Page 44 of Hard to Pretend

“Areyousureyouwant me to come tonight?” Chris asked as I herded him toward the door to his apartment.

I crossed my arms over my chest. We’d talked about this. It was important to me that he meet my friends and now seemed as good a time as any. Things were still strained with his friends, even though they’d all talked. It would just be a slow process, rebuilding the foundation of trust that his lies had cracked. I couldn’t help him with that, though I really wanted to text his friends and make them see sense. I knew better than to do that. I could, however, offer him a distraction.

A night out, especially one back at the place where we’d first met, could serve that purpose, and my friends agreed. Or maybe they just wanted a chance to meet him and get to know him, rather than just catching glimpses and passing greetings. Jonas hadeven invited Silas so Chris wouldn’t be the only one without years of history and inside jokes.

At least we knew that the first hang out with Chris would go better than Silas’s had. We didn’t have the history Jonas and Silas shared, meaning that none of my friends should be a prick to him. Of course with my friends, I was never too certain of how anything would go.

While I was confident that it’d go pretty well, Chris seemed nervous. He was on edge as we left his apartment, and he’d asked multiple times if I was sure about this. It was driving me up a wall, because he knew how important the boys were to me. The fact that I wanted him to meet them spoke volumes about how important he was to me. I couldn’t remember the last time I wanted to introduce a partner to my friends.

I finally got him out of his apartment, though he was white knuckling the steering wheel the entire drive to Goliath. It was a short drive from my apartment to the club, and we found parking easily. Once inside, I led him to the table where my friends and I usually met. Not surprisingly, we were the first ones there. “Are we early?” he asked.

“A few minutes early,” I told him with a shrug. “I don’t like to be late. Matt will be late.”

“Oh, did he text?”

“Nope,” I told him with a grin. “He’s just the kind of guy that would be late to his own funeral.”

Chris laughed. “And everyone else? They’ll be on time?”

“Jonas and Silas will be on time,” I answered. “It’s fifty-fifty on if Eli and Holden will be late or not. It really depends on how hard it is for Holden to herd Eli out the door.”

“And you’re sure they’re not—” He trailed off. I gave him a confused look, because there was no way he was implying what I thought he was implying. “Together?”

He was.

“Yes. I told you they’re just best friends. The kind of best friends that have been up each other’s asses in the not literal and not sexy way since the day we met them. Holden didn’t even leave King’s Bay for college because the idea of being too far away from Eli was too hard for him.”

“But they’re not together?”

I laughed. He wasn’t the first person to hear that fun fact about Holden and Eli and ask the same question. The two of them had a bond I never fully understood. I didn’t think that anyone outside of Eli and Holden could understand the connection they had, but it didn’t matter. It somehow made sense.

“Have they ever been together?”

“Not that any of us know about.” And if they’d ever been together, I was pretty sure we all would’ve heard about it in excruciating detail. Neither Eli nor Holden were particularly shy about sharing theirsexual exploits. In fact, they both had a habit of sharingtoomuch about them. There was no way they’d have kept hooking up a secret. They’d be making jokes about it until the end of time.

“What don’t any of us know about?”

I looked away from my boyfriend in time to see Jonas and Silas approaching the table. Jonas and Silas took seats next to each other. “I was telling Chris a bit about Eli and Holden, and he was asking if they were together.”

“You’ll think it even more when you meet them,” Silas teased. “I’m still not convinced that they aren’t secretly married, and Jonas is hiding it from me for some reason.”

Jonas and I exchanged a look and started laughing. The idea of any of us keeping that kind of secret was insane. Once all of us were together, we ended up talking about things without any care of who else was around us. We’d have spilled that secret to Silas within the first few times we’d met him, assuming Jonas didn’t tell him sooner. There was a reason I hadn’t tried to convince them that Chris and I were real when we started this fake dating thing.

We made small talk until everyone else arrived. I introduced Chris to everyone as they arrived—Holden and Eli first, only five minutes late with Holden apologizing while Eli spewed excuses, and then Matt, twenty minutes late and looking disheveled.

“Is there a reason you look like you just rolled out of bed?” I asked him, studying him across the table. His dark hair was a mess, and his clothes were wrinkled. He even had a bit of a five o’clock shadow on his usually clean shaven face. “Everything okay?”

“I stayed up too late last night,” Matt said with a shrug. “I’ve got a project due Sunday, and I had a surge of inspiration last night. Kind of fell into the hole.”

Silas and Jonas let out an understanding grunt while Eli, Holden, Chris, and I exchanged confused looks. Jonas caught the expression and grinned. “Coding hole.”

“Coding hole?” Chris questioned.

“You lose track of time, because you’re so deep into the code,” Jonas explained.

“Not the kind of hole I like to get lost in,” Eli quipped, “but to each their own.”

Matt took advantage of the fact that he was close to Eli to playfully shove him. He was sitting so close to Holden that he barely moved, but Holden’s arms wrapped around him to steady him anyway. Chris looked over at me with a raised eyebrow, and Silas laughed. Maybe I could see how they were confused about the fact that Holden and Eli had always been strictly platonic.

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