Marry Me By Midnight

Chapter 7: Five Days

Ivy woke to sunlight and the strange, unfamiliar sensation of not dreading the day.

Grant had left before dawn — slipping out of her room with a promise to “figure out logistics” and a kiss pressed to her forehead that felt more like a vow than a goodbye. She lay there a long moment, hand on her still-flat stomach, trying to reconcile the terror of the night before with the calm settling over her now.

Five days. Five days until Sophie and Michael said their vows, and somewhere in the middle of that, she and Grant were supposed to be normal. Professional. Unremarkable.

It turned out to be harder than either of them expected.

At the bridal party breakfast, Grant sat two seats down, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating off him whenever he passed the coffee carafe her way. Sophie, freshly glowing and blissfully wedding-brained, chattered about seating charts and didn’t seem to notice anything unusual — until she caught Ivy watching Grant reach for the cream at the exact moment Ivy reached for it too, their hands brushing, neither pulling back fast enough.

“You two are being weird,” Sophie said, not even looking up from her napkin folding diagram.

“We’re being professional,” Grant said smoothly, not missing a beat.

“That’s what weird looks like on you,” Sophie said, and went back to her diagram.

Ivy exhaled. Close.

Later, in the hotel’s garden courtyard, she found Grant waiting by the fountain during the lull between breakfast and the afternoon’s floral walkthrough. He had two coffees — hers decaf, she noticed, which meant he’d asked, which meant he’d been thinking about this longer than the twelve hours since he found out.

“You told them decaf,” she said, taking the cup.

“I told them nothing. I looked it up.” He said it like it embarrassed him a little, admitting he’d spent part of his morning researching pregnancy and caffeine limits instead of sleeping. “Is that weird?”

“No,” she said, and meant it. “That’s the opposite of weird.”

They sat on the fountain’s edge, shoulders not quite touching, the noise of florists and rental trucks and Sophie’s mother directing traffic somewhere behind them. For a moment it felt almost like they were just two people at a wedding, instead of two people holding a secret that would reshape both their lives.

“I keep waiting to panic,” Grant admitted. “I don’t know if that’s a good sign or if it just hasn’t caught up to me yet.”

“Both, probably,” Ivy said. “Mine caught up around three a.m. and then left again by six.”

He glanced at her sideways. “What convinced it to leave?”

She didn’t have a clean answer — not one she was ready to say out loud, not with Sophie’s mother now waving frantically for both of them from across the courtyard, calling something about boutonniere colors that apparently required their immediate joint opinion. So instead she just stood, offered him a hand up he didn’t need but took anyway, and let the moment stay unfinished.

Five days, she thought again, watching him fall into step beside her, close but not too close. Five days of pretending this was simple.

It already didn’t feel simple. It felt like something she didn’t want to end.