Page 125 of How to Lose at Love

I leave the bedroom and go to the living room, plopping down in the overstuffed blue chair next to the sliding glass patio door.

“What are you talking about? I’m not dating anyone. I would have told you about it.”

“Really? You’re not dating Dallas Colter? Ryann, your dad is basically shitting himself.”

“I’m not dating Dallas Colter, Mom. I already told you. He’s the guy Diego paid to break up with me.”

“Why are you lying! It’s all over the goddamn news!”

My body goes still, brain processing all the words she’s shouting at me.My grandparents’ retirement community, Dad shitting himself, all over the news…“What do you mean it’s all over the news?”

“First thing your dad does in the morning is check the scores of the games onSportsCenter—and whose face do you think he saw plastered all over it, kissing the predicted number one draft pick for the NFL in a parking lot? His daughter. I thought he was going to have a heart attack when he came into the bedroom.”

My mind is spinning.

So thatwasa photographer I saw in the parking lot yesterday! I knew it. I told Dallas that—

Oh my God.

Obviously, he knew.

He knew the guy was there taking our photo, and apparently, he was recording us too.

“Do you see that?”

“See what?” He craned his neck around as if he were having trouble seeing the same guy I saw.

“That guy.” I paused, rain pelting my eyes. “I thought I saw him taking pictures.”

“In this rain?”

I nodded. Did it make a difference if it was raining or not for the press to take our photos? “Before that…”

He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward his truck. “Why are we still standing here? Let’s go.”

Distracting me.

“Ryann, are you there?” Mom’s voice interrupts my memory.

If this phone I’m on had a cord, I’d be nervously twirling it. “I’m assuming Dad almost having a heart attack wasn’t a good thing?”

“All I know is we’ve been getting call after call, and it’s still morning. This is ridiculous. Who is this boy?”

She keeps calling him a boy, but he’s anything but.

“I’m not dating him. We just…we’re friends.”

“How did you become friends with a guy who dumped you for one of his buddies?”

Ah. So shedoesremember me mentioning Dallas! How sly my mother is when she wants to be.

“It’s complicated,” I tell her. I can’t very well say I agreed to a farce for the sake of his football career. Which suddenly sounds so fucking stupid and was such a dumb thing to do, the whole idea gross to me. An idea that, at the time, I thought I could handle.

Mom huffs in frustration. “I don’t understand your generation.”

“You don’t have to understand it. This is really between Dallas and me.”

“And now it’s between you and Dallas and the entire nation of sports fans.”

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