b.

You look over briefly—long enough to suggest to him that his presence is mildly perturbing—and then return your attention to the email. You can hardly concentrate over the jazz band in the corner of the hall, rotating through their collection of love songs sung in different romance languages, and now a strange man has set up camp next to you, only further reminding you why you shouldn’t be responding to emails when you’re out of office. 

“Hi,” he says, after more seconds of silence. 

You finish your email before you give him the time of day. “Hi,” you smile, soft but forced. “Who are you?”

“Charles,” He smiles, holding his hand out to shake yours. You stare at his waiting hand until he takes it away. “Nice to meet you,” he laughs, moving one of the drinks closer to you. “For you. White Negroni. Céline told me it’s your drink.”

You give him a sideways glance before looking past him, scanning the reception hall for your friend. She should stand out in her bridesmaid dress. The wedding invite had specifically requested guests to follow a color code, and nobody was wearing that shade besides the bridesmaids. Your eyes finally land on her, glass of champagne in her hand, long blonde hair falling over her shoulders, leaning over to whisper something to the groom—her brother. No doubt the two of them conspiring, a theory only proved when Mathéo’s eyes land on yours from across the room. You roll your eyes. 

“How do you know Céline?” you ask, as if half the guests here tonight aren’t related to her. 

“I went to school with Mathéo,” he says, and you nod slowly, confusion growing, curiosity peaked. “I suppose technically I went to school with Céline as well.”

“I went to school with Céline,” you say, and Charles furrows his brows. 

“Are you sure?” He asks, and you laugh softly, picking up the drink he’d offered, pulling the garnish off the lip of the glass and dropping it on top of the ice. “I’m serious!” He says, matching your laugh, taking a sip of his drink. “Because I would remember you. And I do not remember you.”

“I’m sure,” you shake your head, bringing the glass to your lips. “Lycée. Première.”

Charles nods. “That is why. I was graduated by then.”

Someone laughs so loud at the next table over that it steals both of your attention. It’s the mother-of-the-bride, and she's visibly drunk in a way that only a divorced French socialite can manage. The sudden attention tones her down, and the room is once again filled with wealthy laughter and crisp clinking crystal glasses. 

You love weddings. You love this wedding; the delicate scent of blooming lavender, the smoked salmon canapés and delicate foie gras pâté that sit half-eaten at most of the tables, the perfectly chilled glasses of champagne waiting to be toasted, and the sun. The golden sun that casts itself across the terraces and into the tall windows, painting the dancing figures in golden hues. 

And then he’s speaking again, and you look back at him, and the sun casts a warm shadow through his brown hair that you're noticing for the first time. “Parles-tu français?” he asks. 

You wince, tilting your head to the side, holding up two fingers pinched together. “Un petit peu. Je suis grec,” you explain, pulling your hair around to drape over one shoulder. 

“Ah,” he says. “How do you say, ‘Would you like to dance?’ in Greek?”

You smile gently, taking another sip of your drink. It’s important to keep yourself paced. Especially when you’re staring at someone who looks like that. “Θα χορέψεις μαζί μου?” You finally say, and he stares at you blankly. The expression forces a laugh from you, which in turn pulls one from him. 

“Again?”

“Θα χορέψεις μαζί μου?”

Charles nods for what feels like a very extended period, before downing the remainder of his drink. “Tha horeps…” he winces at his pronunciation so you don’t have to, “mazi-moo?”

You smile at his hopeful expression, and wonder if he’s more hopeful for a correct pronunciation or an agreement to dance. You shrug, swirling your drink around the glass, looking past him to your friend again. 

She’s watching you this time and wears a grin the size of the wedding. She holds up both her thumbs, and then makes a heart with her hands, pretends to have it beating out of her chest. You shake your head, smiling softly, eyes moving back to Charles. 

“One dance.”

— — — 

Your feet drag across the stone pathway like maybe you’ll slow yourself down and get to spend a half-second longer on the phone with him. You hear it over the voices of drunken uncles pouring from open windows and the radio sat on one of the sills playing a Christiana classic. The air is warm, but dry, and the elastic at the end of your braid tickles the skin on your back while you walk. 

