“Not really.”
“That’s the reason you came back, then? You just couldn’t resist me.” I gave him a cheeky wink and began eating again. “So,” I said, between mouthfuls. “What was that favour you wanted to ask me earlier?”
“Oh… so… um… funny story,” Harry said, suddenly becoming very interested in his plate of food. “You know how I said Francesca’s getting married? Well, the wedding’s in two weeks, and I may have told her I was bringing my boyfriend. And by that I meant you.” His voice went very high and squeaky at the end as he attempted to give me his most charming smile, but I was in no mood to be charmed.
“Harry. Fucking. Spencer. What the fuck did you do?” Harry recoiled slightly at the amount of venom in my voice, but I didn’t care. Thirty seconds ago, I’d thought I was going to be able to finally move on, and now I was being dragged back into his life by my ankles. Well, I wasn’t going down without a fight. There was no way on earth I was going to that wedding.
“I panicked, okay?” Harry said. “Francesca was finalising the table plan last week and being an absolute cow, saying how awful it was I couldn’t get a boyfriend and how terrible it would look at the wedding, and I just snapped. So, I said I would be bringing someone, and I thought that would be the end of it and I’d have some time to figure this out, but then she asked me who it was, and the only person I could think of was you…” He gave me a weak smile, looking utterly drained. As if all the fight had been sucked out of him. My heart fluttered, my resolve weakening. There was no way I was going to let the Queen of Hell stomp her way through life, breathing fire over everyone because the tablecloths were a slightly different shade of white than the napkins or because her brother hadn’t upheld the family reputation by bringing some pretty trophy boyfriend who’d look good in the photographs. If she was going to be a bitch about it, then so was I. Two could play at that game.
“Fine,” I said, spearing a piece of chicken with more force than was strictly necessary. “I’ll do it. I’ll pretend to be your boyfriend for this wedding.”
“Thank you! I owe you. I really do.” Harry beamed. “Don’t worry, I’ll sort everything. I’ll send you the date. I’m assuming you’ll be able to get the time off, right? Oh, and it’s down in the Cotswolds, at Eric’s parent’s place, so would you be okay coming down on the Friday before with me? I can bring you back first thing on Sunday. Do you have a suit?”
I shook my head and rolled my eyes fondly, slightly feeling like I’d been had. I’d never been able to resist Harry, and I think he knew it. “Calm down,” I said. “I’ll get the time off. Keira wants a couple of extra shifts, and I think Seb will be back by then too, so it’ll be fine.” At least, I hoped it would be. If not, I’d have to do a little begging and perhaps remind people how many favours they owed me for covering for them. I was sure Seb owed me at least two shifts for when he’d gotten shitfaced last month and had been hungover for three days. Alcohol really didn’t agree with him now that he was thirty. “And I think I’ve got a suit. I’ll have to dig around in my wardrobe. If not, I’ll try to get a new one.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get you one,” Harry said. “We’ve got two weeks. I’m sure my tailor can rush you one through. If not, he’ll be able to recommend somewhere to get a decent off-the-peg one. I’ll ring him on Monday.”
“Seriously? It’s just for one day. You don’t need to do that.”
“Of course I do. In fact, it’s the least I can do. You’ve agreed to spend a full weekend with my family while pretending to be my boyfriend. I’ll buy you whatever you want.”
“Those are dangerous words, Mr. Spencer,” I said with a chuckle, raising my eyebrows. “Don’t tempt me.”
“Don’t worry. I fully intend to resist… Mr. Griffin. For now, at least.”
I swallowed hard. I’d already told myself I wasn’t going to fall for Harry again. The problem was my heart had already made a decision without me.
I hadn’t been sure how much I’d see Harry before our forthcoming weekend from hell, but now that we’d started talking again, it was like the floodgates had been opened.
Every day I got a steady stream of messages about everything from his life at work, which sounded horrendously fucking boring, to his random thoughts on whatever popped into his head. Those bits were usually fun and interesting. He also told me about his dog. Toast was a was fat, fluffy corgi with deep brown and honey-coloured fur whose sole interests in life were lying in the sun, eating, and occasionally chasing pigeons in the park whenever he got a rare burst of energy.
