Chapter Eight
Ransom
When we got to the dinner, I decided to try and let Bethany take the lead in terms of how to interact with her classmates. We held hands as we went into the school together, and I kept my attention on her instead of looking around. After all, at the end of the day a school is a school, and most of them look almost completely alike, with the only difference being color schemes.
It was just like how I expected the first night of a big reunion to be. Everyone was dressed to the nines in semi-business attire--dresses and button-down shirts and ties--and everyone looked just a little bit awkward, wearing their name tags and trying to find their friends. The cafeteria had been done up especially for the event, which seemed to me a little bit like putting gilt on a dead rose, but the bunting and the hand-painted posters had a certain kind of appeal that the cheap votive candle holders in school colors didn’t quite capture.
The alumni committee or whoever it was that had organized the whole shebang had at least put in good money for the catering, and someone had pulled a bunch of round tables from somewhere, instead of the usual long cafeteria planks.
“Beth! You look great!” I turned my attention to the woman who came up to Bethany and me, and smiled politely.
“You too, Alicia!” Bethany said. “Wow--you really bounced back after the baby.”
If I hadn’t gotten a feel for Bethany already, I probably would have thought she was being completely genuine. Of course, no one is completely genuine at a high school reunion--or at least, not at first, and not with the people they weren’t best friends with back when they were actually attending school.
“And who’s this gorgeous guy?” Alicia looked me up and down like I was a steak on a plate, and I resisted the urge to laugh.
“I’m just her arm candy for events like this,” I said jokingly. “She keeps me around for that and for the occasional late-night treat.” Bethany elbowed me and I saw her blushing, smiling, and I leaned in a little closer to Alicia. “Honestly, I get the better end of the deal. Cooking the occasional midnight feast in exchange for this one? Totally fair.”
“James is a chef and caterer,” Bethany piped in, leaning against me like an infatuated high school girl.
“That’s a great catch! How did the two of you meet?” I let Bethany take over the story--it was her cover for me, after all.
“James’s catering company was one of the ones we talked to for an event my organization was holding--a banquet to thank our major donors. When I tasted his food, I just had to hire him,” Bethany said, beaming as if she wanted to smile her face off.
“I asked her out before the event,” I added, “but unfortunately Bethie here is more ethical than I am--no dating contractors!”
Bethany laughed and shrugged off my addition to her tall tale.
“Once we’d finished up the banquet, I told him that he’d done a marvelous job, but we probably wouldn’t be hiring him for the next one--because I did want to go out with him, and I never combine business and personal,” Bethany finished.
Alicia said some vague things about how lucky we both were, and how cute we were together, and Bethany and I played the role of a hot couple trying not to seem too boastful. It helped that I still had a slight buzz from the beers we’d enjoyed while quizzing each other--not enough to mess things up, but enough to keep me at ease.
As the night wore on, though, both Bethany and I started to trip each other up. People wandering around the tables before the dinner itself was served wanted to talk to her, and both of us found out that even with the quizzing and the preparations, we weren’t really ready for some of the things people wanted to know. Someone wanted to know how long I’d been working as a chef, or how I’d started my business--and I hadn’t even really thought about that.
“Really, I’m focused completely on my sweetheart, here,” I said, when someone tried to get more details out of me about my work. “Doesn’t she look amazing?” I reached out and took her hand and brought it to my mouth to kiss the top of it.
“Oh, she’s stunning, for sure--but I think we all knew, even back in high school, that Bethany could be a stunner if she wanted to be,” one of her former friends, a girl named Kennedy, said.
“How long have the two of you been together?” someone else at the table asked.
“We’ve been dating seriously for about the last nine months,” Bethany said.
“She finally let me move in with her about six months ago,” I added, grinning. “That makes it a little easier to make sure she eats properly--poor thing is so wrapped up in her work sometimes that she doesn’t even get home until eight or nine at night.”
“If you run a catering company, you probably keep late hours sometimes too, though,” someone pointed out.
“I have a really good manager, I hired him right about the time that Bethie and I started up,” I said, dismissing the idea. “The whole reason I started in that line of work was to be my own boss, and now that everything’s running so smoothly, I can put more of my time into what I really want.”
“If only you could get Bethany to be less of a workaholic!”
I laughed that off. “Oh, she’s not that addicted to work--she’s plenty good with the fun, too,” I said. “It’s more that she throws herself completely into whatever she’s doing, you know?”
“James!” Bethany was blushing, but I could tell she was enjoying it--even if we were both faking.
