Page 3 of Faking Ever After

CHAPTER 2

Percy

“Glamorous, Darling,”Mom said. “Absolutely Fantasmic. To tell you the truth, I was getting worried that you might have forgotten all about it. I’ll see you both then.” And she hung up. The boop-boop sound from the speakerphone made me lift a horrified gaze to Kimberly Jones, my personal assistant and oftentimes the only sane person in a three-mile radius. She was standing on the other side of my desk.

“What the hell just happened?” I whispered, my mouth going suddenly and terribly dry.

Kim held a tablet in the fold of her left arm and a pen in her right hand. Her eyes were sharp and focused, her features smooth. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it went something like this. Your parents invited you to their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and you, not wanting to fly to Greece to enjoy two full weeks of sunbathing and drinking red wine from carafes, made up a boyfriend who’s too busy right now to fly across the Atlantic. How am I doing so far?”

“That sounds right on the money,” I said, sliding back in my chair. I loosened the stupid tie around my neck and popped the top button of my dress shirt open.

Kim proceeded without mercy. “After some back-and-forth, not only did you agree to attend said anniversary party—the one you wanted to avoid all along, if I may remind you—but you also promised to bring your imaginary boyfriend along because ‘yes, Mother, I suppose he does deserve a little break.’” Kim arched an eyebrow in the cynical way only she could pull off while I nodded gravely. “I recall phrases such as, ‘You’re going to love him,’ and, ‘This is just what we need, now that you mention it.’”

I nodded again. “Yes. That sounds about right. Thank you.” I said, my voice raspy as I reached for the glass of water on my desk.

Kim hesitated only for the sake of politeness. “Do I need to call your doctor, Percy?”

I tried for a look of mild annoyance at the quip, but I was possibly the least intimidating person anyone had ever met. “How did this happen?” I asked no one in particular. I wasn’t a terrible negotiator when I had to face a room full of hostile investors who wanted to pry my company from my hands. I wasn’t even that bad at haggling in Morocco. But Mother? I shuddered to think. If the sort of concessions I gave her would become public, I would never be allowed at the negotiating table again.

Kim was there to offer the unwanted answer. “After two years of structuring your life, I know exactly how it happened.”

I deadpanned. “Does it have anything to do with the fact that I have never been able to saynoto my mother?”

“It’s got everything to do with the fact that you have never been able to saynoto your mother,” Kim replied, matching my tone as an extra kick in the nuts.

I gritted my teeth and directed my frustration away from the phone. “And why exactly did you not jump in when you saw me sinking?”

A tiny smile lifted the corners of her lips. “You looked like you really wanted to take your boyfriend to Greece, Sir.”

The back of my head thumped against the faux leather of the chair. “The boyfriend I don’t have, you mean.”

“Precisely.” Lowering her tablet to my desk, Kim sat in one of the comfortable chairs where we imagined clients might want to sit when visiting. Not that I had done any client work in ages. “If I may remind you, I’ve been trying to schedule a date for you for the past, oh, four months.”

I closed my eyes. “I’ve been busy.”

Kimberly Jones was possibly the only person who could make shifting in a chair sound ironic. “I make your schedule, Percy.”You weren’t busy, she meant.

I opened my eyes again and shot her a look of despair. “Let’s not talk about that, shall we? Unless you can turn back time, there’s nothing either of us can do about that.”

Kim nodded firmly. “Correct. So, what can we do?”

We looked at each other for a minute. “I was hoping you would know.”

The cogs in Kim’s brain were chugging along just fine. They had been since the moment I had agreed to this ridiculous thing. “A. You can simply say you broke up, slash, the boyfriend couldn’t make it.”

I shook my head. “I did that once. And it was true, then, but they still make fun of me for ‘making up a boyfriend.’” I air-quoted and dropped my hands on the desk.

“B, then. Get a boyfriend by Sunday. Today being Friday, of course.” She said it like it was the easiest, most obvious solution to all my problems.

This was their thirty-fifth anniversary. I couldn’t miss it. Not when I missed the thirtieth for that stupid music festival in the desert I went to with Richie Harrison. We’d been young and stupid and still newly rich. To this day, I couldn’t see my motherwithout her showing me photos from the celebration week. She would laugh at a perfectly reasonable photo and shake her head dismissively. “You had to be there,” she’d explain. It was less bearable when she would just sigh and tell me how much they missed me the entire week. “Aunt Judith was so looking forward to seeing you, Darling.”

I cocked my head at Kim. “How…how do I do that?”

“Speed dating?” she suggested.

“And taking an innocent stranger to Naxos for two weeks of socializing with my extended family? I can’t be that cruel.” I crossed my arms defiantly.

Kim used her tablet’s pen to tap her chin. “Actually, I might have a solution. Percy?” She looked as if divine providence had struck her. Eyes wide and mouth slightly open, she lifted the pen to make a point. “Oh, this is brilliant. Yes, I can make this work.”

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