Page 30 of Hard to Pretend

He kept looking at me, and I shrugged again. “I don’t know,” I lied.

“You don’t know?” I hated that he knew me well enough to call me on my bullshit.

I leaned back further into the couch and picked up the other pillow, holding it in my lap in a mirror of Jonas’s position. He sat there, looking at me and waiting patiently for me to open up. I could only take the weight of his stare for so long. I heaved a heavy sigh and hated the look in his eyes when I did. He knew that he was wearing me down, and he didn’t even have to say anything for it to happen.

“What if he doesn’t like me back?”

Jonas reached out and squeezed my hand. “Then you move on.”

We wouldn’t just have to move on. We would have to fake a breakup when we moved on. We would be throwing away the friendship that was starting to build between us, because it would be too awkward to be friends with him after I made an ass out of myself. This whole thing was a recipe for disaster.

Jonas looked at me like he could read my thoughts before pulling out his cell phone.

“What are you doing?”

“Texting for reinforcements,” he answered. I waited for my phone to light up, because I thought it’d go tothe group message. It didn’t, and unlike me, he didn’t break under the weight of my questioning stare. He did, however, let me change the subject until his mystery reinforcements arrived twenty minutes later.

I didn’t even know what we were talking about when Matt walked into my apartment. It wasn’t anything meaningful. It wasn’t anything that would stick in my memories for years to come. I was pretty sure it was about a television show. I just know that the moment Matt came in and got settled, Jonas switched gears.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think that Eli’s single minded personality had possessed him, because he immediately got back to what he thought was the most pressing topic in the world: my potential (okay, very real) crush on Christopher Singh. I sat back and listened as Jonas told Matt all about my date, only answering to make little corrections about things that he got wrong. Things that didn’t matter to the story but made Jonas grin that knowing grin of his and probably made it that much more obvious that I has a major thing for the man.

“I don’t get what the problem is,” Matt said when he was finished.

“Seb here is worried that Chris might not like him back.”

Matt blinked once and then twice before shooting me the mostwhat the fuckcoded look I’d ever seen on him. “He took you on a twenty-four hour date.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be a twenty-four hour date,” I countered.

“That doesn’t make the evidence any less damning,” Matt pointed out. “In fact, I think that points more to him having feelings for you than himnothaving feelings for you. A date only lasts that long when you don’t want it to end.”

I hadn’t wanted it to end. I hadn’t wanted to go home, but I didn’t want to blow off Jonas. Not that we’d started doing anything that we originally had planned, which was just eating dinner. We hadn’t even ordered the Chinese food we’d talked about grabbing yet, and now I had a feeling it was going to be dinner for three. I didn’t mind Matt’s addition. In fact, I might even suggest that we invite Eli and Holden before we order food.

Or maybe not.

I didn’t need their added input as to why or why not Chris liked me.

“But what if he was just too tired to go home last night?” I suggested. “I mean going home post hook up—”

“Is normal,” Jonas cut me off. “After Silas and I hooked up the first time, I went home. At two in the morning.”

“And after my first hook up with Chris, I crashed at his place,” I reminded them. They’d all gotten the rundown of that hookup the day after it happened. Of course, we’d also been talking about a lot of otherthings. Like Matt’s breakup and Jonas having to work with Silas, who he hated at the time. Luckily, Matt and Jonas were the kind that either paid attention and remembered or didn’t feel the need to clarify.

Either way, they let it lie and continued down the mental journey with me. “Okay, he still took you to breakfast.”

“We were hungry.”

“And then spent the day with you,” Matt repeated. He studied me for a moment. “After breakfast, did he act like he wanted to head back home without you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“That’s usually a sign that someone likes you,” he pointed out. He and Jonas exchanged a glance before they both looked at me in unison. I shifted under the pressure of their combined gaze. An awkward tension buzzed in the air between us. I wasn’t used to things being awkward with Matt and Jonas. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. “So, what’s the real fear?”

Matt’s question pierced through the bullshit. I shrugged again. I didn’t know how to word any of it. How could I tell either of them what was really bothering me? It was more than just fear that he might not like me back. I didn’t know what I wanted to say about my fear, because I couldn’t put a finger on it.

I only knew that I was afraid.

Matt kept looking at me like he could see right through me, like my thoughts were on display and he was just trying to translate them into a language thatmade sense to him. I’d seen that look on his face. It was the same way he looked at a particularly complicated bit of code that he was trying to work his way through, a problem in a program he was building for one of his freelance gigs.

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