Chapter Text
Nando wasn’t a jealous guy. He really wasn’t. But when he learned that his high school sweetheart was getting remarried, that brought up some old, complicated emotions. And when he learned that he had no choice but to go to the wedding, just because the bride happened to be the mother of his thirteen-year-old daughter, well, that was kind of a lot.
Nadia, his beloved angsty tween with eyes full of hearts and walls full of K-pop posters, would be sitting at the head table with the happy couple, which meant he’d be left to stew alone in his not-jealousy and high school nostalgia. No way was he enduring that alone. So when he got the invitation in the mail, all pretty and lacy and frilly and repulsive, addressed to “Romeo Fernando Sy and guest” in swooping calligraphy, he RSVP’d with a plus-one while he muttered to himself something like “who the fuck still gets their wedding invitations addressed in calligraphy? In this economy, Daniella?”
Nando was hot. He could find a date to a wedding easily.
That was about eight weeks ago. The Thursday before the wedding, he was less confident. He and Schmidt were on another ridiculous case for another rich husband that suspected his wife was cheating. Is that all private investigators do? Nando was pretty sure the husband was cheating, too, but God forbid a woman gets sick of a loveless, unfaithful marriage, and strikes back once or twice. Nando thought everyone would just be happier in candid, consensual open relationships. Humans weren’t designed for monogamy.
He used to be a lot more romantic. In high school, he’d slip notes in the slats of Daniella’s locker, making grandiose promises of flowers and forevers in poetic verse. He picked dandelions in his yard when he couldn’t afford roses, made her hold them in a bouquet as she closed her eyes and imagined the soft red petals and long green stems and a future together where money was no object and roses grew like grass in their yard. She told him his voice in her ear was better than roses ever would’ve been, and he told her he loved her and meant it.
They were in love— intensely, unquestionably, temporarily.
Nando didn’t regret loving Daniella, and he never would. And not just because she gave him Nadia, and Nadia was the best thing in his life. He wouldn’t regret loving Daniella, even if she wasn’t the reason he had Nadia. Loving Daniella was a part of him that would always be there, buried deep beneath the cynicism and practicality of adulthood. They were co-parents first and friends second, and exes always last.
He would always love Daniella. He wished that was why it stung so much to see her remarry. In actuality, he was a big fan of her new fiance, and was more than happy for them. He treated her well, had a stable job, and was a good influence on Nadia. They were really in love, and Danielle deserved to be really in love. She deserved a guy who could give her roses instead of dandelions, who would write her poems and make her promises that he could actually keep. He wasn’t that guy. He didn’t think he believed in that guy anymore.
It didn’t sting so much to see her remarry because he was still madly in love with her. It stung so much to see her remarry because it meant she was starting a new life, and he was stuck in limbo between who he used to be and whoever the fuck he was now. But, as he insisted, he wasn’t jealous.
“Earth to Nando,” Schmidt sing-songed, waving his hand in Nando’s face. He snapped out of his haze. “I asked if you had plans this weekend.”
“Oh, uh, yeah.”
“Okay, good talk, then, geez,” he dismissed, taking a useless peek through his binoculars. Useless because, for one, no one was in the house they were surveilling, and two, he was holding the binoculars backwards.
“Sorry,” said Nando, yanking the device from his hands, flipping it the right way, and handing it back. “I’m going to a wedding.”
“Fun! I love weddings,” said Schmidt. It only made Nando’s dread intensify.
“You wanna trade lives?”
“What, Freaky Friday style?”
“Sure.”
“You couldn’t handle looking this good,” Schmidt joked. Nando looked him up and down, and kind of agreed. If being that hot made you as vapid and clueless as Schmidt was, he probably couldn’t handle it. He didn’t want to. “Whose wedding?”
“Ex-wife.” Schmidt appeared to be processing that like a computer shutting down and rebooting.
“I thought you were gay,” he said after a while. It wasn’t what Nando expected him to say.
