He tucked the printout of Gillian’s excessively detailed and detached email into his breast pocket and headed into Frijoles, the Tex-Mex place where Serena and Dillon’s rehearsal dinner would be shortly underway. After introducing himself to the manager on duty, he headed to the party room to get a few establishing shots of the layout and the tres leches parfaits and the lines of margarita glasses stretched along the bar.
Gillian, he figured, would come in with the rest, after they’d done the actual rehearsal. The bride and groom had opted to skip his services at the chapel in favor of him sticking at the party later. Their mutual friend Jorge would act as his assistant for an hour of secondary shots, once the speeches were underway, but this party was fairly laid back and intimate. He found himself in the not-quite-friend not-just-professional zone with these two, not for the first time. He’d known them from a few parties at Jorge and Bubba’s before the wedding, and he’d helped Serena out with some photos for work a couple of times.
In the past, with friends-of-friends, or overly effusive wedding couples, he’d taken care to draw firm lines. He was a vendor, with a job to do. That came first no matter how much he liked the subjects of his work. But his job was an intimate one, capturing not just the pretty dresses and elegant guests, but, when he was both skilled and fortunate, raw emotion.
For that, he needed a layer of reserve, of distance between himself and his subjects. That's what the lenses were for: a handy outward manifestation of the way he was eternally the one on the outside. The observer.
So when a groom slung an arm over his shoulder and invited him to down a shot, or a flirty attendant suggested he drop the camera and dance, he pled professional duties. The life of a friendship, after all, was longer than one wedding season. If he was meant to have a personal relationship with a client, they could build it after the shots were delivered and the invoice paid.
That said, this event was on a countdown to midnight. And no matter how he fussed with his equipment or checked off tasks, he was constantly aware of the passing time. When midnight hit, he’d take a pic of the engaged couple celebrating the new year, but then … then he planned to be kissing Gillian Bellamy.
Everyone could see she was super busy. It was the night before one of her very most important person’s wedding. There’d been the copious nonsense at the rehearsal with Serena’s dad and mom and stepdad, when she’d found herself front and center for the drama. Forced into jumping up and down waving her arms to distract them all. Then the manager at Frijoles cornering her with questions, and then those guests besieging her to gush about how cute the kids had been. She didn’t know if they thought she was Dillon’s sister, or Rachel, or not a parent at all but just a fellow admirer of little Tobias and Hannah, but the point was: she was super busy.
So she had zero spare time for his pointed looks. His circling the room not like it was his job, but like he was a gyroscope and she was the epicenter. She talked to the lead bartender about midnight champagne; Vic was posing Dillon and Serena on a pair of Frijoles’ colorful bar stools. She checked in with Natalie to make sure all the step-siblings were playing sweet; Victor Anthony was right behind her suggesting that throwing fake gang signs was best left to group prom photos instead of the wedding party of fully grown mostly white people. She couldn't move five feet without being aware of his gaze.
“What's got you glum?” Rachel asked.
“Nothing .”
“Oh for sure, a fake chirpy voice and that crocodile smile has me convinced you’ve never partied so hard,” her friend said. Which was the flip side of having shared an apartment with someone for years; no matter how long ago it’d been. She wasn't the least adept at being unreadable to Rach.
“It's nothing. Just Vic.”
“He ducking up the job?”
“Ducking?”
“Six-year-old and three-year-old at home. I thought I had more time to learn to watch my language, but then I went and fell for a guy with a school-aged son.”
Gill laughed. “Ducking it is then.”
“So he is ducking it up? You need me to go quack at him?”
She wrapped an arm around Rach and turned them so they were facing the entrance to the party room. “No quacking necessary. It's only that he … it feels like maybe he ….”
Wow. The linguist unwilling to articulate something.
“Is it the way he hasn't taken his eye off you for more than three minutes at a time even though he's supposed to be busy capturing the precious final minutes of Serena and Dillon as single people?”
Gill snatched up an abandoned cloth napkin and thwapped it against the table for emphasis. “Yes. It is exactly that. He won't stop looking at me.”
And then Rachel was leaning against her so hard Gill panicked in case it was pregnancy distress. But despite the haze of adrenaline shooting through her she gathered quickly that Rach was fine. Doubled over laughing at her, which ought to be grounds for a serious girlfriend talking-to, but fine.
“What?”
“You—you are so ….”
“So what? Stop giggling. Everyone’s looking at us.”
