Page 45 of Fake It 'til You Make It

I don’t think I want to be lying to Abbey, or anyone for that matter. But, Christ, the real me is an absolute car crash right now and I don’t really want to be him either.

I stop my watch from recording my workout, I guess subconsciously resigned to talking to Abbey for a while. Wait, wasn’t she supposed to be…?

‘What happened to your date?’

She scratches her head and scrunches her nose.

‘That good, was it?’ I ask, amused by her reaction.

‘The guy ordered for me without asking what I might like and one glass of wine in, do you know what he said to me?’

I twist my lip as I think, and I have a feeling I know where this is going.

‘Abbey,’ she says, in a woman putting on a deep male voice. ‘What do you say to just skipping straight to the good bit?’

She laughs the way I heard her laughing in Bloomingdale’s, like she means it. It’s a good laugh. Surprising, since she’s so crabby most of the time. ‘By good bit he meant to the sex bit, I presume?’

‘Precisely.’ She bends back down to her shoes, finally releasing the buckles and taking them off, standing on the dirty sidewalk in bare feet. ‘I couldn’t stand being in his seedy eyeline long enough to call a cab, so now I’m walking home and these ridiculous shoes my sister convinced me to buy are absolutely tearing shreds off my feet.’

Pah. She says it as if she needs any persuasion to throw a load of money at impractical shoes. Nevertheless, I beg her, ‘Please don’t put naked feet on this grubby sidewalk. This isn’t a west coast beach, this is Brooklyn.’

‘I hear you,’ she says whilst picking up her sandals and dangling them in one hand. ‘But there’s no way in hell I’m putting my feet back in these shoes tonight. I’d rather walk across burning coals than put those devils anywhere near my delicate tootsies again.’

‘We’re still a good way from home. Let’s get you a cab.’

She starts walking away from me in the direction of home. ‘No one is going to take me this short distance. I’ll get a tetanus jab tomorrow.’

She catches me off-guard and I laugh. She’ll need one. Then I jog to catch her up. ‘Okay, either we can do a newlywed marital threshold-style carry, or you can hop on my back, but there’s no way my constitution can stand watching you walk home barefoot.’

She plants her hands on her hips in that way I’m becoming familiar with. But she has stopped, so she must be considering the offer. ‘I’m not a child.’

‘I wasn’t calling you a child, I was calling you a kind of disgusting human being.’

She scowls but looks along the road, considering the distance to our apartment block, then back to me. ‘I’ll take a piggyback, but you don’t have to take me all the way home. I need to make a pitstop for food because my gentlemanly date didn’t factor that in, or else he thought I would be the meal.’

Unwittingly humored, I crouch down and she pops up onto my back.

I’ve already taken a few steps before I realize that my hands are on her bare thighs, which are wrapped around my waist, her skin smooth under my touch. In hindsight, this might have been a bad idea.

‘I can’t believe you would call me disgusting when your back is completely saturated with sweat and you’ve just made me squash into it.’

‘Yeah well, at least you only need a shower and not antibiotics this way.’

‘Definitely the lesser of two great evils,’ she says.

On the way home, she’s lost in bizarre ramblings about Dante and Beatrice, whilst I am lost in the feel of her arms around myshoulders, her legs gripping my hips, the sound of her voice, all of which is much more pleasant than anything I was thinking about whilst I was running.

We’re both so lost in thought that we make it all the way back to our block before remembering we meant to stop for food.

‘For your troubles, can I tempt you with an Uber Eats order?’ Abbey asks, hopping down to the tiled floor of the foyer of Blake House.

‘Can it be a feast? I just went for a run and feel deserving.’

‘Deal,’ she says, right as her ex walks into the building, stilling her.

‘Oh, hey.’ He seems to check us both out and maybe realizes her fancy outfit is an odd match for my sweaty sports attire. But actually, she’s an actress and I’m a ball player, so…

I sense Abbey’s mood shift. Her muscles stiffen. I notice she tugs on the hem of her skirt, despite the move being very subtle.

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