Page 46 of Faking It with the Bad Boy

The door closed behind him with a finality that echoed through the empty museum.

I stood there for a long time, surrounded by Victorian medical tools that suddenly felt like artifacts of a different kind of history – the kind you couldn't put in display cases or catalogs with careful labels.

The kind that left scars.

Later that night, I found a book of poetry in my bag – the one his grandmother had slipped me at the game. Inside was a note in Jack's familiar handwriting:

"Some things are worth the risk. Some people are worth being real for. Some stories don't need roles or acts or pretense. Just truth. Just us."

Below it, I found a poem dated three days ago:

***

"In museum light, she catalogs history,

Each artifact carefully placed,

Like the pieces of herself, she shares

One careful measure at a time.

I want to tell her she doesn't need Rules to make her real,

That some things can't be categorized,

Like the way she looks at old books,

Or how she makes me forget every role I've ever tried to play."

***

I closed the book before I could read more and before I could let myself wonder if maybe I'd just destroyed something real in my rush to protect myself from something fake.

But the words followed me home, echoing like heartbeats:

Some things are worth the risk. Some people are worth being real for. Some stories don't need roles or acts or pretense.

Just truth. Just us. Just broken.

And maybe that was the real tragedy – not that he might have been pretending, but that he might have been real all along.

And I'd been too scared to believe it.

Chapter fifteen

Forced Cooperation

There are exactly twenty-four steps in the Preston University Museum's emergency protocols. I know because I've read them forty-two times in the past hour, trying to find a loophole that would get me out of what Dean Williams just called "a wonderful opportunity for academic collaboration."

The email sat open on my laptop, its words more terrifying than any Victorian surgical manual:

"Dear Ms. Chen and Mr. Morrison,

Given your combined expertise in medical history and your successful mentorship partnership, you will jointly host tomorrow's Victorian Medical Innovation exhibition for the Board of Trustees. This is a crucial fundraising event for both the museum and the athletic department.

Attendance is mandatory.

Regards, Dean Williams"

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