“She’s a very private person, which I respect,” I said. “Besides, there’s something to say for keeping what happens in the apartment...or the office...in those places.” I winked around the table.
“For sure, she never seems to post much about what she does outside of work,” someone pointed out.
“I just don’t ever think to talk about things I do in my free time,” Bethany said, shrugging it off.
“Why not? It seems like everyone’s trying to live that aspirational life,” one of the women at the table--I was pretty sure she was some kind of marketer--said.
“I think--if I can speak for you, babe--that Bethany’s so busy living her life to the fullest that it just doesn’t come up,” I said.
“That’s exactly it,” Bethany said.
The dinner was good enough that I could comment on it; apparently one of the people at our table had been involved in the planning for the events somehow, so I could pretend to be an expert, commenting on the doneness of the steak, or the sauce on the chicken--things like that. Everything started going more smoothly at that point as people started drinking and just took for granted that of course Bethany had a date, and of course I was who I said I was.
I wondered just how long the whole thing was going to be--it didn’t seem like the kind of event that was designed to be hours long, but everyone seemed to want to talk to everyone. I met Bethany’s best friend, Jess--who gave me a knowing look and took Bethany aside for a few minutes. I wondered just how much Jess knew about Bethany’s real life, and whether Bethany had clued her friend in about our scheme.
“James, you said that you and Bethany have been living together for six months?” someone asked.
“Yeah--she finally agreed to let me stay with her,” I replied.
“I thought she’d moved in with you?”
I shook my head. “No--I moved in with her. Her place has the bigger kitchen,” I said with a grin. “And a bigger bedroom.”
“When is your anniversary?” the woman asked.
I blanked--I absolutely blanked. We hadn’t even set a specific date for when we would have started dating.
“Don’t tell her,” I told the woman, leaning in, “but I was hoping to make it an anniversary week--I’m working out the details now.”
“What kind of details?”
I grinned more broadly. “Hotel room, out of town, the whole nine,” I said. “Thankfully I have plenty of friends in the industry to help me out with prime places to stay, and a few of my classmates are willing to hold a table for me at their restaurants.”
“It sounds like a dream,” the woman said, shaking her head slowly, almost in disbelief.
I had to fight back the urge to laugh again, thinking about how ridiculous everything Bethany and I had claimed was.
Bethany came back then and I gestured to the woman to keep her silence on my supposed plans--I’d need to figure out with Bethany later when to say our anniversary was. After the dishes were all cleared, someone put on some music, and while one or two people got up and danced a bit, it wasn’t really the right vibe for it, so Bethany and I just wandered around, hand in hand, talking to people.
I pulled her aside at one point, pretending I wanted to get her alone for reasons other than talk. “When’s our anniversary?”
“Oh shit,” she said, staring at me. “We never even thought of that.”
“Well, figure out which event I was supposed to have catered, and we can go from there,” I suggested.
“Did someone already ask you about it?” she asked, her forehead crinkling with worry.
“I told them I was going to try and make us an anniversary week, and I think she bought it,” I told her.
“Good, good,” Bethany said. “I’ll have to figure something out once we go home--figure out when to say we started dating.”
“I mean, we could pick a date more or less at random,” I pointed out. “As long as we both go for it, nobody can really question it.”
“But I want to make sure it’s feasible, in case someone remembers me posting about the catering at one of the events, or something like that,” Bethany countered.
“First of all, I doubt anyone remembers more than maybe a quarter of what you post in terms of specifics,” I said. “Secondly, as long as it’s just about a year ago they’re not really going to think about it too hard.”
“Yeah well--you thought we knew all we needed to about each other when we came in, and we obviously didn’t,” Bethany said.
I had to admit she had a point about that.
“I’ll keep up the ‘week-long anniversary’ thing for now,” I suggested.
“And if anyone asks me, I’ll just say that I don’t remember the specific day of our first date, but it’s in my calendar,” Bethany said.
I snickered. “We’re setting ourselves up for me to be the romantic, I guess?” I leaned in as some people passed by, trying to make it look like we were kissing in the dark little alcove.
“We? You’re the one setting that up,” Bethany pointed out, grinning slightly. “I like it though, don’t get me wrong.”
“No woman in her right mind would dislike it,” I said. “We’ll get through the night well enough, and tomorrow we’ll figure out how to make the rest of this happen without any catches.”
Bethany nodded. “We should head back to the table, I think the event’s almost over,” she suggested.
I took her hand and led her away, wiping at my mouth surreptitiously to make people think I was trying to make sure I didn’t have any lipstick there.