"Out!" The door hit her in the shoulder as she pulled it open. Katniss ignored the pain. "I said out!"
Gale brushed a piece of hair behind her ear, his fingertips skimming along her cheek as he did so. She pushed his hand away. "Come on, babe, let's talk about this."
"You can 'talk about this' with your other babe." Katniss hated air quotes with a passion. Right now, she hated him enough to ignore that. "I said out."
She heard a door squeak down the hall. Lazy shits in management had promised to fix that months ago. Katniss glared at the man who had dared to poke his head into the hallway. "Not you, Mellark. You stay in." He didn't budge. Was nobody listening to her today?
"Katniss, I can –"
"No, you can't. Please leave."
His shoulders slumped, and he moved toward the door. Katniss counted the steps as he went. Just one more, and then she could…
He stopped in the doorway, two hundred pounds of him stopping her from shutting him out. "I'll call you tomorrow."
"No."
Gale was finally outside. "Katniss, we need to talk about this."
"You can call me all you want. That doesn't mean I'm going to answer." She shut the door and clicked the deadbolt into place.
It took ten minutes for panic to set in. Katniss unlocked her phone, stared at Gale's contact information, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. Cheaters neve change, and clean breaks were better. No sense in bringing him back into her life when she would have to kick him out again in a few days.
That's what rationality told her, anyway. And if her Prim's wedding wasn't in two days, she would be repeating those marvelously rational affirmations to herself in between bites of Ben & Jerry's. Instead, she had a size-four bridesmaid dress that she needed to fit into on Saturday and a hell of a mess to get herself out of.
Katniss wasn't an expert in these matters, but six months seemed like a long time to date someone without introducing them to the family. It wasn't the kind of thing that set off alarm bells – after all, Gale had brought her home to his mother two and a half months in, and with Prim in South Carolina finishing up her residency and Mom in Portland doing, well, whatever Mom did, getting everyone together would be a logistical nightmare. The wedding provided the perfect solution. Gale's crazy work schedule meant he couldn't get time off for the rehearsal dinner, and the rest of the week had been a scheduling mess for everyone else, so they'd settled on the wedding.
So now she got to decide between pasting on a happy face and calling Gale or having her breakup be the elephant in the room at her sister's wedding. Shit. Why couldn't he have waited another week to cheat on her?
She jumped at a knock on the door. "Go away, Gale."
"It's not Gale." Peeta. Hadn't she told him to stay out of this?
Suddenly aware that it was four AM and she had been angry-crying in yesterday's makeup for a good portion of the last six hours, Katniss fumbled. "Hey, Peeta." Please don't want to come in.
"I was on my way to work and saw that your light was still on. You okay?"
"Sure." Wow, that sounded convincing.
Thank God, he was willing to accept her lies. "Okay. Let me know if there's anything I can do. Hope today's better for you." The forces that ran the universe should really let her know what she'd done in her last life to deserve such a nice, if clueless, guy for a neighbor.
"Thanks. You too." The idea followed half a second later. She ran to the door and pulled it open. "Peeta, I thought of something!"
His eyebrows rose when he saw her. Way to flatter a girl. "Katniss? Are you, um, I mean -"
"Will you pretend to be Gale and take me to my sister's wedding on Saturday?" Three heartbeats of silence told her that sounded just as crazy to him as it did to her.
To his credit, Peeta didn't run away. He checked his watch instead. "I've got a few minutes before I really need to head. Care to give me some background?"
"Come in. Can I get you something to drink?" There might be twenty balled-up used tissues on the couch, but that didn't mean she couldn't pretend to be a good hostess.
"Not right now, thanks, but I'd like to keep my options open depending on what you've got to say."
"That's fair."
"Darius Constantinides."
"Darius Constantine-ides."
Katniss forced back a groan. Shouldn't he have taken Greek during divinity school? "No, repeat after me: Darius Constantinides." She slowed it down as much as possible, and this time, Father Rose managed to get it right. "Do you want to write that down or something?" she prodded.
"I'll remember."
"I think you should write it down just in case." This shouldn't be grating on her so much. It wasn't her name, and Darius was laid-back enough that he probably wouldn't care, but Prim was only getting married once. She deserved for that day to be perfect, and Katniss had already screwed it up enough.
Father Rose still hadn't made any move to write down the correct pronunciation. "Well?"
"Katniss, once I know the name, I know it." He had the kindly old man thing down. "Weddings are stressful, but there's no need for you to worry."
"I need this to be perfect." Except for the fact that instead of her now ex-boyfriend, she was bringing her handsome neighbor pretending to be her boyfriend as her date. That could be less-than-perfect, but only because the other alternatives were even worse.
He smiled. "Nothing on this earth is perfect."
"The wedding will be." Had she just threatened a priest? Katniss needed an out. "I'm going to check on Prim. She said she hadn't heard back from the florist yet."