I adored Toast, and I’d missed him almost as much as I’d missed Harry. I’d demanded many pictures of the chunky fluffball as payment for having to go to Harry’s tailor on Monday evening. I’d been on the day shift and had spent most of my time doing orders and accounts for the week ahead. It was one of my least favourite tasks, but when Tom, who owned the pub, had taken me on as manager, it was one of the things we’d decided would be mine. Tom said it would help me with responsibility, but it was mostly because he loathed anything to do with numbers.
Harry had picked me up and dragged me across the city to a shop in Saville Row where I’d met Angelo. I’d been expecting a stuffy old man, but what I’d gotten was an exuberant Italian who talked nineteen to the dozen, told me how pretty I was, then spent thirty minutes discussing suit colours and linings.
“Two weeks isn’t a lot of time,” he’d said as he’d handed me fabric swatches and gave Harry a piercing look. “You should have introduced me a lot sooner. I’d have done wonders for you boyfriend. Now, I only have time for one suit and only with what I’ve got.”
Harry had blushed and stumbled over his words, apologising for the oversight.
“Don’t worry,” I’d said, sipping the coffee Angelo had given me. “We can always come back afterwards. I’m intrigued now.” Angelo had beamed, practically bouncing around his studio as he talked about flowered waistcoats and contrasting colours. I’d given Harry a wink, and he’d smiled, as if it was something he was really considering. Which was stupid because we’d already agreed this was a ruse.
I’d be his boyfriend for the weekend, he’d make me look the part, and we’d part ways afterwards as unlikely friends. Maybe we’d even get the chance to hook up again somewhere in the middle, for old times’ sake. I couldn’t deny I missed the way he fucked.
But that would be that.
After Angelo had dismissed me, we’d gone to get pizza, sitting at a corner table in a tiny Italian restaurant not far from Harry’s house. We’d stayed there for hours talking about everything we could think of, until we’d had to drag ourselves home because we both had work the next day, and Harry seemed to have developed this fucked up habit of going to the gym at five in the morning.
“There are more fun ways to exercise,” I’d teased, as we’d waited for someone to appear with a card machine so we could pay. Or Harry could pay. He’d given me a stern look as soon as I’d reached for my wallet, and I’d decided not to argue.
“I know, but this is the only one available to me, so treadmill it is.”
I’d been phenomenally tempted to invite him back to mine, because I was horny as fuck and we’d never said anything about no sex, but I didn’t want to get my feelings mixed up in this, and I didn’t want us to fall back into our old pattern of fuck and run.
“Sucks to be you,” was all I’d said. I’d then gone home and spent the rest of my evening making good use of my porn studio subscription.
I hadn’t really seen much of Harry after that, and if it weren’t for the continuous messages, I’d have thought he was avoiding me. I just wasn’t sure why.
The Friday of the wedding weekend dawned like so many days of British summer: grey, wet, and miserable.
“Well,” I muttered to myself, as I finished packing the last of my clothes. “This will make her majesty very happy.” Harry was picking me up at lunchtime so we could make it to the bed and breakfast we’d been booked i
nto by the middle of the afternoon. Apparently, our presence had also been requested at dinner. I was not particularly looking forward to spending several painful hours in a restaurant with Harry’s family. I just had to hope Eric’s relatives weren’t as horrific. I still wondered how Harry had turned out to be a vaguely normal human being considering everything.
My housemates were both at work, so I spent most of my morning watching endless episodes of Last Call, which was this terrible eighties detective show about a guy who solved crimes with his cop best friend while also running a busy bar in New York. The premise was thin at best and the acting was terrible. Everyone wore sunglasses and had cheesy catch phrases like, “I guess he bought his… final round”, but it was also strangely watchable. It was one of those shows where you laughed all the way through the first episode because it was so bad, put on another because you wanted to see if it stayed that way, and then you suddenly found yourself twelve episodes in and neck deep in a tube of Pringles while you said everyone’s catch phrases and formed your own conspiracy theories.
