Commitment Issues by Ali Ryecart
Chapter One
Elliot
“There’s no way I can get out of it, even if I wanted to. And why should I? I’m the best man, for God’s sake. Or one of them.”
I push my fingers through my hair, the hard tug on the strands making me wince. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had this conversation with James.
“Yes, and who’s the other one? Andrew and Marcus can’t be expecting you to go. Not now.”
The position I’m in is unenviable. That’s the cool, reasoned, understated way of looking at it. A shit storm waiting to happen, is the other. James glares at me. For such a short arse, he’s surprisingly fierce. A Rottweiler in Armani. Or one of those horrible yappy little dogs beloved of over-powdered, over-rouged elderly ladies. Whichever, he has sharp teeth when he has a mind to use them. But I should be grateful, I suppose, that one of my two oldest friends took it upon himself to be President and Chairman of Team Hendricks when my relationship with Gavin hit the skids, crashed, and burned.
“You can stop glaring at me.”
“I’m not glaring. I’m glowering. There’s a discrete, finely tuned difference,” he drawls.
“Whatever that squinty-eyed expression is, backing out of being Andrew’s best man can only be excused by death or imprisonment, and I’m not planning on either of those. I’ll get us some more drinks.” If I disappear to the bar for a few minutes perhaps he’ll have changed the record by the time I get back. I go to stand, but James’ grip, surprisingly strong for such a slight man, keeps me captive in my seat.
“You’re just trying to change the subject. I know you too well, Elliot Hendricks.”
Unfortunately, that’s true. James continues to glare — or glower — at me, but even in the bar’s muted lights, it’s impossible not to see the mischievous light in his eyes. And that doesn’t bode well. The words James and mischievous are an ominous and sometimes frightening combination.
“And besides, you don’t need to go to the bar. There are lots of luscious young waiters milling around.”
James shifts his focus from me. Throwing out a smile and a wink he summons up, as though by magic, one of the luscious ones.
“Two more G&Ts, darling, and one for yourself.”
He makes no secret he’s checking out every inch of the young waiter. I swallow the groan aching to escape my throat. My friend’s sharpening his knife to make another notch on his bedpost. With a simpering smile, the waiter disappears with our order.
“And you can take that pained look off your face.” James spears me with his feline eyes. “It doesn’t suit you. It just makes you look like you’re straining for a shit. If you are, of course, please don’t let me stop you from availing yourself of the facilities.”
“If I do have a pained look, it’s because you won’t change the record.”
“He’s very pretty.”
“What?” I should be used to James’ sudden, incomprehensible switches of subjects, but they never fail to leave me floundering.
“The waiter. He was immune to my charms, and his smile was as false as a reality TV star’s tan and tits, which naturally makes him something of a savage, but I saw how he was looking at you.”
“He wasn’t looking at me, and even if he was, it was only because the staff here are ordered to flirt. It’s in their employment contract. It keeps the punters happy, and happy punters order more drinks. And why did you want to meet here? We could have booked a table at Caravaggio.” My stomach gives a Pavlovian rumble as I say the name of the small restaurant that serves some of the best Italian food in London. I can almost taste the lasagna.
“Because the waiters at Caravaggio are neither as cute nor as easy as the ones here. And all that pasta? You know how carbs go to my hips.” James arches his brows in mock horror, and even though I don’t want to, I can’t help laughing.
He leans forward, all trace of waspish humour disappearing.
“It’s good to hear you laugh, even if it is at me. It feels like too long since I heard those butch, gravelly tones,” James says, a small and this time genuine, smile tugging at his lips. In truth, it feels like a long time since I’ve had cause to.
The smile drops away, and is replaced by brow-crinkling concern.
“Seriously Elliot, you need — and deserve — some mindless, no strings fun. You need to let off some steam, and I don’t mean by pounding your way across Hampstead Heath. It’s another kind of pounding that’d do you the world of good. I mean it.” He squeezes my arm, to underscore his words. “I do worry about you, you know.”
And just like that, my eyes prickle. I tell myself it’s because of his steel hard, bony fingers digging into my forearm, but it’s not that and I know it. James, who’s been by my side since we met at school as young teenagers, a man with whom, on the face of it, I have little in common, does worry about me. He always has, in his own way, and I know he always will.
Of course, I’m hardly going to admit that. I clear my throat.
“I’m a big boy now, and I really don’t need looking after. I can tie my own shoelaces, I won’t lose my mittens because they’re on a string, and if I get lost I have my address sewn into my clothes.”
