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“I can entertain myself,” he said with a grin.
I rolled my eyes. “Sorry, not happening. Only because I have to go to Italy for a wedding before heading to London to work.”
“Oh, cool!” He spooned some bulgogi onto his plate, and the fragrance of the marinated beef filled my nose and triggered my appetite even more. “That’s a high-roller wedding. Is Cass finally getting married? Did Mike finally propose to her?”
“Ha, nope,” I said. I was entertained by the guess; he knew my friends well since they’d been a fixture in my life throughout his adolescence. He’d tried out his clumsiest flirting on Bree, and Cass had changed his wardrobe for the better. Sammy generally made fun of him in good spirits, and he’d been at both Sammy’s and Bree’s weddings. He was the only member of my family any of them had ever met. “You wouldn’t know anyone in this particular wedding party. I was merely invited as a plus one.”
He raised his eyebrows at me. “Interesting.”
“What’s so interesting about it? I met a man who invited me to a wedding, and I get a quick vacation in Italy out of the invite. So, it’s nothing to brag about.”
“Right,” he said, digging into the sweet potato noodles he loved so much.
“Why do you act like there’s anything more to this? You’ll hurt your brain if you try to dig for something that’s not there, Shane,” I said, not wanting to explain the bizarre arrangement I’d made with Spencer.
“Because there is more to this, Nat. You’re attending an event across the ocean with a man. Everyone who knows you knows it isn’t your style to lock down like that with a man for any reason.”
“Lock down with a man?” I smirked with confusion. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Put yourself in a situation where a man depends on you for anything. This sounds like there’s more to the story to me,” he said, eyeing me and believing he would actually get the whole story out of me. “You’re the queen of the term love them and leave them.”
I stared at him. “Well, trust me, this one will be left like the rest of them. Just because I’m attending a damn wedding with the man doesn’t mean I’m planning on meeting him at the altar.”
“Am I wrong, though? There’s more to this guy if you’re doing something like attending a wedding with him.”
“Meh,” I said, tilting my head back to catch the last of the soup in my mouth. “Nope. Not even a little bit, actually. Nice try, though. How’s the bulgogi?”
He shrugged as he took a bite. “Don’t change the subject. Who’s this guy that you’re going out of your way for? What’s his name? What does he do?”
“Oh, my God. You are insufferable,” I said. “His name is Spencer if you must know.”
He shrugged. “All right,” he said. “I guess it’s an okay name.”
“That’s a ridiculous metric by which to judge someone,” I said.
“Well, answer the other questions, then. What does he do? Where’s he from?”
“Why, so you can Google him?” I asked. “No, I’m not going to tell you who he is. All you need to know is that he’s nice enough and invited me to a wedding.”
“Goddamn,” he said, fixing me with the world’s most obnoxious smirk. “The sex must be good if you’re sitting there looking like that.”
“I’m definitely not getting into that with you,” I said, looking over the damage he’d done to the plates of takeout in front of us. “You know, for someone who said he wasn’t very hungry, you sure put a dent in the food.”
He looked it over before he looked back at his plate. “I guess I was hungrier than I thought.”
“I guess so.” I leaned forward, putting my hand over my brother’s. “Shane, what exactly did you do all day today?”
He looked at me and shrugged. “I worked on some clients’ websites and did some stuff for that app idea I was telling you about last week.”
“I do still love that idea,” I said, thinking of the composition app for digital music he’d told me about while we’d been at dinner the week before, “but you know that’s not what I’m asking you about.”
He gave me a long look before looking into the corner of the room. “Nat…” He drifted off with a look of guilt I was expecting when I pinned him and forced some accountability out of him.
“What was it this time, Shane? Coke? Ketamine? I know it wasn’t heroin, or you’d be nodding in and out of this conversation, so—”
“Natalia. Please, just drop it.” He pulled his hand out from under mine and got up, going to the desk in the corner where his computer monitors were set up and hastily organizing the work surface. “You wanted me to let the Spencer thing go, right? And by the way, I do not buy that you don’t like him; you have that look in your eye that you always get when you’re leaning into a new adventure—obsession—or whatever the fuck you want to call it. So, if you want to talk about whatever it was that I took today, then we’re also going to talk about Spencer Smith, or Jones, or—”
“Jesus, okay,” I said, holding my hands up in surrender. “If I tell you his last name, will you let it go?”
