Nineteen Clauses

The contract had nineteen clauses, and they argued about every one of them, in a coffee shop, for three hours, and it was — Frankie would not say this aloud for some time — the most fun she had had in roughly two years. Julian wrote contracts the way other people breathed. He arrived with a laptop and a yellow legal pad and the air of a man in his natural habitat, and he proposed Clause One — Definitions — and Frankie said nobody needs a definitions section for a fake relationship, and Julian said everybody needs a definitions section for everything, ambiguity is where lawsuits are born, and they were off. Clause Two established the term: three weeks, both weddings, all associated events, terminating automatically at the conclusion of the second reception. Clause Three was the cover story, which took forty minutes, because Frankie wanted them to have met at the charity auction — "it's true, it's the easiest lie, you only have to remember the parts you leave out" — and Julian wanted something with fewer witnesses, and Frankie won, because she was right. Clause Seven was the one that nearly ended it. "Physical conduct," Julian read aloud, off his own pad. "Hand-holding, permitted. Arm around shoulder or waist, permitted. A kiss, if the social situation makes its absence conspicuous —" "No." "Frankie. There will be a moment at one of these weddings — a toast, a dance, a photograph — where two people who are supposedly together and do not touch each other will be more noticeable than two people who do. Your own mother will clock it. You plan weddings. You know I'm right." He was right. She hated, by this point in the afternoon, how often he was right, and she also — and this was the part she shut a door on very firmly — did not entirely hate the afternoon. "Fine," she said. "Clause Seven. A kiss, if and only if its absence would blow the cover, brief, decided in advance by a — by a signal. We need a signal. A word." "A safeword for a fake relationship," said Julian. "We've come a long way from the canapés." "Pick a word, Julian." "Orangery," he said. Frankie looked up. He was not smiling, exactly. He was watching her with that bright narrowed expression he'd had at the auction table, the one that meant a man was enjoying himself and a little afraid of how much. "You closed the orangery," she said. "I did. And it's the word least likely to come up naturally in conversation at either wedding, and the word most likely to remind both of us, every single time, exactly who we are and exactly what this is and exactly why it ends in three weeks." He held her gaze. "Clause Seven. Either of us says orangery, the other one knows the moment is staged, nothing more. It's a leash. I'm offering us both a leash, Frankie. I think we're going to want one." It was, she thought, the single most honest thing he had said in the three hours, and possibly the most honest thing anyone had said to her in two years, and the fact that it had come from Julian Marsh, in a coffee shop, dressed up as Clause Seven of a ridiculous contract, was the kind of thing the universe did, she felt, purely to keep her from getting comfortable. "Orangery," she agreed. They signed it at the bottom of the third page. Two signatures, his slashing and certain, hers neat and small and reluctant. Julian Marsh slid one copy across the table to her, and kept one, and folded his into the breast pocket of his expensive jacket, directly over the place where, in a better-organised man, the heart would be. "Three weeks," he said. "Two weddings. Strictly contractual." "Strictly contractual," said Frankie. Neither of them, walking out into the late afternoon in opposite directions, noticed that they had spent the last twenty minutes of a three-hour meeting discussing nothing of any importance whatsoever, and had simply, neither admitting it, not wanted the meeting to end.