Ahead of your scraping shoes, a cat cleans their paw in the yellow of a porch light. You’re in Paros, and life is so sweet you’re finding porch lights and the smell of your yia-yia’s karidopita to be the most romantic thing in the world. 

“I’m nearly home,” you hum into your phone’s receiver. He laughs on the other end, and you wish all the aunts with the drunken, ballad-performing husbands could hear it so they’d stop asking when you’re going to settle down. It would make sense to them, then, the way you behave about Charles. It would all make sense if they heard him laugh, if they could imagine his dimples. 

“Well, you should probably hang up, then,” he says. You roll your eyes. Your cheeks ache from smiling all evening. Your cousin joked before dinner that your face was going to freeze like that if you weren’t careful. 

“I should,” you agree, but you don’t hang up. You stay on the line, quiet, and stop in front of the resident street cat—he’s small and sweet and purrs against your skin when you run your hand over its sleek black fur, scratch your nails under its chin. You’d bring him home if you knew he didn’t belong to someone, to everyone. “Or you could.”

He laughs again. It’s like honey. You’d swan dive into it if you could, drown all slow and blissfully. “I’m not the one nearly home,” he retorts. I could get far from home again, you think. You could do another lap around the neighborhood. You’d already done it thrice, and then two more times after that. What’s another in the grand scheme of things? “I’ll call you again in the morning,” he says, like it’s routine. You suppose it’s sort of becoming that. 

You take a seat on your porch steps. Voices pour out louder, now. They’ve gotten rowdier with every lap you’ve done. A cousin pulls the old squeaky door open behind you, and you jump in your seat, turning around to see who’s busted you. They hold their hands up defensively, mouth a quick sorry like they’d walked in on you changing, and disappear back into the house. You pull your braid over your shoulder, twirl it around your finger carefully. Nervously, you ask:“Do you think we speak too often?”

“Why do you say that?”

You shrug like he can see it. “We talk too much to be friends.”

“Do we?” You imagine him quirking a brow goofily, based solely on his tone of voice. 

“Yeah,” you chuckle, dropping your braid. “Yeah, I think we do.”

Charles sighs. All you can smell is cinnamon and walnuts. You wonder which one of your cousins ate the heel of the bread while you were out walking. “Well, good thing I would never be just friends with you, then.”

The apples of your cheeks burn like they’d been pinched. You flatten your dress over your legs and a careful giggle tumbles from your lips, teeth biting down on the stupid smile there. “Good thing.”

“Goodnight?”

“Yeah,” you nod. “Goodnight.”

— — —

It’s raining in Milan when you pinky promise your best friends that you and Charles aren’t dating. 

The sky has been threatening all afternoon, dull and gray and humidity that was anything but friendly to your hair. It poured through the window like your own personal heatwave every time you walked past the open kitchen window,coated the tiled countertop in an irritable condensation. 

It came wafting through the air with the smell of the impending storm when you opened the door to your friends. Finally, after hours of building up, heavy raindrops patter against the porcelain of your kitchen sink, forcing you to hastily close the window while giggles pour from your friends’ mouths. 

Between your two hands, you can count the number of times the lot of you have been in the same time zone since graduation, let alone the same city. You’d spent the entire humid day wiping condensation off the counters and cutting cheese into perfect cubes and gathering the nicest bundles of grapes you could from the three grocery shops within walking distance. 

The sound of the storm against the glass is drowned out by red-wine laughter and tales of big cities and big dreams, all so vastly different. You sit with your legs crossed underneath you, phone face-up on your thigh, the stem of an empty wine glass pinched between two fingers, twisting the glass around mindlessly.  

Your phone buzzes, for the fourth time in eight minutes. And for the fourth time in eight minutes, you pick it up, abandoning glass on the cluttered coffee table next to the week-old vase of pink anemones. 

Stop texting me, he’s messaged. Enjoy your time with your friends.

