Page 22 of Hard to Pretend

call?

Chris

i think it’d be better in person. can i come over?

Seb

you know where i live

I sent back a thumbs up. I didn’t care that I didn’t look my best. I’d already changed out of my work clothes into a pair of basketball shorts and an old tee-shirt. I slid on some flip flops and drove over to Seb’s apartment before I could think about it too much. If I didn’t do it now, I wasn’t going to do it at all. I knew myself well enough to know this, and I wasn’t going to let myself chicken out.

I couldn’t.

If I let this slip away without saying anything, I knew I’d regret it.

Seb answered the door moments after I knocked. I wondered if he was just standing on the other side, waiting to figure out what I was being cagey about. Because in hindsight, not saying what I wanted to talk aboutwaskind of cagey.

“Small talk first?” Seb asked after he’d closed the door behind me.

I followed him to the couch and sat down, angling my body toward him. “Kind of just want to get it out.”

“You realize you don’t have to do a full break up speech, right?” Seb asked with a small laugh.

Of course that’s what he’d think it was about. Because it had been a few days since dinner at his mom’s. We’d reached the expiration date on our arrangement. I swallowed hard. “What if we didn’t. Break up, I mean.” He didn’t say anything. He just stared at me blankly. That was not a good sign. It was never a good sign when a statement like that was met with silence and a blank stare. “Never mind. Of course we should—”

“Is there another thing we were invited to?” he asked, cutting me off.

Because that was the next logical question here, wasn’t it?

“No. I just—” I let out a long breath. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that kiss from the other night. And I realized that I’ve really enjoyed spending time with you. It was stupid.”

“It’s not stupid.” Seb studied me for a few moments. I watched the corner of his lips flick up ever so slightly before he spoke. “So what do you want to do?”

“I want to get to know you. As a person, not just as my fake boyfriend,” I clarified. “I want toknow if the kiss was some kind of glitch or if it could be something more.”

Seb nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the kiss either, so let’s do this. Let’s see what happens if we go on a real date. Worst case we break up, right?”

I wasn’t sure that was the worst case, but he was right. We didn’t have a lot to lose by trying, but it felt like we’d have a lot to lose by not trying.

I didn’t stay at Seb’s very long that night. We talked a little longer and started making plans for our date, but then one of his friends called with some kind of crisis. I told him to deal with his friend’s crisis and leave the final date plans to me. I left without a goodbye kiss, and I promised myself that if our real date went half as well as our pretend ones had, I’d get that kiss on Friday.

The rest of the week passed in a uneventful blur. Seb and I texted more than we had in the weeks leading up to our fake dates. The conversations flowed naturally. For the first time, we weren’t asking one another questions about the people we were meant to be convincing of our relationship. We weren’t getting to know the people in our lives through each other. Instead we were getting to know each other.

And everything I learned about him only made me like him that much more.

By the time Friday evening rolled around, I’d built our date up in my head to something much bigger than I should have. It felt like a make it or break it moment, and I was grateful that I was good in times like that. I had always worked well under pressure, if you excluded that morning at the coffee shop when I panicked and pretended Seb was my boyfriend. That might not have been my finest moment, but maybe it was one of those moments that had to happen.

Which was me building this whole thing up a little too much again.

I had to talk myself down, and once again I found myself wishing that I had someone I could talk to about this. I thought about calling my brother and coming clean to him. The worst that would happen with him was relentless teasing, but I didn’t want to deal with that. It was the burden of being the little brother, and I’d given him enough reasons to tease me in my life.

I didn’t want to think about the level of teasing fake boyfriend would earn. It didn’t matter that he’d be easier to talk to about this than any of my friends. Besides, if I told him the truth, then there was a chance that it would leak out to my friends. It could leak to Seb’s mom, who knew at least one of my friends.

So I was on my own. I had to pick out my outfit for myself and hype myself up for this while atthe same time talking myself down from inflating it into something bigger than it was. Needless to say, there was a lot of talking to myself that made me very glad that I didn’t know my neighbors. I didn’t know if our walls were thick enough to hide the fact that I was having full blown conversations with myself. If I’d known my neighbors, it might have been embarrassing.

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