Page 13 of Hard to Pretend

All of them.

Maybe I should just chalk it up to good practice for our date.

5

Iwasoverthinkingthisdecision.It wasn’t a real date, and I shouldn’t be obsessing over what I was going to wear like it was. But even if it wasn’t a real date, I still wanted to look good. I didn’t want my outfit to be the thing that told Chris’s friends that this wasn’t real. If nothing else, I could use this as a dress rehearsal for when I finally did find that something real I craved.

“You realize you have three green button downs?” Holden asked as I threw another shirt option on the bed. “I mean, you’ve tossed out five shirts as options, and three of them are green button downs.”

I looked at my bed and the small hill of clothing that was growing there. He was right. There were three almost identical green button downs, mere shades of difference separating them. “Should I takethat as a sign?”

“And just put on a green button down instead of obsessing about what you’re going to wear out for your date with your fake boyfriend?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah,” I clarified.

Holden nodded his head, an amused grin on his lips. “Yeah,” he said, “and then you should calm the fuck down. I mean this is a one time fake date, right?” He paused. “Two time fake date. Since you played pretend at the coffee shop already.”

“That was an impromptu performance,” I countered. “It wasn’t a date. It was saving a…” I didn’t know what to call Chris. I couldn’t sayfriend, because we weren’t friends. We were two guys who had slept together once and then ran into one another months later. Wecouldbecome friends. After the other night when we stayed up too late talking on my couch, we could easily become friends. Maybe we would, after all of this. Maybe I could just consider him that now, for the sake of having a label.

The word wouldn’t form on my tongue, and the sentence hung incomplete in the air between us.

“A what?” Holden prompted.

“I have no idea.”

“You realize this is going to be a disaster, right?” Holden asked.

“You don’t know that.”

Holden sat down on the edge of my bed, pushing the shirts all to the middle before holding up oneof the green shirts and offering it to me. “Wear that one and stop obsessing,” he ordered. He picked up another green shirt and began toying with one of its small buttons. He looked deep in thought, which was not his default setting by a long shot. I waited for him to say whatever it was that was on his mind. “Okay, so I do know that this is going to end in disaster. Think about every movie or book that does the fake dating thing.”

“Those aren’t real.”

“Because real people don’t pretend to date someone.” Holden toyed with the button for another moment. “Real people would just tell their friends that they’re okay being single or that they haven’t met the right person, and if they did the fake dating thing, then what does it say about what they think about their friends?” He paused again. I opened my mouth to answer, but he cut me off. “It says that the friendship isn’t as strong as they think, because I couldn’t imagine lying to you guys about dating or not dating someone. We all tell each other everything.”

Not quite true, but I understood where he was coming from. I understood his hesitation and concern about what Chris was doing. “Not every friendship is like ours though,” I pointed out after weighing his words. “And we don’t know how long they’ve been up his ass before he got annoyed, saw someone he kind of knew, and decided to take the chance.”

“And that’d be okay for a one time thing, but I mean now you’re going on an actual date. You’re meeting his friends and acting like you’re in a relationship with him. And then what? You’re going to break his heart and these people are going to hate you based on a lie that someone else decided to tell their friends? That one of their friends decided to tell them?”

“We’re not going to have a dramatic breakup. It’s going to be amicable. It just didn’t work out.”

“And at least one of his friends will kind of hate you for it.”

“None of us hate any of Matt’s exes for things not working out,” I pointed out.

Holden shook his head. “Actually, Eli kind of hates Lucas for taking that job in Texas and breaking Matt’s heart.”

“Lucas and Matt were together for three years, not a few weeks or months or—”

“You don’t even remember how long you’ve been with Chris?”

I groaned. That was something we’d talked about, and I’d completely blanked on it already. Maybe we’d talked about a few too many things that night. We’d made the lie too complex and now the more important details were slipping away.

I blamed Chris. He had been too easy to talk to.

“You really don’t remember how long you’re supposed to have been with him, do you?” Holden laughed. “Like I said, this is going to be a disaster.”

“You sound like Eli.”

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