You smile softly, your incriminating grin illuminated bright OLED white in contrast to the soft yellow lamp lighting the dim room. You stop texting me, you replied, because you’re a pig-tailed girl on the schoolyard when you talk to him, your normally composed, carefully developed persona melting into a puddle of mush at the mere thought of him. 

Can’t, he responds. I am bored. 

Why? You’re never bored.

“Oh, my God!” your best friend, Roma, teases in broken English, her Italian accent not nearly as light as the cube of ​​Gorgonzola she’d tossed at your head from the other end of the sofa. “Who are you speaking to?” She questions. 

“Just a friend,” you say too quickly, too defensive for anyone in the room to believe. 

Roma quirks her brow at you, curious grin painted on her face. “Yeah? Just a friend?”

“I’m serious,” you insist, turning your phone off. You set it face down on the table, and it vibrates there almost immediately, all of your friends’ eyes watching for your reaction. The corners of your lips tremble, fighting a soft smile, and you shrug, bringing your empty wine glass to your lips, turning your head up to the ceiling, the last few drops of red falling through your lips. And then it vibrates again, the bright colors of your background pouring out in a soft ring of light around your phone. You still don’t flinch, but Roma does, lurching forward and snatching it up before you have time to react. 

“‘Because,” she reads. “‘I’m normally speaking with you at this time,’” she looks over to another friend, grinning,“From Charles. With the emoji that does like this,” she says, mimicking the blushing emoji you have next to his name.“But with the pink on the cheek, yes?” She continues explaining. 

You sink into the sofa, popping that cube of cheese into your mouth before gathering up the baby hairs and bangs that had fallen loose from your ponytail, carefully twisting the hair into a tiny, thin braid coming out from the middle of your hairline. 

“Just your friend?” Roma questions, and you don’t have to look up from your distraction braid to know she’s raising her brows and grinning at you. 

— — — 

You sit next to him in the fourth row of church pews, one leg crossed over the other, desperately wishing the wedding mass program that sat on your lap was a paper fan, not yet having resorted to the lengths some of your fellow guests had gone to and actually using the cardstock to cool down. 

One leg is crossed over the other, the tip of your heel-clad foot threatening to tap the back of the pew in front of you with every awkward, uncomfortable roll of your ankle you attempt. At least your dress is sleeveless, you think. Charles is not as lucky, a formal suit perfectly fitted to his frame, one arm draped behind you over the back of the pew, his fingers mindlessly twirling one of the tiny braids that riddle your ponytail. Neither of you speak nearly enough Spanish or know nearly enough people for this to be any sort of enjoyable. 

“Do you understand them at all?” You whisper, your head falling onto his shoulder. “Because I do not.”

“Absolutely not,” he whispers back, kissing the top of your head, his hand finding yours, interlocking in your lap. “And I am about to die from heatstroke.”

You nod. “You, me, and the rest of the church,” you sigh, pretending not to hear the crying baby or the stressed mother in the back of the church. You figure she has the eyes of enough judgy relatives to drown out any soft sentiments from a stranger.  “Can they just kiss and wrap it up?” You ask, and as is on cue, the newlyweds are locking lips under the cathedral candlelight. 

“Oh shit,” Charles giggles, the two of you hurrying to stand with everyone else in the room who understood what's been happening for the last hour and a half. You hastily adjust the skirt of your dress, feeling quickly to make sure you hadn’t sweat-stained the fabric, or worse, the bench you’d been all but stuck to. “Thank God,” he says, just above a whisper, just loud enough for you to hear. 

The church quickly funnels out of the church behind the couple, filing into the cars that were driving to the reception location. Police officers line the road on either side, cameras and strangers gathered at their barriers. You walk out with your hand interlaced in his, watching every step you take down the steep concrete stairs. 

“Is it like this every time one of you gets married?” You ask, staring at the uniformed officers. They’re a stark contrast to the summer air, to the leaves of the trees drenched in sunlight, and to the flowers buzzing with bees. It feels like you’re at a royal wedding—the ones with professional watchers and ceremonies that get broadcast to millions of people around the world. But it’s not that. It’s just your boyfriend’s teammate. 

