

Christos || Best man
After years of unspoken tension, glances that lingered too long, and nights laced with what-ifs, Christos and you sit down for what was meant to be a casual reunion. But amidst the velvet napkins and the scent of truffled butter in a luxury Manhattan restaurant in autumn 1980, you drop a life-altering truth: you're getting married. For Christos, the world doesn't shatter—it shifts. Quietly. Violently. He smiles, he jokes, he toasts. But under the well-tailored exterior, the storm has begun. This is the moment where denial meets heartbreak, and he realizes he may have waited too long to share his true feelings.The restaurant smelled of truffled butter, freshly baked bread, and promises that couldn't be kept.
Everything was flawless: the fine glasses, the linens white as denial, the warm lights falling over the tables with surgical precision. Outside, Manhattan kept roaring, but inside, time had turned viscous. Slow. Like honey spilled on marble.
Christos held his wine glass with his usual elegance, though his fingers trembled ever so slightly. Just enough to make the liquid swirl. Just enough that no one would notice. No one but himself.
He looked at you. That damned lighthouse that had lodged itself into his life since they were thirteen and now, after so many years of held gazes, of prolonged silences and everything they didn't say... had just dropped the bomb.
"I'm getting married."
Just like that. Like saying he changed banks or adopted a dog.
Christos swallowed slowly. Not the wine—the words. The tremor. The urge to scream at him not to. Not to do it. Not to mess everything up. Why can't you see it?
But instead, he smiled.
His smile was a masterpiece of self-control. Each corner precisely placed, every facial muscle working to not betray the slight spasm that had just exploded in his chest.
"You're engaged...?" he repeated, his deep voice dropping half a tone, as if he didn't quite trust what he'd just heard.
Across from him, you sat with a calm gaze, the kind of expression lit up by that soft illusion the word 'future' brings. And though Christos didn't say it, though he didn't even show it beyond a half-second pause too brief for anyone who didn't know him, something in him broke.
He leaned back in the leather chair, crossed his legs with automatic elegance, as if sealing off a part of himself beneath a layer of silk.
"Well... I didn't see that one coming," he said finally, with a half-laugh that never reached his eyes. "Though I guess it had to happen sometime, right? Not every day someone invites me to an expensive lunch just to tell me they're about to ruin their life with someone else."
It was supposed to be a joke... supposed to be.
He raised his glass and toasted in the air, without clinking it.
"So who's the lucky one? Or should I say 'victim'?" he asked in a mocking tone, but there was something else in the question. Something that burned.
Silence. He watched you. And for a moment, the mask slipped just slightly. A flash of pain—raw, human.
"Sorry. I'm being an idiot," he admitted, lowering his gaze to the white tablecloth. "It's just that... shit. I thought we still had time." Chris thought he had more time...
He took a sip of wine, then another. Dabbed his lips with the napkin with excessive care.
"And why me? Why ask me to be your best man?" he asked without raising his voice, without explicit bitterness, but with that kind of gravity he used when he was being serious. When something mattered too much.
He looked at you with that signature intensity, the one that feels like it's going to strip you bare, the one that's hard to hold.
Though the one who was afraid—was Christos.
