An Invitation and an Offer

Maya had photographed enough weddings to recognise expensive paper by touch. This invitation was thick, cream, and determined to survive anything short of a flood. Along the bottom, in her friend Lena's handwriting, were six words: You are a guest. Bring nothing.

She looked at the camera bag by her desk. At twenty-nine, she had built a freelance business by being useful. Attending a wedding without a job felt less like a holiday than an administrative error.

The invitation allowed a guest. The rest of her phone contained suggestions from her sister: a dentist, a friend of a friend, a man described only as very stable. Maya typed that she could attend a wedding alone. Her sister sent three hearts and another photograph.

At Lena and Sam's engagement dinner that evening, Maya arrived alone and ten minutes early. Adrian was already in the restaurant, trying to unfold a chair without attracting attention. He looked up when it pinched his finger.

"Still good at entrances," she said.

They had met through Sam three years earlier. Once, after a group picnic, they had walked to the station together and almost arranged coffee. Then Maya had left for a long assignment, and almost had remained almost.

"I was aiming for furniture maintenance," he said.

At thirty-two, Adrian had founded a small software company whose scheduling tool Maya had actually used. She told him so. He seemed more pleased by her complaint about the export button than he would have been by praise.

"I'll pass that on," he said. "With feeling."

Across the table, his brother Theo announced that Adrian had sold part of the company and might finally have time for a personal life. Maya watched Adrian smile with the resigned precision of someone opening a bill.

"I've got a friend you should meet," Theo continued.

"I have friends. You're sitting with most of them."

Maya laughed into her water. Her sister, beside her, took that moment to mention the dentist. The two conversations collided over the bread basket.

Later, Maya found Adrian on the pavement outside. They stood under a restaurant awning while a bus hissed through a puddle.

"Apparently we're both unfinished projects," she said.

"I'm considering issuing quarterly updates."

She smiled. He looked less polished when he smiled back.

"Are you bringing someone to the wedding?" he asked.

"Only myself, if my sister doesn't arrange an intervention."

Adrian hesitated. "Would you consider arriving together?"

Maya turned towards him. "As a favour?"

"As a mutual arrangement. My brother stops auditioning people. Your sister stops offering medical professionals. We have someone to talk to when everybody starts discussing table linen."

"I like table linen."

"Then I'll learn something."

She studied him, waiting for the part where his problem became her responsibility. He seemed to be waiting for an answer he expected might be no.

"You mean pretending we're dating."

"Only if you want to. I'm quite capable of being single in public. I'm just tired of making it a group discussion."

She understood that better than she wanted to. Still, she had spent too much time photographing other people's carefully arranged lives to wander into one without terms.

"Coffee tomorrow," she said. "We can decide whether this is an impressively bad idea."

They met at a small cafe near her studio. Maya brought a notebook. Adrian laughed when she put it between them, then stopped when he realised she meant it.

"First rule," she said. "No money, professional favours, or business introductions. I don't become a prop for your company."

"Agreed. And you don't have to photograph anything."

"Second. Either of us can leave, cancel, or stop the whole thing. No explanation required in front of other people."

"We should have a phrase."

"We can say, 'I'd like to go home.'"

He considered that. "A revolutionary system."

They added asking before touching, no invented history, no posting photographs without permission, and no promises about events beyond Lena's wedding. They would not lie about work, family, or anything important. If someone asked whether they were together, they could say they had come together and leave it there.

"That's technically true," Adrian said.

"And emotionally evasive. The foundation of our terrible plan."

He wrote a final line beneath hers: We don't make the wedding about us.

Maya agreed. She tore out the page, photographed it, and gave him the original. Its title, in her neat capitals, read THE PLUS-ONE AGREEMENT.

On the way out, he held the cafe door. "Would you like me to walk you to the studio?"

"That's not one of the events."

"I know."

She could have said no. The fact that he left room for it made the choice surprisingly easy.