“Everyone? Or mostly just one person in particular?”
“Shut it, you.” Not that there was any heat in her words. Not that anyone really noticed them. Not that she was keeping herself from peering over Rachel’s bent form at Vic.
He winked at her.
Jerk.
She so did not need this kind of attention. She could imagine her parents’ narrowed eyes at the very idea that she was being overdramatic and attention-seeking with her personal life. At work, okay, she was encouraged to feel pride when her students were attentive to her lessons. To the material. To the ways their studies interacted with her field.
But attention paid to her as a person, outside of the scope of educator and researcher and writer? No. It made her self-centered to fuss over friend dynamics, and the need to protect her perfectly competent and successful baby brother, and a heart that—damn it to perdition and rake it with the ashes of hellfire—seemed to give a through, thumping damn about exactly the kind of attention Vic was paying it.
Theo wandered over to check on Rachel, which was just the distraction Gillian needed to refocus on what was important. Not her weird heart longings, but the successful gathering of Serena and Dillon’s friends and families. Surely one of Serena’s parents was doing something stress-inducing somewhere. It was Gill’s duty to shield everyone from their shenanigans.
And never mind the man whose job it was to capture everyone without their shields. To see into their hearts and make permanent images of what Gillian—what anyone—might prefer to leave hidden away.
She thought she was so good at hiding.
Ha.
Maybe it would work on someone who hadn’t known her since they were in elementary school, but not on him. He knew her tells. Hadn’t he listened to her fudging truths at the family dinner table, while he had the inside scoop? Hadn’t he been there when Ton told her that she could drop the protective-big-sis stance, because of course Vic knew about his best friend’s sexual orientation?
Hadn’t he lived through every excruciating second of that first pool party after they’d slept together in college? Gillian as blasé as always, no one else catching that minuscule moment when they’d locked eyes. How she’d buried her thoughts almost—almost—sooner than he could see the intense flare of longing. She’d banked it so fast, but: he knew her tells. Her unspoken message to stay away, that they weren’t happening ever again, had been clear. She didn’t hide it at all. But so was the quieter message that she was warning off herself as much as she was him.
So let her bob and weave her way through the rehearsal dinner party. No problem for him. It wasn’t midnight quite yet, and he had a job to do.
Ten minutes to countdown, and he was posing all the bridesmaids with their noisemakers and streamers ready to go.
Eight minutes, and he caught the groom’s sister and brother-in-law both reaching to smooth Dillon’s hair while he batted them away, laughing.
Five minutes. An overhead shot of the room, of that moment when people caught the buzz of the approaching midnight, and started to seek out those they wanted close when the New Year rang in. Gillian drifting his way as he stood on a chair in the corner.
Three minutes to go, he closed in on the wedding party. They’d all clustered together, the bride’s and groom’s best friends and their partners, if they had them. Gillian wasn’t the only one without a date in the excitable group hug that enclosed Serena and Dillon. Just the one who was closest to him.
One minute. One half-step to bring him beside her as she took charge of telling the room about countdown. Yes, he was focused on the people who were paying him. He was a professional, and he was damn good at his job.
So good he could capture Serena and Dillon locked on to each other, frozen in a moment of realization that midnight would mean the end of their last days as single people. The hint of tears in his eyes and the captivated grin on her face, lost to everyone buzzing around them.
Thirty seconds, and they laughed and laced their fingers together and looked around with wonder-filled gazes as the crowd they’d assembled to celebrate with them.
Ten seconds. Nine, eight, seven. Gillian ignoring him—pretending she was ignoring him—while she led the countdown chant. Four. Three. Two.
Explosions of cheers and song and confetti and bodies jostling. He was planted within it all, solid and sure taking shots of the midnight kisses. Every smiling face. Every glint and glitter.
And then he’d done it. And it was the New Year. And he lowered his lens, took that last half-step to bring them flush, and ran the back of his fingers down Gillian’s cheek. Held her gaze. Read past her expected give-nothing-away look to the truth inside her.
Her breath hitched, and there was confetti glinting in her braids, and his heart pounded like the beat of the mariachis playing behind them. His feet were planted so the people jostling them didn’t affect him. But maybe they did her, or maybe she opted to press herself closer and wrap her hands around his biceps, but it was a new year, and it was his same old feelings about his best friend’s big sister, and she wasn’t, just for that one transitional, magic moment, hiding from him.
So he kissed her.