"I don't know where you found this girl, but you're marrying her."
James looked at his mother with surprise as she sat down next to him with a grateful sigh.
"Err…"
Euphemia jabbed a forceful finger in his direction. "I mean it. You're my only son, and I love you, but god help you if you mess this up for me."
He looked warily to the small table at the window where a pretty redhead was currently engaged in cheerful conversation with his father.
"Doesn't really matter, I suppose, that Evans and I barely know each other?"
They did, in fact, barely know each other. Although they worked at the same company, their departments rarely crossed paths, and so neither did they. The fact that he often – always – happened to spend the five-minute gap between the arrival of coffee and bagels and the proper start of Wednesday morning meetings attempting to make her laugh was incidental and inconsequential. Theirs was a slight acquaintance at best.
It was therefore a coincidence of only the slightest magnitude that she happened to be in the same tea shop where he and his parents had stopped. And it would have been rude not to say hello, having made eye contact as she looked around for a table while he queued behind her. They had a moment of pleasant if unexceptional conversation, and then she went to sit by the window, as he moved up to place an order for himself and his parents, who were settling at a table themselves, and that was that.
For a brief minute, he had been pleased. She had smiled, and given a sort of huff that was almost a laugh, and her shirt had matched her eyes so precisely. It was only his poor luck that his sharp-eyed parents had noticed him exchanging five seconds of pleasantries with a woman.
His misfortune that they of course viewed that as an invitation to evaluate how adorable any potential grandchildren could be generated between the two of them, and how willing she might be to produce them, or whatever mad things they dreamed up to torment him. This could only compound what was already his cross to bear; that he, of course, fancied her rotten.
And yet he was still, somehow, not prepared for the calamity that was his mother actively trying to set them up.
Doomed. He was doomed. His mother had all the subtlety of a piano falling out of a third story window. He wondered if they made cards with tactful messages conveying apologies for interfering parents, or if he was fated to an eternity of awkwardly picking sesame seeds off bagels while the woman of his dreams tried her best to avoid eye contact at a table that only seated six.
He watched glumly as across the room his father ruffled his hair contentedly, took out his phone, and leaned towards Lily, apparently with the intention to show her some photographs. She leaned forward to meet him with a small smile. Her eyes slid past Fleamont for a moment to catch James' eye, and he felt something in his stomach jump and she grinned at him before turning her attention back to the phone in his father's hands.
God, so doomed.
"It's kismet, that's what," Euphemia said emphatically.
James turned his attention back to his mother dubiously. "How d—"
"She likes lighthouses." She watched James with what was frankly an unkind amount of satisfaction. "That's what they're talking about now."
This had James taken aback momentarily, and then he scoffed. "Dad will bring up lighthouses if anyone so much as mentions the weather – she's likely just being polite. And bloody hell, why would you really want another one of those around? Dad's bad enough. I'd take a sinking boat over another lighthouse tour any day of the week, please and thanks."
Euphemia huffed. "Are you being intentionally stupid? Why would he want either of us to go when he's got her? James, she knows what a Fresnel lens is. She brought it up first. The words came out of her mouth."
Even as Euphemia spoke, he watched Lily pull out her own phone, swipe the screen a few times, and then hold it out to his father, still chatting pleasantly. James' brain seemed to short-circuit for just a moment. Euphemia pressed on.
"We could go on family holidays to the seaside again – and while they were being batty over foghorns, we could get drinks. We could nap on the beach." Her eyes focused dreamily on nothing, as if she could already see the condensation forming on the glass of an icy, rum-based drink.
James stomach squirmed. He knew about Fresnel lenses. And incandescent oil vapour lamps, and diaphones, and loads of shipwreck stories. All against his will of course, but nevertheless…he wondered idly if he could come up with some sort of lighthouse-themed joke by Wednesday. Something subtle. Cool. There had to be a way to make a subtle, suave lighthouse joke – he had three days to sort it out. Some part of his brain – most likely, the part that was still a miserably bored ten year old on another miserably boring holiday – rebelled, warning him that it was ruddy dangerous, setting a precedent of any sort that he had the smallest inkling of interest in lighthouses, but all the same…
The sunlight winked off the sunglasses perched in Lily's hair.
Who knows, he might take a shine to them yet.