Page 33 of Resorting to Romance

“It’s not even one o’clock,” Kai teases.

“Ha. How about some sweet tea? Or I made strawberry lemonade?”

“I’d love some of your lemonade.”

I pour Kai a lemonade and myself an iced tea, and rejoin him at the island.

“So, if we are going to pull this off for Brad, ideally, we could wait until he comes back,” Kai says. “If no one else knew, we’d be able to put our charade on ice. But it’s complicated now that Shaw and Ben and this wahine, Bree, all know.”

Kai lapses into Hawaiian terms when he’s upset or nervous. I’ve watched this over the years. It’s pretty darn cute, and I’ll never call him on it, just like I never called Noah on saying bisgetti. I knew he’d outgrow it, and it tickled me every time he’d say it. Kai won’t outgrow this habit, and I’m secretly glad of that.

“Right,” I agree, taking a sip of my tea.

“So, we can play it by ear?” He says it half as a question and half as a statement.

“What would that look like? And we have to think of Noah.”

“Of course. Noah comes first. Always. I’m just thinking, I only really see Shaw once a week. I don’t even know Bree. Ben said I just need to tell him to zip it and he will. He actually used that motion so much when we were talking I wanted to reach over and see if I could find an invisible zipper tomake him stop talking.”

I chuckle.

“You laugh. You weren’t there. He was like a toddler hyped up on Cap’n Crunch. No. A sugar-amped toddler who’s been watching Cocomelon all day long.”

“Not Cocomelon!” I fake a horrified look, putting my hands on either side of my face, raising my eyebrows and pursing my lips in an O.

“Right?”

“That show was banned after a while around here.”

“Rightfully so. Anyway, the point is, despite Ben’s inappropriate exuberance, he’ll zip it if I tell him to keep things under wraps. So, we don’t have much to worry about. Then, if the situation calls for it, we will fake a dating relationship. Only, not in front of Noah. Every adult who thinks we’re dating needs to know we’re not telling Noah. That’s a line they’ll gladly honor.”

Before I think better of it, I’m blurting out, “Oh, you’re right. Whenever my aunts would try to tell me what a cute couple we’d make, they’d always say, ‘We won’t tell Noah until things are serious.’”

Kai stares at me a beat too long. Then he says, “Your aunts thought we’d be cute together?”

“In a metaphorical, hypothetical, completely fantastical, not real, imaginary way … Yes.”

“Hmm.” Kai just hums.

He studies me from across the table.

Then he says, “Okay. So, what do you think of that plan?”

“I think it sounds too easy.”

“Am I missing something?”

“Well, unlike you, who only reads surfing biographies and crime thrillers, I read romance.”

“I know. What do our reading habits have to do with this, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m missing the correlation.”

“In romance, people fake date all the time.”

“They do?”

“They do. It’s a thing. Anyway, the key to pulling off a fake romance is having rules.”

“Rules.”

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