The Wrong Table

Tanya Pratt was thirty-two years old and had been fixing pools for eleven years, and in all that time she had never once crashed a wedding by accident. There was a first time for everything, apparently.

It happened like this. She'd left her channel locks by the skimmer basket at the club pool that afternoon, and the homeowner she'd been working for had told her the pool access gate was behind the country club, so she swung the van around, parked in what she thought was the service lot, and walked in through the nearest open door with her tool bag over her shoulder, fully expecting to slip out to the pool deck, grab her pliers, and leave.

What she walked into instead was a reception hall. White roses everywhere. Fairy lights strung up like the ceiling had a rash. A string quartet warming up in the corner, and a couple hundred people in suits and dresses holding champagne and looking at her like she'd crawled out of a drain.

Well. In fairness, she was still in her work polo, her hair was pushed back under a cap, and she had a bag of pipe fittings on her shoulder.

A woman with a clipboard and the strained smile of a wedding coordinator materialized in front of her. "Oh thank goodness, are you with the lighting crew? You're late, we've been waiting."

Tanya opened her mouth to say no, actually, she was here for her pliers, and then she stopped. Because she'd just spent six hours wrestling a dead pump in ninety degree heat, and the alternative to this room was her apartment, a microwave dinner, and a rerun she'd already seen twice. The bar over by the windows was serving something with rum in it. She could see the little umbrellas from here.

"I'm with the lighting crew," she heard herself say. "Long day."

The coordinator beamed, handed her a drink ticket, and vanished into the crowd. And that was that. Tanya found the bar, ordered the rum punch, parked herself against the wall, and decided she'd stay until the thing wound down and she could slip out to the pool deck in peace. Her tools weren't going anywhere. Neither, apparently, was she.

The punch was better than she expected. She was on her second one when she saw him.

Edward Gill. Standing across the room in a charcoal suit, holding a whiskey, laughing at something some other suit was saying. Thirty-five years old, tall, hair that probably cost more a month than her truck insurance, and a smirk that she could identify from two hundred feet away even in bad lighting.

Her stomach did a thing she did not appreciate.

Edward Gill was her rival, and the word rival was doing a lot of work in that sentence, because the way she felt about him was somewhere between wanting to key his van and wanting to throw him into a deep end and see if he swam. Two summers ago he'd underbid her on the Hartwell estate job, came in eleven percent under her quote, and then botched the resurfacing so badly the owners called her back the next spring to fix his mess, at full price, which he never acknowledged and never apologized for. She'd told anyone who'd listen that he was a hack with a nice website. She'd said it at a supplier's counter with him standing four feet away, and he'd just smiled at her like she was a puppy barking at a doorstop, and she'd thought about that smile more times since than she cared to admit.

So. Irritation, yes. But also, and this was the part that bugged her, curiosity. The man had a way of looking at her like he was reading a meter, taking an actual measurement, and she hated how much she wanted to know what number he was getting.

He spotted her then. She watched it happen, watched his eyes slide across the room, catch on the woman in a work polo drinking a rum punch at a wedding, and narrow. Then he excused himself from the suit, and she thought, oh no, oh absolutely not, he's coming over.

He came over.

"This is a closed event," he said, stopping a polite distance away, arms crossed. "Members and guests."

"So is your face, probably, and yet here we both are."

"You crashed a wedding."

"I'm picking up tools from the pool deck, actually, but the punch was calling. Sue me." She took a long sip, mostly so she'd have something to do with her mouth that wasn't grinning. He was closer than he needed to be. That was the thing about Edward, he always stood just inside the line, never over it, just enough that you noticed.

"You look like you came to fix the fountain," he said, and his eyes did that meter reading thing again, top to bottom, and she felt it like a hand.

"The fountain should be so lucky. I hear the guy who services this club is a hack with a nice website."

Something flickered across his face that was almost a laugh, killed before it got out. "That was one job."

"That was one job you did, and six I had to fix after, but who's counting."