When Harry messaged me to say he was outside, I was ten minutes from the end of an episode, just before the big reveal. I was sure the rich wife had murdered her husband for sleeping with the nanny, but it could have also been his business partner because the nanny was his secret daughter. I wasn’t ruling out a joint plan either.
“You know I was just getting to the good bit,” I said, as I shoved my suitcase into the back of Harry’s car then climbed into the passenger seat. “Why do you have to be so punctual?”
Harry laughed. “Sorry, you’ll have to watch the end later. I’ve got my laptop with me so you can use my Netflix.”
“Oh no, you’re going to watch it with me. We’re going to watch the whole episode so you can understand why you ruined the tension.”
“What were you even watching?” he asked, as he pulled out into the steady stream of London traffic, following the satnav’s careful directions.
“Okay, so, it’s this show called Last Call…” I quickly explained the setup and gave a brief overview of the characters, watching Harry’s face split into a grin as I tried to do my best impressions of eighties New York cops.
“That sounds… interesting.”
“You can say it sounds shit because it kinda is.” I laughed. “But you can’t help getting addicted to it. You’ll see when you watch it. I’m already on season three.”
“They let it run for three seasons?”
“They let it run for seven! I’m kinda interested to see how ridiculous it gets by the end. Apparently, there’s some huge conspiracy with the mayor and the mob!” I’d already spent an hour this morning reading bits of Wikipedia on my phone while watching, simultaneously trying to find and avoid all the major spoilers.
“Don’t spoil it,” Harry said. “You never know, I might love it and have to watch it all.”
“You’re going to have to watch it anyway. It sucks you in, and you’ll end up binging it whether you enjoy it or not.”
“Well, if I do, you’ll certainly hear about it. It can be your punishment for ruining my taste in television.”
“Send me Toast photos and you can complain all you want. Speaking of the fluffball, where is he?” I turned my head to check the back of the car, in case Harry had somehow snuck him into the backseat without me noticing him. But sadly, there was no Toast.
“He’s staying with Ben for the weekend,” Harry said. Ben was Harry’s best friend and quite possibly one of the world’s loveliest human beings. He looked like your typical London fuckboy, with his striped shirts and chinos and perfect, chiselled features, but underneath it he had a heart of gold. He’d been at uni with Harry and ended up a corporate lawyer, then four years ago he’d had a crisis of conscious while on a luxury holiday in Costa Rica and packed it all in to become an environmental lawyer and campaigner. These days he headed up the legal division at this new environmental group in London, kept bees in his garden, and herded three miniature dachshunds called Pickle, Lola, and Monty.
“Hang on, how did Ben get out of this? I thought your sister tolerated him?”
“She did, until last year when Eric and Ben got into an argument about corporate responsibility at a family barbecue, and Ben tipped a jug of punch over his head to illustrate a point.” Harry chuckled while I stared open mouthed. “Best thing I’ve seen in years.”
“Holy shit! And you didn’t tell me about this?”
“We, um, we weren’t talking back then…”
“Oh, yeah.” That must have been at the start of last summer, just after Harry had told me he was going to New York. We’d fought, both saying things I knew we’d regretted immediately. I’d told him not to call me again.
That was the thing I regretted most. I’d been too stubborn to reach out to him, and I’d been determined to start afresh, even if my heart wasn’t in it.
“So, how is Ben?” I asked, changing the subject slightly. “Is he suffering much from being denied Francesca’s charming presence?” Harry snorted.
“Something like that,” he said with a wry smile, before starting to chat away about Ben and a trip they were planning together at some point. Something inside me relaxed as Harry spoke, a strange feeling of tightness loosening in my chest. I knew I needed to forget the past and move on, and I’d been doing a great job of that until he’d shown up at the pub.
Except, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to forget.
