I straightened his tie. “You clean up well too.” He wore a suit to work every day, but this was a nicer one. His hair was freshly trimmed, and he had shaved off the little bit of stubble he usually kept, the aftershave smell lingering alluringly.
“Shall we?” he asked, offering his arm. I took it and we went to the car.
The benefit was at the same hotel where Sharon was getting married. I had originally suggested Metroing so we could drink, but Alex said he wasn’t having more than a drink or two at a work event. Mildly shamed, I agreed to stick to that plan as well.
“Just don’t get engagement-party drunk and you’re fine,” he said. I elbowed him playfully. His face grew more serious. “Are you ready for everyone to assume we’re together?”
“Does it help you career-wise if I say we are?”
“It’s not the fifties. They know I’m divorced. They’re just going to make assumptions when they see us.”
“In that case, let’s tell everyone I’m your sister and then make out all night.”
“Oh okay, good, that’ll go over well.” I laughed. “Don’t be too much of a jerk please,” he said.
“I’ll be like Goldilocks. Just right.”
He brushed a hair off my forehead. “She was breaking and entering. It was the baby bear whose stuff was just right.”
“I said what I said.”
After the dinner part of the evening ended, I turned to Alex and said, “Thirty-six.”
“Thirty-six what?”
“Thirty-six people asked how long we’ve been dating.”
“And what did you say the latter thirty-five times to that?” He knew me well.
“That we’ve been together since high school, and I was really upset when you and my sister wife split up so we’re looking for someone new to add to our marriage.”
He covered his eyes with a hand. “Seriously?”
I rolled my eyes. “No. I said a few months to everyone.”
“Excellent. Want to keep up the lie and dance?” I looked to the dance floor, where about a dozen couples were dancing, and made a face. “Come on,” he said. “It’s good practice for Tim and Megan’s wedding.”
I agreed and followed him out to the floor. “It’s weird,” I said, as we swayed to the music. “I’ve never once referred to them as ‘Tim and Megan.’ It’s ‘Megan and Tim’ to me. Is it always like that with the person you knew first?”
He thought for a minute. “I think so.”
“What happens if you’ve known both people an equal length of time?”
“Maybe that’s when they get one of those celeb nicknames like Brangelina.”
“I guess. So we’d be Lily and Alex to my friends and Alex and Lily to yours?”
“And Ally to the people who knew us the same amount of time. Or Lilex.”
I laughed. “Lilex sounds like a knockoff watch brand. Ally it is.”
We danced without talking for a couple of minutes. I was glad he would be at Megan’s wedding with me. Going completely dateless to four of them was going to be rough. And I thought, for the millionth time, about lying to my family and saying Alex was my boyfriend.
The idea had some appeal to it. It would mean having a date to Jake’s and Amy’s weddings and being an awkward single only at Caryn’s and Sharon’s. Yeah, we would get asked when we were getting married, but we could play along with that. Help getting my grandma to Mexico would be useful as well. She was a handful.
I pulled back slightly to look at him. There was no denying that he was handsome. I mean, he wasn’t a Hemsworth, but who, other than the Hemsworths, was? He was already the first person I texted most mornings and the last person I texted at night. Did it have to be fake? What would it be like to kiss him?
He caught me looking at him. “What are you thinking?” he asked warily.
“Nothing.” I shook my head, more at myself than at him. What a dumb idea. He wasn’t into me like that anyway. Plus, Megan would murder me.
I glanced over his shoulder at the movement I saw back at the tables. “Ooh, dessert time!” I took the hand that had been in mine to dance and pulled him back toward the table, away from the dance floor of dangerous plans.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
March came to an end, flouting the “in like a lion, out like a lamb” cliché, as it does so often in DC, and ushered in a minor April snowstorm that left my mother in fits about our trip to Chicago for Madison’s bridal shower.