The string quartet launched into something upbeat and the coordinator reappeared, looking frayed now, a stack of place cards in her hand. "Table nine, table nine," she muttered, scanning the room. "The Vantages didn't show, and the Oyelarans are down with the flu, which leaves table nine with four empty chairs and the toasts start in twenty minutes and it has to be full or it photographs wrong." Her eyes landed on Tanya and Edward standing there, and Tanya saw the exact moment the woman stopped seeing a lighting tech and a guest and started seeing two bodies that could fill chairs.

"You two. Table nine. Back left corner, by the windows. Please, please, just sit there during the toasts, you can slip out after, nobody will know."

"We're not actually," Edward started, and Tanya cut in.

"We'd be happy to."

He turned and looked at her with an expression she'd have paid money to photograph. "Would we."

"Free dinner, Ed. Free dinner and open bar. What are you, allergic to winning?"

The coordinator didn't wait for his answer, just pointed them at the table and fled. Tanya walked over and sat down on the window side, and after a moment long enough to make a point, Edward sat down across the corner from her instead of opposite, which put them closer, and she suspected that was the point.

Table nine, it turned out, was the late table, the one for people nobody had wanted to seat but nobody could quite leave out, and by dessert it had thinned to just the two of them while the room shifted toward the dance floor for the toasts. A waiter refilled her punch without being asked. Edward had moved on to his third whiskey. The candles on the table were doing something warm and unfair to his face.

"So," she said, leaning back. "What's your excuse? You know the groom?"

"Bride's family uses my company for their pool service. Her father invited me." He turned his glass a slow half turn on the linen. "What's yours, a lighting emergency?"

"I told one lie tonight and you weren't supposed to hear it twice."

And then the best man stood up with a microphone and the room hushed, and the lights dimmed a little for the slideshow, and the table went half dark, just candles and fairy light glow. Tanya shifted her legs under the table to get comfortable, and her knee bumped into Edward's, and here was the thing, here was the part she'd think about later in the shower and hate herself for thinking it, he didn't move his knee away. He left it there. Warm, solid, pressed against hers through the linen, deliberate in a way that no accident was ever deliberate.

She should have pulled back. Any sane person would have pulled back. Instead she took a slow breath, looked straight ahead at the slideshow, and pressed back, just slightly, just enough that he'd know it wasn't an accident either.

She heard him set his glass down. Quietly. Like a man clearing the table for something.

On the screen, the bride and groom grinned in front of some beach somewhere. Under the table, Edward's knee stayed exactly where it was, and Tanya Pratt, thirty-two years old, eleven years in pools, sat very still and thought that for the first time in months she was not even slightly bored.

The slideshow droned on, and somewhere around photo forty of the couple at a pumpkin patch, Edward leaned over and spoke low, so low she felt it more than heard it. "About the Hartwell job," he said, and she turned her head and found him closer than she expected, his face lit from the screen in that flickery blue. "The underbidding. I'm not going to apologize for winning, but I'll admit I cut it too thin and I knew it at the time."

"Well, look at that," she whispered back, because the room was quiet and the best man was mid-joke. "Edward Gill admits a flaw. Somebody call the papers."

"I'm being serious, Tanya."

"Are you? Because that sounded like an apology with a smirk welded to it."

"It is an apology with a smirk welded to it. It's the only kind I make." And his knee pressed a fraction harder against hers, and her breath went somewhere shallow and stupid. She heard herself answer him and hated the sound of her own voice, breathy, almost a whisper, nothing like the flat professional tone she used with customers. "One job, Ed. You cost me one job and then acted smug about it for a year. You want forgiveness, buy me a drink that isn't rum punch."

"That can be arranged." He said it easily, but she caught the way his hand had settled on the table near hers, not touching, just near, close enough that she could feel the warmth off it. On the screen the groom fell off a jet ski in eleven slow photos and the room laughed, and Tanya didn't laugh, she just sat there with her pulse doing something embarrassing in her throat.

The toasts ended, eventually, the way toasts do, with a standing ovation and the DJ switching over to music that was mostly bass. Then came the cake, a four-tier white thing that the groom cut while the photographer directed him like air traffic. Tanya watched the whole ceremony with her knee still touching Edward's, neither of them mentioning it, both of them clearly aware of nothing else. He fed her a small observation about buttercream structural