Page 10 of Hard to Pretend

“We should meet up before the party,” I suggested. “I mean if we’ve been dating, we should know things about each other, right? We should know how long we’ve been seeing each other and get our facts straight.”

“We should probably also go over rules. I mean, I don’t want to do something that makes you uncomfortable.”

He’d already seen me naked. It wasn’t like we were really starting at square one here, but I understood his point. A one night stand was different than playing pretend with his friends.

“Good idea,” I agreed.

“Are you free tomorrow?”

I already knew the answer, but I paused like I needed to consider. Like I needed to check my all too empty calendar. “I get off work at five.”

“Perfect,” he declared.

I promised to send him my address, and then we talked for another fifteen minutes. The conversation wasn’t exactly natural. There were uncomfortable pauses and ebbs as we grappled for another topic. It was small talk, and a stone was forming in the pit of my stomach.

If we couldn’t even make small talk on the phone, how were we going to pull this off?

This was probably a really bad idea.

As we hung up the phone and I laid back in my bed, I realized that there was no probably to it. Thiswasa really bad idea.

But at least I’d get a date out of it.

4

Mypalmsweresweatingas I waited at a stop light on the way to the address Seb gave me. What was I thinking? This was an incredibly bad idea. I knew it, and I was pretty sure that he knew it too. Pretending to date someone I’d hooked up with one time was an insane idea.

Agreeing to it made me question his sanity a little too.

It had been one thing, pretending for five minutes at a coffee shop. It had been a spur of the moment flash of idiocy. It hadn’t been anything that could or should have had real life consequences. Which, in hindsight, was a naive thought. After all, I wasn’t pretending for a stranger. I was pretending for one of my best friends. Of course Mason would tell our other friends, and they would want to meet my mystery man.

I sighed as the light turned green.

I could call and cancel. I could tell my friends that we broke up or confess that I’d never been datingthis guy in the first place. They might tease me for it, mercilessly, but I wouldn’t have to play pretend. It would be a momentary lapse of judgment. If I kept it up, it would become a deep hole I couldn’t climb out of. I kept driving toward Seb’s.

Maybe I was just hoping that Seb would be the genius to suggest that this was a bad idea and blow me off so that I didn’t have to be the bad guy.

Except that I knew that wasn’t the case either.

I didn’t want to admit to my friends that I’d lied. I didn’t want to face the music, the consequences of my actions.

Besides, it was just one party. One night. I could talk to Seb tonight about how we were going to break up.

I could do this.

I turned up the music and after two songs, I was parked in front of a run down apartment building. The building itself had a few cracks in the bricks on the corner. The fake wood shutters were faded from the sunlight, and the balconies looked weathered with age. The sidewalk leading up to the buildings was cracked, but the grass was neatly kept and the bushes out front were trimmed.

I climbed out of the car and locked it before walking toward the building. Seb’s apartment was on the third floor, up creaking metal stairs. The four doors on his landing all had place mats in front of them. Two of the doors had actual wreaths, and while the paint was peeling on the walls between the doors, it didn’tlook as bad as I might have originally thought. I was judging a book by its cover.

I took another deep breath and knocked.

I heard Seb call out and a few moments later, the door opened. He stepped back to let me in, and I got my first glimpse of his apartment. It was a lot better than the exterior made it look. The cream colored walls didn’t have any peeling paint, and there was a faint citrus smell in the air. The hard wood floors weren’t quite polished, but they looked neat and well done. Seb led me to the living room just past the small entry way.

It was small. No, it was cozy. He had an overstuffed cream colored couch with a blanket decorated with lemons draped over the back. There were matching yellow throw pillows and even a little yellow rug underneath a white coffee table. My eyes moved around the rest of the room. A white bookshelf sat against one wall, filled with a few books and a lot of Pop Funko figurines. There were a few framed pictures on the shelf—mostly of Seb with a few other guys. They looked vaguely familiar.

“Do you have a thing for lemons?” I asked, still looking around.

“What?”

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