Page 100 of The Fake Dating War

Putting the bottle down, I toy with the cap. “This is hard. Because you’re—you. I bet you’ve got all sorts of savings and investments and your credit score is magical, and nothing in your life has ever gone off the rails or not happened according to some brilliant plan. You’re fucking perfect—and I’ve—not been.”

“I almost don’t want to disagree with you,” he says, with an odd wistfulness to his tone. “When you call me perfect.”

A shocked laugh burst out of me. “Seriously? My god, your ego!”

“Yes.” He’s back to massaging my foot. “But that’s not how I meant it.”

“Oh, and howdidyou mean it?”

“Being perfect—” He hesitates. “… for you, specifically, is appealing. I want you to think I’m—” He swallows. “Never mind. The point is that I’m not how you see me. And I’m not just saying that to make you feel better.” His hand reaches over and finds mine, which has curled into a tight ball. “Though, I don’t like this.”

Long, skillful fingers start massaging the tension out there, too.

“How are you not perfect?” I ask, still holding onto the fulcrum of this moment. Before he knows the ugly truth. “Be detailed.”

“I hate mangos.”

“That’s… so random.”

“And I favor my right side, so if I don’t consciously work out both sides of my body, I become lop-sided.”

Tilting my head, I examine him. “Hm. Yeah. I see that.”

He pinches my ankle (rude), before soothing the minuscule discomfort away with the pad of his thumb.

“As for savings,” he continues. “I’m about to spend a lot of mine because of someone else’s negligence.”

“Whose?”

“My father.” He takes a long breath. “The man I try hard to hate, because I don’t want to love him, even though he died from cancer way too young. The one who never told any of us in the first place he was dying, so when he collapsed onto the floor one day, no one knew what was going on. The man whose lies have left me so mad that I don’t like remembering him at all. How’s that for not being perfect?”

52

JAKE

Reema doesn’t know how to react. Anyone would think she was politely neutral, but I saw the way her head almost reared back before she caught herself in time. I’ve stunned her.

Well, she can join the group. If you told me I’d be voluntarily bringing up my dead father to encourage Patel to share her own vulnerabilities, I’d have laughed and not very nicely. But here I am, in the most surreal moment of my life, ready to bare own damages, so she has a safe space for her own.

I’ve spent this whole year wanting to beat her at work, poking and prodding at her whenever I won a bigger client, and now I can’t let go of her hand.

“I don’t know what to say,” she tells me honestly.

“Right. We can start with the savings part, moving past the rest for now.”

“Savings… You said you are going to spend a lot of your savings?”

Falling back on facts makes this somewhat easier. “The house I grew up in is worth over seventeen times what it cost to own back when my parents first bought it. We’ve been paying for it for years, but turns out those were rent payments, not mortgage ones. I should have known right away when I took over. Really—I mean—the amounts were odd. But when my dad passed away, everything was a mess. We were—a mess. It took time for the estate to settle—and guess what–the house wasn’t part of that. Because my dad sold the place without telling his family, which is a trend, not that I want to get into him hiding his cancer, because I don’t…”

She wraps an arm around my waist and leans her head on my arm. It’s more than nice.

“Anyway, I’ve been saving up and trying to negotiate with the current owners to buy the house back for my mom. She’s lived there most of her life. And if you could see her in the backyard, knee deep in her garden or drinking her tea on that raggedy patio chair she loves, you’d agree. She can’t live anywhere else. It’s her home. Which is why I’ve been saving for this, but the owners are bumping up the price, so the final cost is a moving line that keeps fucking shifting forward. It needs way more money than I calculated.”

Against me, she stiffens. “The bonus.”

There’s no point in denying it. “It would help cover the rest of the cost.”

“But I’m in the lead.”

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