She really needed to get back to the gym sometime. Half-walking, half-running from a seventy-year-old shouldn't take this much out of her.
…
She straightened his tie. "The green's a nice touch."
"I thought it'd go with your dress. You look lovely, by the way."
"You don't need to go into boyfriend mode yet, but thank you." Katniss gave him a once-over. "You're looking pretty good yourself."
Understatement of the century. She had quietly admired him in his bakery t-shirts and cozy sweaters for years, but Katniss had never given any thought to how Peeta might fill out a suit. She imagined she'd make up for lost time over the next few weeks.
"How touchy-feely are we going to be?"
"What are you comfortable with? Gale and I have been dating – dated," she corrected herself, "for a little over six months. Anything's on the table as far as I'm concerned."
A slow, sexy smirk spread over his face.
She rolled her eyes. "Not like that. Just, y'know, hand-holding or hugging or maybe some kissing. Nothing they couldn't stick a G rating on."
"Of course. It's your sister's wedding, and anything more would be inappropriate. Where would you get that idea?"
She huffed, then, before she could talk herself out of it, Katniss got up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. It never hurt to catch your opponent (or teammate, in this case) off guard.
She could feel his eyes on her. Katniss looked over to where he sat with Aunt Edith, a great-aunt on their mother's side who Katniss had believed hated everybody before she saw Peeta chatting with her before the ceremony started. There was blushing. And smiles. When Katniss 'broke up' with him in a few days, Peeta would be lucky not to find Aunt Edith on his doorstep.
He caught her watching him and grinned. Heat crept up her neck and splotched her cheeks pink as she returned his smile.
"Primrose Eileen Everdeen," Father Rose continued, dragging Katniss' attention back to the scene in front of her. "Do you, Primrose Everdeen, take this man Darius Constantinides to be your lawfully wedded husband?"
There could never be any doubt of her response. "I do."
Katniss was not a woman who cried at weddings. In fact, she was a woman who rarely cried at anything at all. Now, though, watching her baby sister saying her vows, so happy to be spending the rest of her life with a man who was just as thrilled to spend his life with her…
No. Keep it together.
"I now pronounce you husband and wife."
Thirty seconds. If you can last the next thirty seconds, you're good to go.
Then the veil came up, and with that, Katniss gave that waterproof mascara a run for its money.
"Gale, it's so nice to meet you."
"You too, Mrs. Everdeen." Peeta would be the type to use last names with his in-laws. Not that her mother would ever be Peeta's mother-in-law, since this was definitely a one-night engagement, but still.
"Eileen, please."
She saw Prim edging towards them, Darius in tow. They wore matching smiles, and both glowed with a kind of contentment that Katniss would have thought kind of gross any other day.
Katniss rose to greet them, pulling Prim in for a hug the second she was close enough. "Every time I see you, I'm amazed by how pretty you look!"
"I'm glad you're surprised."
She pulled away to glare at her sister. "That's not what I meant, and you know it."
Prim shot her a grin that was pure mischief and turned to Peeta. "Nice to meet you, Gale. I'm Prim."
Peeta introduced himself – she really ought to have done that herself – and the five of them fell into easy conversation. That in and of itself was odd. Nothing involving her mother was ever easy. The party continued around them, strains of music and conversation occasionally floating into their little bubble.
They had just gotten onto the subject of work, a dangerous topic, since she had told Mom and Prim that Gale was an engineer, and Peeta didn't seem at all like the engineer type, when Prim elbowed her in the ribs.
"It's your favorite song!" True enough, Doris Day's voice carried over the room, begging her lover to dream little dreams of her. "Go dance!"
One couldn't very well disobey a bride on her wedding day.
"Y'know, I'm not sure that my family is going to believe I dumped you," she said once she was sure Mom and Prim were out of earshot.
"Sure you're not just looking for excuses to keep me around?" He gave her a spin, pulling her closer at the end.
"I meant that the story will have to be that you broke up with me."
"I know what you meant." He paused for a few seconds. "But I wouldn't mind not being gotten rid of."
She shook her head. "I think there was one too many negatives for me to follow that."
"I like your family."
"They like you."
"And I like you. A lot."
"Oh." Katniss hadn't considered that possibility. Actually, she had, many times, but it was always a hypothetical, a fantasy to visit when everything else went wrong. Here, now, the dream was brought to life, tactile with his hand on her waist, their bodies so close she could feel the heat radiating off him.
They slowed as the song reached its end, her hand moved from his shoulder to his cheek, gently bringing him down until their lips touched. That, she felt, was answer enough.
Three text messages from Prim greeted her the next morning.
Never would've guessed Tall, Dark, and Handsome was a blondie ;-)
I always thought your neighbor was hot. Good for you.
You'll have to let me know what happened with Gale sometime.
She put the phone away and snuggled a little deeper into Peeta's arms. Explanations could wait.
A/N: Originally written as part of everlarkbirthdaydrabbles on Tumblr with the prompt 'fake dating AU'.