Page 21 of A Flighty Fake Boyfriend
“I know.” I stubbed out my cigarette and opened the car door. “Mount up. We’re not far from the hotel.”
“Isn’t it still a little early?”
“The room should be ready. It will be by the time we’ve eaten lunch.”
“Okay.” When we were both inside the car and buckled up, he said, “You know, I don’t mind if we have to share a bed.”
I glanced at him. “You don’t?”
“No. I thought about it a lot, and I figure if you were supposed to come here with a date, you probably don’t have a room with two beds.”
“I see.” I started the engine and left the lot, making my way south toward the hotel.
“Yeah, so I wanted you to know it’s fine. As long as it’s a king-size because I need my space.”
“We have two beds.”
“Oh.” He sighed. “Okay.”
Was that disappointment? “The date I was going to bring is a friend. We don’t hook up.”
“Really?” That was definitely disappointment. “It seems a shame for you to go to all this trouble for a wedding you don’t want to attend with a guy you don’t even boink.”
“Yeah, that’s my style. I snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at every opportunity.”
“So…this guy who had to cancel at the last second. Just a friend? Really?”
“Yeah. We planned to get some sailing in. He’s got a boat.”
“Nice.” Epic rolled his window down to let his hand fly on the breeze. “What’s he do?”
“Actor.”
“An actor…He do anything I might have heard of?”
I hesitated before answering. “I doubt it.”
“I thought about being an actor.” Epic turned to me with a wry expression. “My parents couldn’t stand the idea.”
“It’s not really up to your parents, is it?”
“Well, no. But they’ll ride my ass until I decide what I want to do, and whatever it is will probably freak them out just as badly. They have a career in mind for me, and I hate it.”
“You finish college yet?”
“Yup. I got my BS at Santa Cruz and an MFE at Berkley Haas, but there’s no way I’m going into finance.”
Epic had a graduate degree? “Seriously?”
“What?”
“You have a master’s degree infinancial engineering?” I couldn’t help my surprise.
He frowned at me. “Why is my education so shocking to you?”
“You…You’re twenty-three, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but”—he began ticking things off on his fingers—“I took every advanced placement class I could in high school; I graduated early, so I went to college at seventeen; and the MFE only takes a year.”
