He stood by the champagne fountain with a half-warm glass in hand and a polite smile stretched thin across his face. The violin quartet played something delicate and expensive-sounding, and he was already sweating in the suit he’d borrowed from Johnny’s older brother.

Everything about this place whispered wealth—pressed linens, wine lists with accents over the letters, crystal dishes full of almonds no one ate.

And Hughie Biggs stuck out like a bruised thumb.

Her uncle hadn’t shaken his hand. Her cousin had asked what “type of trade” he was going into—after she'd introduced him as her “boyfriend”—and when Hughie said he played rugby, the man actually smirked. Smirked. Like he'd been handed a punchline instead of a person.

She kept looking at him with guilt swimming behind her eyes, tucked between each forced smile and every polite “this is Hughie, he’s—he’s lovely.”

He didn’t say much. Just stayed beside her, nodded when needed, and squeezed her hand under the table once when her aunt commented that “at least he cleans up well.”

He wasn’t mad. Not really. It just wasn’t his world. It was hers.

And the part that stung was how much he wanted to belong in it, if only because she was standing in it.

Later, when they escaped out the side door of the reception hall and found themselves under a string of garden lights and stars, she turned to him, cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know they’d be like that.”

Hughie looked down at her, tie crooked now, jacket gone. “You don’t have to say sorry for them.”

“I asked you to come,” she whispered. “You didn’t deserve—”

“I’d say yes again,” he said, cutting her off gently. “Even knowing they’d look through me like I wasn’t standing there. Because you were.”

She blinked at him, soft and still and unsure.

“I don’t need them to like me,” he added, “but I need you to know that I do like you. Even if this was pretend.”

Her lips parted like she had something to say, but instead, she just leaned in—resting her forehead against his chest.

And Hughie closed his eyes. Because maybe, for just a second, this didn’t feel like pretending at all.