Page 34 of Stealing Sunshine

“We could tell him the truth.”

I shake my head. “He’d tell Rory, and she’d tell the rest of the girls. From there, everyone would know.”

“I could swear him to twin secrecy,” she suggests, too damn hopeful.

“If we do this, nobody knows the truth. Not your siblings and not my best friends. It has to be real to everyone. The moment someone learns the truth, the plan is ruined. If my mom figures out that I turned to fake dating to get out of these dates . . . I’d rather suffer through a million more of them than suffer that embarrassment.”

She chews on that for a moment. “Alright. Okay, nobody will know. But that means our story has to be perfect. No holes, and we have to be ready to explain it a thousand times without getting our facts mixed up.”

“Easy enough.”

“What is our story, then?”

“You don’t have anything to suggest? This was your idea.”

Daisy exhales, jerking her chin in agreement. “That’s true. Well, we’re already living together, so we could say that it just happened naturally?”

“What happened naturally? You took one look at my empty fridge and decided you wanted to be the one to fill it?” I ask sarcastically.

She hits my arm again, and I think I like when she does that. “Not exactly. How about you just let me come up with something in the moment. It will feel more genuine that way. We don’t bring it up to anyone alone before then, and we’ll just make note of the story we tell the first time so neither one of us forgets.”

“Will that work?”

“I’m a pretty good actress.”

“I hope so.” I hold her stare with one that I hope she can understand the seriousness behind. “How long will we date for?”

“As long as it takes. I don’t have anything else to do besides work. School starts Monday.”

“Okay.”

She does a double take. “Okay?”

“Okay, we’ll do this. Fucking fake date.”

It sounds ridiculous, yet my heart is thrashing at the agreement. The crush I’ve had on Daisy Mitchell for the past three years should have made me turn this idea down and build a permanent wall between us. Instead, it’s encouraging me to go along with this.

It’s going to get messy. I’m going to torture myself by picking at an unhealed wound over and over again. I’ve thought about Daisy in the exact way I’m going to be “pretending” to over the next who fucking knows how long. If she ever found out that I agreed to this, knowing that I want her for real, she might never trust me again.

It feels dirty and sneaky. But I’m not doing this just for my own selfish reasons. It’s more than that. The idea of telling my mom that I’m no longer able to entertain these blind dates feels like a well-deserved fuck off. Having my fake girlfriend be Daisy is just a bonus. Even if I know that by the end of this agreement, I’ll be left worse off than how I entered it.

For three years, I’ve successfully hidden my affection for the sunshine girl beside me. Every blunt, cold reply and blank expression were my only ways of keeping my cards hidden. I’ve never reacted to someone the way I do her, as if she’d somehow already burrowed herself into my life without my knowledge by our first meeting.

Nobody knows how I truly feel. Not Anna or Poppy and Darren, despite their suspicions that I may be playing a little too hard against Johnny’s twin. I wasn’t planning on confirming those feelings, and now, it seems I have no choice.

They’ll believe me when I say that they were right. This plan could actually work, but I fear it will break me in the process.

Too bad I’ve never feared a little pain.

11

DAISY

I’mup early the next morning. At the first creak of the floor in the hall outside my room, I sit up in bed and attempt to push my bed-head flat.

Yesterday, I woke up single, and today, I have a girlfriend. A fake one, to be specific, which I guess I need to be when we’re not in private.

Blowing out a breath, I cringe at my morning breath and slip out of bed. Toes curling into the plush carpet with every step to my dresser, I yank clothes out and get dressed. The bathroom is across the hall, and I don’t think I’m quite ready to be wandering Bryce’s halls in only my panties just yet.

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