“Why did you think that?”
“I don’t know. Your whole… deal.” Nando didn’t know what to do with that. He wasn’t offended that Schmidt thought he was gay, but he liked to think that wasn’t his entire deal. Though, lately, he felt like he knew less and less what his ‘deal’ actually was.
“I’m bisexual.”
“Oh, rad,” he said, and Nando found himself letting out a breath. He didn’t say that out loud very often, and there was a part of him that feared every time he did, even when he knew there was nothing to fear. Schmidt let the subject die as quickly as it came up, like it was no big deal. Nando supposed it wasn’t one. “Why are you going to your ex-wife’s wedding?”
“Our daughter’s the flower girl.”
“You have a daughter?” Nando looked pointedly down at his “#1 Dad” travel mug, the one that matched his “#1 Dad” mug at the office, and then back at Schmidt, who was blinking cluelessly up at him.
“Schmidt, we’ve been working together for months now. How do you know nothing about me?”
“Well excuse me,” he defended, “sorry I’m not in the business of knowing intimate details about people’s personal lives.”
“You are literally a private investigator.”
“And what about it?”
Nando put his head in his hands and wondered, not for the first time, if it was safe to let this guy operate a motor vehicle.
Schmidt went back to doing who-knows-what on his phone, so Nando went back to feeling sorry for himself, and trying to come up with a last-minute way to get a date to a wedding.
He made an extremely bad decision, because desperate times call for desperate measures. He didn’t expect to be called out on it so immediately, though.
“Oh, sweetie, no,” Schmidt said, not looking up from his phone.
“Did someone wear orange in an Instagram post again? I’m telling you, you have to be less judgmental.”
“No, worse. An extremely clueless coworker of mine appears to have just downloaded Grindr looking for a date to his ex-wife’s wedding.” Nando’s eyes widened, called out. He didn’t care much what Schmidt thought about him, but being called clueless by the most clueless person he knew didn’t feel particularly good.
“In my defense, I didn’t think you’d see that.”
“The app works by proximity. I’m a foot away from you.”
“I don’t know how the app works. It’s like Tinder for guys, right? I figured it would be more accepting.”
“Oh, God. You’re hopeless. Of course you’re a dad. You’re like, perpetually forty-five years old.” Nando was only thirty-two. It just so happened that his twenty-nine year old partner had the priorities of a seventeen-year-old.
“Better than forever twenty-one,” Nando argued.
“No, it’s not.”
“I don’t want to go to my ex-wife’s wedding alone, okay? I don’t want to be the lonely ex-husband at the singles table.” Schmidt appeared to pity him, which he hated. Nando was the only one who got to pity Nando.
“Fine. You’ve forced my hand. I’ll be your date to this thing,” he said, as if Nando asked. He blinked slowly in disbelief as he registered what just happened. Nando wouldn’t say that he forced Schmidt’s hand as much as very accidentally signed up for the most uncomfortable and embarrassing night of his life, but, well, it didn’t seem like he had another option. “Please get off Grindr, before I put you in a nursing home.” The phone buzzed in his hand, and he looked down at it.
“How has someone already sent me a picture of his penis? It’s been, like, two and a half minutes.”
“Welcome to the 21st century. Let me see that,” Schmidt ripped the phone from Nando’s hands before he could be stopped. “It’s not even a good angle.”
“Is there a good angle for an unsolicited dick pic?”
“I guess not, no,” Schmidt said, deleting the app from Nando’s phone.
