Page 44 of The Match Faker

“He let me have the bag,” I say to Mindy.

“And now she makes me cake.” He kisses my temple. It’s the briefest touch, the kind of cursory kiss a person would give someone they know they’ll kiss again and again and again for a long time. But it makes my heart pound for no reason at all.

“I’ll go grab the bags,” he says, leaving me to smile and nod at Mindy as she runs through an itinerary of the weekend: a dinner tonight, the party tomorrow, lamenting the fact that we likely won’t be able to get out on the lake for a skate. “But you’ll just have to come back before the ice thaws,” she says excitedly.

Nick returns withallof the bags. He smells like the cold and his face is flushed from exertion,

“I put you in your old room, sweetie,” Mindy says, giving James a pat on his stomach before hurrying after a grandchild running by with a—thankfully clean—diaper on their head.

His dad is called away by one of Nick’s brothers, Robert, I think.

“You?” I ask, my heart pounding for an entirely new reason. “You as in you, right? You will be in your room and I will be…elsewhere?”

“Both of us,” he says, one corner of his lips quirking up.

I follow him as he hefts the bags toward a mudroom off the kitchen rather than the staircase that bisects the main room.

“But we can’tsleeptogether,” I hiss. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He shrugs in this way he has, like he’s beleaguered by my annoying questions.

My fingers twitch in response, that’s how badly I want to strangle him.

“I thought you’d assume that two adults pretending…” He stops at the foot of the stairs in the mudroom. “Two adults who aredatingwould be sleeping together.” With that, he turns and stomps up the stairs.

Of course, the possibility crossed my mind, but it wasn’t such a big deal before. Now, after that moment in my kitchen, the idea of being alone with him, behind a closed door, under the same bed linens,horizontal? I don’t trust myself.

This is all Jade’s fault. She planted the seed and now it’s all I can think about.

Getting dicked down by Nick Scott.

12

NICK

Before I open the door of the ensuite bathroom, I take a deep, centering breath and work to convince myself not to do this. I shouldn’t do this. But I can hear her moving around on the other side of the door, snooping. She went silent as she crossed the threshold into my room, because it doesn’t look like my room. There aren’t any old NHL players or pop rock band posters plastered on the wood-paneled walls. No awards, trophies, artwork, pictures from my youth. Just a large flat-screen TV mounted on the wall across from a double bed covered in a crisp navy blue comforter. There’s no personality left at all.

Mom kept all our rooms as we left them, I think in the hopes that we’d be more likely to come back, but home isn’t really a place; it’s a feeling. I took home with me when I left.

On the other side of the door a drawer opens and shuts quietly, too slowly not to be intentional. I shouldn’t do this, but I’m gonna.

Tightening the towel around my hips, I step into my bedroom. Jasmine spins from where she was bent over my old desk. When she sees me, she plasters herself against the wall,her clothes folded neatly in her arms and pressed against her chest. Her green eyes makeholy shitholes in her head.

“You…that…” She blushes, clutching her clothes tighter. “Yourbody,” she whisper-hisses, not quite meeting my gaze.

I tell myself that I’m doing this to make her hate me. As if the more I tease her, the easier it will be to have a clean break when I tell her the truth. But honestly, I just love making her flustered. I revel in how easy it is to make her blush and how prim and proper she tries to be. Key word, tries.

I press my hand to my bare chest. “Dear god, not my body again.”

She slinks along the wall, keeping a wide berth, then slips into the bathroom and shuts the door harder than necessary.

“It’s my bedroom, Jazz,” I call.

She doesn’t respond, and then the shower comes on.

To my reflection in the mirror above my dresser, I say, “Are you proud of yourself?”

I don’t dignify myself with a response. Instead, I flop on the bed to get my heart under control. Each new wave of attraction to her is a surprise, though it shouldn’t be. It’s as if the more I tell myself I can’t have her, the more I recount the reasons I shouldn’t be doing this at all—that I am, actually, a huge fucking asshole—the more my body is tuned to her. The Binder, the blush on her cheeks when I frustrate her or when she’s scandalized, the way she bravely faced my family, how the sun catches the blazing red and fiery gold in her hair.

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