Twelve dates on paper. One clause about kissing. His ex's wedding speech is already hers to write.
A wedding speechwriter becomes a chef's fake girlfriend for a television season, and the clause she wrote about kissing stops being funny.
Completed · 19 chapters · 2h 47m
WarmSensual tension; intimacy fades to black.Witty · Yearning
Infidelity (past, not between the leads), Public humiliation (past)
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Dear Maeve,
I have written forty-one wedding speeches. I know where the joke goes, where the pause goes, how long to let a room sit before the line that makes somebody’s grandmother cry. I have never once believed one while I was writing it.
Hattie Ellison has written forty-one wedding speeches and never once believed one while she was writing it. When a publicist offers her a fee to be chef Luca Bassani's steady, happy public partner for twelve appearances, she reads the contract twice and adds two clauses of her own: no kissing without both of them initialling the schedule, and a clean exit if the arrangement ever requires her to lie to a client. He signs without reading it twice. Two years ago Luca's fiancée left him for his business partner at a launch party, on someone's phone, and he has been managing the story ever since. Hattie is the first person who can see exactly how much of him is performance, because she manufactures believable intimacy for a living. The appearances go fine, then better than fine, and a near-kiss in a service corridor gets papered over with paperwork that fools nobody. Then Hattie's agency books a June wedding: the bride is Thea Whitlock, the groom is the business partner, and the series wants the wedding as its finale. Hattie refuses to drop the client. Luca tells her to write Thea the best speech of her life, and slides the schedule across the pass with the wedding already initialled. What follows is a contract nobody needs, a speech Hattie writes without compromising anyone, and the question of whether a woman who edits other people's love stories can let her own be said out loud, in public, unedited.
Three weeks ago I signed a contract to be a chef’s girlfriend, on paper, for twelve public appearances and a fee my business partner logged under exposure. I read it twice and added two clauses of my own. One says nobody kisses anybody without both of us initialling the schedule first. He signed without reading it, because I already had.
Nobody knows this, not even Rae: I keep a file of the lines couples cut from their own speeches because they were too true to say in front of a room. Forty of them, maybe fifty. I have never used one. This week a bride I like more than I should told me to cut a sentence, and I wrote it down with the others, and then lay awake wondering what I am saving them for.
The second appearance is on Saturday. He has opinions about cheese. I have started checking my phone at hours that have nothing to do with work, which is not in the contract, and I would like it on the record that I noticed.
From The Plus-One Clause
Read this if you want the lightest book here, with a contract at the centre of it.
Slow burns where the waiting is the point
Completed stories you can finish tonight
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