“Um,” Charles shrugs. “I’m not sure, to be honest,” he admits. “I don’t think so,” he continues, letting you duck into the black sedan first. “I think it’s just his family.”

“Gosh,” you breathe out, relaxing in the calm of the air-conditioned car. “It’s like a whole production.”

“I know,” he shakes his head, uncapping a water bottle that was waiting in the car door cup holder and passing it to you first. “It’s like they’re Spanish royalty or something,” he laughs. 

You nod animatedly, drinking down the water before passing the now half-full bottle to him. “Exactly like that!” you laugh. 

— — — 

“Three wishes,” you grin, spinning around to face him, antique Arabian oil lamp in your hand. 

The second-hand shop smells like vintage leather and dusty velvet. La Dolce Vita plays from the store radio, and it sounds like it’s on vinyl even though it isn’t. The store is full of gaudy outfits and gaudier decor, and there in the middle of it is you and Charles, the ladder laughing every time the former makes the same joke about twenty different items, each uglier than the one before, being ‘just what I was looking for.’

“I wish for unlimited wishes, obviously,” He says, and you shake your head.

“Absolutely not. That goes against Genie rule number three.”

It’s chilly, the early morning dew still crisp in the air. A gentle breeze pours in from the propped open door, and with it comes the smell of fresh pastries and espresso from the bakery next door. It smells gentle and warm and makes the vintage store feel like your yia-yia’s house on the last morning of your last visit to her house. 

You’re wearing your favorite pair of jeans, a pair of pink sneakers, and a sweater that was your favorite before you shrunk it a size in the dryer the day before. You cover up the fashion faux pas with a tan wool coat and long, hardly managed hair. He’s dressed like you, but elevated. Always more elevated than you, even if the only brand he seems to bring into his closet anymore is his friend’s. 

“Ah,” he nods, pulling you closer by the opening of your coat.  “Of course,” he smiles, speaking softly. “And what are the other rules?”

“Oh, you know,” you shrug, dimples digging into your cheeks at the mere sight of his. “No bringing people back from the dead, no making someone fall in love,” you hum, “and no wishing for more wishes.” 

Charles quirks a brow, dropping his head to the side. “Those are stupid rules,” he protests, pouting. “What if those were all three of my wishes?”

You shrug, holding up the lamp to his eye level. “Got to get educated on Genie’s, man,” you tease, cheeks aching. “I don’t know what to tell you,” you giggle, stepping even closer. “Them’s the rules.”

“Them’s the rules,” he repeats. “How about…” he says, leaning in, still grinning. “Wish one,” he says, pressing a soft kiss into your lips. “Wish two,” he says, repeating the action. “And,” he grins, pulling away momentarily to tuck a piece of hair behind your ear. You think you could die on the spot, melt right into a puddle on the shop floor. Your face is so hot. “Wish three?” he says, and as a surprise to nobody, leans in to kiss you again. 

“Nope,” you shake your head, desperate for another breeze to blow through the shop, to cool you down, to keep you standing. “I expected better wishes. Very… μη πρωτότυπο.”

“Mi protótypo?” he repeats, and your grin grows.

“Not original.”

— — —

Charles’ apartment couldn’t be more different than yours, and not even solely on a decoration level. Fundamentally, you two come from two different spaces, and trying to merge those spaces has been nothing short of a treat. 

Not that your decor styles are the same either, because you think his are one-of-kind. So one of a kind, that the two of you had gone through each other’s apartment with yard-sale stickers from the corner store, tagging everything you refused to mesh with in red, and everything you refused to part with in green.  Who else can say they have three dozen racing helmets and trophies in the living room, a blown-up shot of a homeless American man on their dining room wall, and a piano that costs more than your net worth in the foyer? That is some perfectly Charles Leclerc decor, and if you had told yourself once that you would be endeared by all of it, you’d have laughed in your face. 