James huffs as he shakes his head, and leans back in his seat. His cat-like eyes rake up and down me, not in any kind of a sexual way, thank God, not in the way he’d done it to the waiter; it’s more as though he’s studying me, trying to work me out, but quite why he needs to do that after so many years I honestly don’t know.
“You’re right, at least when it comes to the Elliot Hendricks everybody sees. That Elliot Hendricks, successful CEO blah, blah, blah, knows exactly who he is and where he’s going. But he’s not the Elliot Hendricks I’m talking about.”
“Then what on earth are you talking about? Come on, out with it and stop being so bloody cryptic.” I lock my gaze to his, meeting the challenge I see in his green eyes.
“I can’t let you go to the wedding—”
“Christ, James. Not this again.” The words explode from me, they’re loud and exasperated, and some nearby fellow customers turn and stare. I lower my voice. “Please. For the last time, I am not letting Andrew and—”
“On your own.” James cuts across me.
“Well, I am,” I snap. “I’ll be going on my own, doing my duty by my friends, because the man I was supposed to be going with will no longer be going with me.” I spit the words out, every one of them ripping my throat to shreds.
Because they hurt.
I keep telling myself the break-up has been for the best, that Gavin and I had been drifting apart, that we would only damage each other if we stayed together. Finding the man I’d loved in bed — in our bed — with a couple of pick ups had been the last straw. I’d forgiven him so many times over the years, but this time had been different, because this time he hadn’t wanted to be forgiven. By the following day, Gavin had gone, leaving a decade-long relationship behind him which, despite everything, I’d told myself was for forever. That had been three months ago, but it felt like three minutes as much as it felt like three years.
“But he’ll be there. You’ll be thrust into his company, with no escape. Your ex, Elliot. Your ex-fiancé, for Christ’s sake, will be there. And that’s something you shouldn’t have to face alone.”
I stiffen. “You don’t think I can face Gavin? You think I’m going to break down and beg him to come back to me, that I can’t hold my head high? After everything he did? Do you really think I’d want him back?”
James says nothing, and anger sears through me, a sudden burning flash, but it dies away just as quickly. Because in those first days after Gavin left, I’d picked up my phone so many times, ready to abase myself. But my pride, battered though it’d been, had been just about strong enough to still my hand.
“I don’t doubt you can face him, the duplicitous, cheating little shit that he is. I just don’t want you facing him alone,” James’ voice is as calm and level as his gaze.
“I won’t be alone. I’ll be part of a wedding party, remember. Whatever there is, or isn’t, between us will be tucked away out of sight. We’ll be civil, and polite, and nice as pie as we behave like the reasonable adults we are. Andrew and Marcus are his friends as much as mine, and neither of us wants our relationship impinging on their day.”
They’re good words, but I’m not sure I believe half of them.
When the world had split into the hashtags Team Elliot and Team Gavin, Andrew and Marcus had done their best to stay neutral, but the bare truth was, Marcus had been Gavin’s friend years before Gavin and I had met, and the same had been for me and Andrew.
A stomach crashing thought occurs to me…
No, he can’t be…
“You’re not offering to come with me as my guest, are you?”
Christ, that really would be a shit show. James and Andrew have never been friends, disliking each other on sight. We’d all attended the same school and university and I was the link between them, and it was for my sake they tolerated each other. But that uneasy truce has been well and truly blown apart.
James is persona non grata in Andrew’s eyes now, and always will be. There’s no way he’ll be allowed within a fifty mile radius of the wedding. And no wonder, as it has more than a little to do with James and Marcus being found in a rather messy-looking drunken snog at a summer party we’d all attended, a good three or four years back. Andrew had been furious and had threatened to give James a kicking, and it’d taken three of us to stop Andrew doing just that. It’d all blown over, but it gave Andrew the excuse to cut James out of his life for good.
James snorts. “Andrew would have my balls ripped off, stuffed, and hung from the ceiling. I wouldn’t go anywhere near their wedding. And nor should you, but if you tediously insist on doing so, then I forbid you to go alone.”
“You—forbid?”
He waves my words away as though they’re nothing more than midges.
“If you insist on going, you need to do it in style. And that includes giving Gavin,” he says, the name sounding like acid on his tongue, “the two fingered salute, and there’s only one way to do that.”
“And that’s how?” I don’t know why I’m wasting my breath asking, because the creeping sensation deep in my stomach is all the warning I need that something’s coming that I don’t want to hear. I wait for the bombshell to drop, and it doesn’t.
“Ah,” he says, his smile wide and his voice overly cheery. “Here come our drinks.”
