my offer?”
“I have to,” I say. Maybe I should be embarrassed about how easily I agree, but the truth is I need the money desperately. That, and ever since I failed at wrecking Eliza’s wedding, I’ve had this wedge of guilt lodged in my throat. I know exactly the heartache she’s inevitably going to suffer through. This could be a chance to redeem myself and clear my conscience of the failure.
“Okay.” I take a glass from his wine flight. “Tell me your reason.”
“Long story short, she and her fiancé will never work out.”
“And short story long?”
He chuckles, then sighs. “There’s so much wrong with the pairing. My sister is just twenty-three, way too young to get married. She’s only just legally been allowed to drink. Now she’s choosing who she wants to be with forever?”
He shakes his head. “My sister is flighty. I love her, but she’s never fully grounded. She loves someone, something, for batches of time, and then moves on to new things, to new people. They’ve only been engaged for a few weeks and wanted to have a shotgun wedding, but my aunt threatened to disown her if she didn’t plan an event the family could celebrate, so now we have some time. This is her fourth engagement, but it’s the only one that’s made it to actual wedding-planning stage, and I need it to end there.”
I cock my head. “Do you think it’s possible this wedding is developing further because they are a better pairing than her past lovers?”
I muffle my laugh when the word lovers makes him shudder. “No, not at all. I know the guy, John. I used to be his roommate in college, and we were really close. He’s quiet, nerdy, introverted. He never knew how to stand up for himself and was constantly taken advantage of by anyone who asked him for things. He was constantly broke, and if he did manage to save anything from his part-time jobs, he’d get scammed out of it all over again.”
I feel my brows pull together. “Your best friend married your first love, and your sister is going to marry your college roommate.” I blow out a whistle. “That seems difficult.”
He rubs the back of his neck. “You’re not wrong. And maybe that’s part of it; maybe I’m scared that if this doesn’t work out, I’ll lose another friend. I don’t have too many to spare.”
“It almost sounds like you want to ruin the wedding for him.”
“It’s for both of them, really. My sister will break his heart, and he won’t recover. But that doesn’t matter if she’s the one doing the breaking. Whenever my sister dumps someone, she falls into this deep depression. She’s devastated that she didn’t find the one. She spends months in the dark; she doesn’t eat or sleep. When you meet her, she seems so bright, and she is, but when she isn’t, it’s dark. If she makes it to marriage and has to get divorced instead of a simple breakup, I don’t think she’ll recover. No matter how much I talk to her about it, she just pushes me away.”