More than anything, I think I wanted us to go back and start again. But this time, I wanted us to get it right. Not that I was going to say anything. I didn’t want the rest of the journey, let alone the whole weekend, to be awkward.
All I had to do was be fake in love with Harry instead of real in love with him.
God, this was so fucked up!
The journey passed without too much difficulty, and soon I found myself staring out the window at the lush rolling hills of the Cotswolds. It was beautiful, with sweeping countryside and picture-perfect villages. It was the sort of place where small country cottages went for millions and was a far cry from the small corner of east London I’d called home since I was born.
“I think this is it,” Harry said, pulling the car off onto a small country lane between two hedges and peering out the windscreen at a little sign by the driver’s window. “Ah, yes, Willow Farm.”
“Are you sure? It looks like a farm track,” I said. “This is where we get lost in the middle of nowhere, kidnapped by posh hillbillies, and miss the wedding. Actually, that sounds preferable to spending the weekend with your family. Drive on, Jeeves.”
Harry snorted. “Yes, sir.”
I was still doubtful as we drove on, mostly because the road was narrow with grass tufts growing in the centre, and there was nowhere to turn around or pull over if we got into trouble. This was like the start of an episode of Last Call, and I knew exactly how it ended. With Harry and I locked in someone’s basement. And not in a fun way.
I sighed. Maybe I’d been watching a few too many episodes recently.
We rounded a bend in the road, and suddenly it opened out into a wide, gravelled drive with a large, wooden gate across it that was propped open. Beyond it was a selection of pretty, low stone buildings and what looked like a farmhouse and some stables. There were a couple of other cars here, so Harry slotted his into a gap, stretching and sighing happily as he turned the engine off.
“Thanks for driving,” I said, opening the car door and breathing in deeply. It wasn’t raining here, but luckily it wasn’t baking either. A soft breeze played across my skin as I climbed out of the car, stretching my legs. Flowerbeds in full bloom decorated the edge of the drive and around the house, and beyond the wooden fence were rolling green fields.
There was a soft woof from behind me, and an old black Labrador came pottering around the edge of the house, accompanied by a cheery looking older woman in a bright pink t-shirt and old jeans. Her short, curled hair was dyed a soft l
avender colour, and I immediately decided I liked her.
“Hello,” she called. “You must be Harry and Jack.”
“Yeah, we are. I’m Jack, and this is Harry.” I pointed to my “boyfriend”, who was stretching his arms above his head and revealing a delicious strip of skin between the bottom of his polo shirt and the top of his jeans.
Bastard.
“I’m Pam, and that’s Stan,” she said, pointing at the elderly Labrador, who’d wandered off to investigate a nearby flowerbed. “Don’t worry. He’s harmless, but he is going slightly deaf, so just be careful not to trip over him. Although he’ll still know if you’ve got food.” She chuckled, looking at him fondly. We chatted for a minute, while she asked about our drive. “Anyway,” she said. “I’ll stop rabbiting on. Shall I show you to your room?”
“That would be great,” Harry said. He’d apparently found his tongue. “I think my mum organised it, so unfortunately I have no idea what she’s booked.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got you sorted.” She gestured for us to follow her across the drive to the low stable buildings. “My husband and I bought this place about ten years ago, and these were so run down back then, but we decided to convert them into a few rooms. We’ve got six in total.” Pam paused at the end of the block, gestured to a pretty yellow door with a black, metal number six bolted to the wood. “This is you. It’s already open, the key is in the other side of the door. I’ve left you some snacks too.”
I pushed the door open, letting out a little happy sound as I looked inside. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. A huge wooden bed stood in the centre of the room covered in a pale-yellow bedspread and a mountain of cushions. There were bedside tables, a wardrobe and chest of drawers made of the same wood as the bedframe, and to one side was a small kitchenette and table, which had a plate of little cakes sitting in the middle under a glass cover. The room curved around the end of the block, so I assumed it had once been two stables. There was another door set back, which I opened to find a giant bathroom, with a walk-in shower and deep claw-footed bath sitting on shiny black tiles.
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