God, he was never usually indecisive like this.
It suddenly started ringing again and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He was never usually jumpy either.
Okay, he was going to answer it.
‘Lily,’ he said.
‘Matt. Hi. So it’s rainingreallyheavily.’ It took him a couple of seconds to process her words because they were so different from what he’d been expecting to hear.
‘Rain?’
‘Yes, rain. Really heavy rain. And it’s the wedding.’
‘Right.’ He moved over to the window to check. Yep, it was absolutely chucking it down. ‘Yep, that’s very heavy rain.’
‘Yes, and the entire reception is planned for outside with no gazebo or anything so we need to sort something out and Aaliyah and I can’t do it by ourselves and she thought that you, especially with all your architect knowledge, might be able to help, so she suggested that I call you.’ Lily sounded pretty keen to let him know that it hadn’t been her idea to call. What a nightmare. He didn’t really have any option other than to agree to help.
‘Right. Okay. Where are you now? Shall I meet you both at your hotel? I’ll try calling Carole on my way. She’ll be our best bet for ideas.’
When he’d ended the call with Lily he discovered that while his phone had been busy Tom had left him three – increasingly panicky – messages, saying that he didn’t really know much at all about the wedding because Tess had wanted to organise it all without his input but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t have bargained for this weather and he was also pretty sure she wouldn’t want to speak to him before the ceremony so would Matt mind again checking if everything was alright. Yup.
Twenty minutes later, wearing a raincoat borrowed from the owner of his hotel but still soaked to the bone, he was greeting Lily and Aaliyah in their hotel lobby.
‘Tess is watching TV at the moment and we’ve told her that everything’s under control and that we have Architect Matt sorting everything out,’ Lily said, not smiling a lot and looking somewhere slightly to the right of his face.
‘Yeah, we actually do an entire module on wedding reception planning in the very first term of an architecture degree,’ he said, rolling his eyes, aiming for mild humour rather than arsiness. For everyone else’s sake they were clearly going to have to park any animosity and behave normally around each other today.
‘I’d be annoyed by the sarcasm if I hadn’t said something similar myself,’ said Lily, shifting her eyes so that she was looking at his actual face for a moment, and raising a hint of a smile. ‘Unfortunately, it seems like we’re out of good options, so architect-helper it is.’
‘Honoured to be helping you on those terms,’ Matt said. ‘So where’s the reception due to be held?’
‘It’s in the field attached to a local restaurant. The interior of the restaurant’s quite small and there are a hundred and forty people coming, so we can’t just do the reception inside. Even if there were space to eat there, which there isn’t, there wouldn’t be any room for the musicians and dancing.’
‘I think we should go and check it out in person,’ Aaliyah said.
‘I’m going to give Carole another call,’ Matt said. ‘She knows a lot of people. Plus her car would come in handy.’
Carole still wasn’t answering.
‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘Is everyone taking the longest showers ever today?’
‘Lily said something very similar to that too, before. It’s actually scary how much you two echo each other sometimes.’ Aaliyah beamed at them both, very butter-wouldn’t-melt. ‘Just saying.’
Lily shook her head, gave her friend a clearShut upsmile and went over to the hotel reception. ‘Do you have any umbrellas we could borrow?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry.’ The woman behind the reception raised her shoulders and spread her hands. ‘We buy them when we need them and throw them away.’
‘That’s so bad for the environment,’ Lily said. ‘I wonder whether you should re-think that.’
‘Lily,’ hissed Aaliyah. ‘The wedding.’
‘Yeah, sorry. Where can we buy the umbrellas from?’ Lily asked.
‘The shop isn’t open now.’
‘Okay, well thank you,’ Lily said.
‘So bloody unhelpful,’ Aaliyah said, quite loudly. Lily nudged her, Aaliyah gave her a comedy sneer and Lily rolled her eyes upwards and then laughed. Matt almost had to look away from them to deal with a sudden stab of pure misery;he’dhad closeness like that with Lily once –suchcloseness – and now… nothing.
