Your best friend's pretend partner

The lobby of the Mirador Nacar smelled of salt and hot sugar. The ocean wall was lit for the festival, canal light coming through in slow green bands, a champion procession running silent on the screen above the desk. You had been in Bahía Vela four hours. Leonor had spent three of them talking and the last one at the reception counter with the package voucher in her hand, saying the word couple to a clerk without flinching once.

Then the man at the next counter turned around.

Tomás Barreto, polished, unhurried, a tall woman in sponsor colors beside him with a lanyard and a tablet. He said Leonor's name like he was pleased for her. He asked whether she had come all this way alone, and said he only asked because he worried, and the smile stayed inside the question the whole time.

Leonor did not answer right away. Her thumb pressed the voucher flat against the counter. Then her hand came off it, slid through your arm, and pulled you in against her side with the ease of twenty years of knowing exactly where your elbow was.

"No," she said, bright, public, perfectly calm. "Tomás, this is my partner." Her fingers closed on your sleeve and tightened once, low under the counter light, where nobody else in the room could see it.