But you do. You adore it, the way it perfectly encapsulates her personality. And you adore him, and the way he put a green sticker on a total of seven things in his whole apartment because he wanted to make sure it felt like your space too. 

“Why did you not label any of these boxes?” He asks, the two of you stood in his dining room. In your dining room. In the dining room. 

“Um…” you hesitate. “You know, I was going to. I really was,” you nod, staring at at least twenty cardboard boxes, each of them completely indistinguishable from the others, not a single identifying marker on any of them. 

“And then?” He asks, shoving his hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels, the herringbone hardwood creaking under his feet with the shifting of his weight. 

“And then I realized I packed my Sharpie,” you nod.

“Mmm,” he hums, scratching his beard, his fingers moving over his face and into his hair, combing through it stressfully. He’s so patient with you. Hopelessly patient with you, and would never admit it. “But you could not find the box it was in?” You shake your head, agreeing with his statement. “Because you forgot to label any of the boxes?”

“Because I didn’t label any of the boxes,” you confirm, an apologetic look painted across your face, eyes soft and sweet, attempting to remind him just how much he loves you. “And suddenly the movers were there. And now I’m here.”

“Oh,” he sighs, wrapping his arms around your chest from behind, kissing the top of your head. “I love you so much,” he says. “I love you so much,” he repeats, voice blank, unconvincing. 

“Yeah,” you nod. “I was thinking we start in the dining room,” you joke, smiling softly, pulling a chuckle from his lips. You can always count on him to laugh at your stupid jokes. Even when he’s pretending not to be annoyed with you.“I’m sorry,” you say softly, kissing the forearm crossed over your chest. 

“I know,” he hums. “It’s okay. It won’t be too bad.”

— — — 

A soft summer breeze floats through the air, blows through the linen pinned to clotheslines in the neighborhood. It brings with it salt air and the careful wafts of cinnamon and nutmeg and eggplants and tomatoes. You sip a glass of Retsina, ignoring the bitter and accepting the sweet. 

The olive trees are draped in endless strings of lights, and gentle, traditional music plays from the live band and the wooden stage your uncles had built with your dad. Your Yia-yia moves around from table to table pinching the cheeks of your cousins, reminding the single girls to check their shoes for their prince charmings. 

The sun is setting on the water, golden shadows cutting around the soft cement architecture. The air is light. Charles wears a tan linen suit with an evil-eye boutonniere. You wear a white dress and a cold coin in your left shoe. 

“You told them no to the money, right?” He asks softly, sipping a glass of white. 

“I did,” you nod. “Well. I told my parents,” You shrug. “Whether or not they convey the message to the four hundred other people here, I guess we’ll find out.”

“It’s weird, no? A first dance and a last dance?”

You smile softly, watching a stray cat hurry down an alleyway. “My family keeps coming up to us and pretending to spit,” you giggle, “But the second dance is where you draw the line in the weird sand?”

“None of it’s weird” he shakes his head, reaching to tuck a curly piece of hair behind your ear, adjusting your veil accordingly. “It’s all you,” he says, leaning in to kiss you softly. His lips are soft, and he tastes like apples and melon and citrus, as easy to kiss as ever. “And I love you.”

“Ah,” you nod, a teasingly soft smile parting your lips. “He loves me,” you say, pretending to wipe sweat from your brow. “I was worried.”

“You act very worried,” he grins. “Wedding dress and all.”

“Oh,” you feign surprise as if you've noticed the setting for the first time. “This old thing? The one that costs a quarter of my salary?”

Charles nods, humming. “That’s the one. Keeps taking my damn breath away.”

You look down at yourself, an innocent, girlish smile draped over your lips, the pink shades of the sunset painting themselves warm over your cheeks. A gust of wind blows through the space, the breeze gently blowing through your veil, through the fabric of your dress. 

“Are you ready?” You ask, watching the sun creep closer to the horizon, be swallowed up inch by inch into the sea, using your hand as a shade-visor. “No time like the present, right?” You add, downing what’s left in your glass. “Our second dance as newlyweds.”