🔎🔎🔎🔎🔎
The stake-out turned out to be a bust. The wife came home alone, and sat at her desk for a couple of hours, doing her goddamned job, which happened to be event planning for a non-profit organization that was raising money for wildfire relief. It was the fourth day trailing her, and the most scandalous thing they saw her do was smoke a cigarette. Not healthy, but not divorceable behavior. When they reported their intel, or lack thereof, to the millionaire gremlin man they were working for, he seemed disappointed to learn his smoking hot philanthropist wife wasn’t sleeping around. He paid them handsomely, but Nando felt gross about it. From the sound of his sputtering about money and legal battles, it seemed like the Lex-Luthor-ass-motherfucker wanted out of the infidelity clause in their prenup. If they were both cheating, Nando imagined, he didn’t owe her anything if he got caught. If Nando slid photographic evidence of his infidelity in her desk at work, well, that was none of anybody’s business.
Yes, true love was alive and well in Southern California.
“Why do we always have to work for skeevy rich guys who suck?” Nando whined once they were back in the car for the thirty minute drive back to the office that would be two hours with traffic.
“Do you know any skeevy rich guys who don’t suck?” Nando rolled his eyes.
“Do we have to work for skeevy rich guys at all?”
“You know any not-skeevy, not-rich guys who want to shell out the big bucks to have two guys spy on people? I didn’t think so.”
“It sucks. My life sucks.”
“Well, things are looking up for you,” Schmidt said. Nando couldn’t see how.
“In what way?”
“You have a date with a smokin’ hot guy on Saturday, and your ex-wife is gonna get so jealous she’ll wish she never left you.” Nando didn’t want to make Daniella jealous, and even if he did, he didn’t see how Schmidt would help him accomplish that. Daniella was whip-smart, well-read, cultured, and gorgeous. Schmidt was… hot? He’d probably interpret that as high praise.
“That’s not what I’m going for.”
“Then what?”
“I just don’t want to be alone at the thing,” his voice sounded sadder than he wanted it to.
“That’s kind of adorable,” Schmidt said, and it wasn’t a compliment.
Traffic wasn’t moving at all, so naturally Schmidt got bored. He filled the time complaining about Nando’s “dad music” playing at a respectable volume, and Nando immediately regretted letting the guy know he had a kid. He knew Nadia had gotten out of school when the Spotify account they shared switched from Hotel California by The Eagles to IDOL by BTS. Schmidt gave him a side-eye and grumbled about how it was not worse but not better.
The K-pop music quieted in the car’s speakers as Nando’s phone pinged, then crescendoed back to its previous volume.
mom wants to know who your bringing to the wedding, Nadia’s text message read. No capitalization or punctuation, as always. Schmidt texted the same way.
*You’re, he corrected. It wasn’t a big deal, but he was dragging his feet to evade the question for as long as he could. He’d been evading the question for weeks, which explained why Nadia was texting him about it instead of Daniella. They were on plenty good enough terms for Daniella to send the text herself, but she was savvy, and she knew him well, so she knew Nadia had a better chance of a straight answer.
*you’re a dweeb, dad, she wrote back. Then, in a second message: she needs a name for the place card. Then, in a third message: YOU’RE weeks late with YOUR response.
Nando dreaded everything that led up to this point in his life as he typed the seven letter name with no preamble or follow-up.
schmidt? Nadia wrote back. no first name?
“Hey, Schmidt?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you have a first name?”
“Schmidt.”
“Last name?”
“Schmidt.”
“Schmidt Schmidt?”
“Just Schmidt. Magnanimous.” Magnanimous? Doesn’t that mean, like, generous? Oh.
“Do you mean ‘mononymous’?”
“Tomato, tomato,” Schmidt said, pronouncing both words the same.
Just Schmidt, he wrote back. Nadia sent him an eye-roll emoji and hands making the ‘okay’ symbol.
The next time traffic stopped completely, Schmidt looked over his shoulder and snatched the phone from his hands. Nando hoped he wasn’t going to make a habit of that.
“You googled ‘what is cocktail attire for men?’ Are you stupid?”
“My idea of a ‘cocktail party’ is drinking a margarita in sweats on my couch while I rewatch Tuca and Bertie on Netflix. Sue me, I don’t own a suit.”
“You’re hopeless. We’re going to my place now.”