Page 14 of Hard to Pretend

“Eli would have a point.” Holden stuck his tongue out at me.

I grabbed a shirt from my closet and threw it at him before sayingfuck itand putting on the green button down Holden had handed me. He might not be right about this thing crashing and burning, but he was right about me pointlessly obsessing over this whole situation.

Holden, thankfully, dropped it while I got dressed. Instead of telling me all the other thoughts he had about my arrangement with Chris, he regaled me with tales of some guy he’d hooked up with the weekend before. He’d mentioned him over text, but I hadn’t gotten all the details. (Maybe Chris’s friends were onto something by not telling each other everything, because about five minutes in, I remembered that Holden had a bad habit of oversharing.)

Holden and I exchanged a few more stories about memorable hookups after that. I thought about telling him about my hookup with Chris, some of the nitty gritty details that had escaped my initial retelling, parts that I’d spent too long replaying since running into him at the coffee shop, but decided against it.

It turned out to be both a good and bad thing, because Chris arrived a few minutes into Holden’s next story. Luckily, he was only talking about his nephew’s latest attempts to learn to ride a bike without training wheels. I could only imagine whatChris would’ve said if he’d walked in while Holden was talking about one of his more colorful hookups.

He’d probably run screaming after realizing that my friends were, in fact, crazy.

I let Chris in and reintroduced him to Holden.

“You look familiar,” Holden muttered, staring at him with narrowed eyes and a cocked head.

Which was why it may have been a bad thing that I hadn’t opted to tell the Chris story to Holden.

“We’ve met before,” Chris told him.

The studious look on Holden’s face transformed to confusion. “When did we—” He looked at me, raising an eyebrow. I could practically hear the question in his head, asking if one of us had slept with him.

“You guys met at Goliath. About eight ago. Before Jonas and Silas started dating.” I hoped the prompting would help him put the puzzle pieces together. It didn’t. In fact, he looked more confused than he had before. “You guys met him before I left with him.”

“Oh.” Holden blinked. “Wait, you’re fake dating a guy that yousleptwith? I mean I guess that makes sense how he knows you and you don’t have to pretend to know what the sex is like, but remember what I said earlier? Double it. Triple it.”

“Okay, I think it’s time for you to go so Chris and I can get to our party,” I grumbled, practically yanking his arm off as I pulled him to his feet and off my couch. I did not need him telling Chris how much he thought this was going to crash, burn, and end in apocalypticdisaster. Chris already knew this was a bad idea. He didn’t need my idiot best friend to point it out.

We followed Holden out of the apartment and said goodbye at the door. He went one way up the sidewalk to his car and we went the other way to the parking lot where Chris had parked his.

It was time to go to this party and hope Holden wasn’t right.

“Okay, quick refresher,” I requested as we parked in front of Chris’s friends’ house. “We’ve been dating a few weeks right?”

“About a month,” he confirmed. Okay, so I was right. A month was basically a few weeks. I took a deep breath, and he reached over the center console to squeeze my arm. “I know this was my idea, but if you want to back out I can say that you got sick last minute. Food poisoning or something.”

“We’re already here.” It would be pointless to leave now. Any of his friends could have looked out the window and saw us already there. It was too late for cold feet, even if they did feel like icicles.

“We’ll make this as painless as we can, right?”

“And then we’ll break up in another week or two and pretend we never did this.”

And maybe we’d find some way to be friends after all of that. We could be those exes that managed tostay friends after a failed relationship, especially since our breakup would be amicable, mutual, and most importantly, fake.

We got out of the car and walked to front door. Chris didn’t bother knocking. He just took my hand and walked inside.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting from a birthday party, but it wasn’t a small group—mostly couples—sitting around a table with a collection of board games piled up in the center. There was a second folding table pushed against a wall covered in a pale blue table cloth. Snacks sat on top of it with bottles of soda lined up neatly beside some glasses. A blue cooler sat on the floor next to the table.

“You made it!” The words were accompanied by a short redhead turning around, bright smile on her face. She bounced out of her seat and practically ran to hug Chris. Her eyes landed on me over his shoulder and her smile grew bigger. “And you must be the mystery boyfriend!”

Chris laughed as he pulled away from the hug. “This is Seb,” he introduced. “Seb, this is Natalie. Her husband, Ronnie, is sitting over there,” he pointed to a lanky brunette having a heated debate with a blonde guy at the head of the table. “Come on over. I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

“Where’s Mason?” I asked as I looked over to the people at the table. He was the only person I would have recognized, and he was noticeably absent.

“He’s in the kitchen helping Luce finish dinner,” Natalie supplied. “Because you know Luce. She has to cook. Even on her birthday.”

I shot a confused look at Chris. Was this something that I was supposed to know? In all the limited information he’d shared about his friends, he’d not mentioned that the birthday girl had to be cooking all the time?

“Luce is a chef,” he explained. “Mason offered to do the cooking tonight, and she agreed, but I’m guessing she’s not actually relinquishing control.”

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