Page 74 of The Fake Dating Plan

“She hid it from you too?”

“I didn’t hide anything!”

“I would call sneaking around and not telling your friend hiding,” Laura said, “Don’t you agree?” she said to Dylan. He nodded.

“Okay fine. But it’s still new so I couldn’t say anything yet.”

“I didn’t know a relationship dating back since college was considered ‘new”.’” She put air quotes when she said the word new.

“You two have been dating since college?” Dylan looked wide-eyed as if he had received some groundbreaking piece of information.

“We dated in college. Then we broke up.”

“Interesting.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “That explains a lot.”

“It does?”

“The way he’s always looking at you like he’s going to devour you every time you’re in each other’s presence. I can practically hear the electricity between you two crackling.”

Laura had been staring at me the entire time, to an almost unnerving degree. “He probably does that with every woman he’s into,” she said. “He didn’t earn the title of playboy for nothing.”

She was right.

“Nuh uh,” Dylan interjected, “Their thing is real.”

“And you know this how?” Laura said.

“I have a sixth sense about these things.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the optics and the way people are talking about this.”

I put my head in my hands. “What are the employees saying?”

“The chats on Slack are pretty positive on the whole,” Dylan said, “We all ship Axmilia.”

“Ugh. If I hear that word again I will fire you.”

He laughed.

“What are you going to do about the chatter? We’re going to have to release something at some point. If you want to, of course.”

I hadn’t even thought about press releases and such stuff. It felt like something a big company had to do. I hadn’t checked our socials yet. “What are people saying on our social media accounts?”

Dylan whipped out his phone. “Mostly praise about your relationship. People like the idea of the two of you dating, but there’s some hate.”

“Oh. God.”

“It’s not that bad. It could be worse, to be honest. It’s only the gossip and entertainment sites we have to worry about, but who reads them these days.”

Nobody, but people, read the headlines. And if one spicy headline went viral, that could change perceptions.

Dylan put back his phone into his pocket. “I think you’re overthinking this.”

“What about our overseas sales? Have you seen what they're saying in Singapore? This could affect a lot.”

“The Singaporeans don’t care what we do as long as we give them high-quality products. Again. You two are overthinking this.”

I wasn’t sure he was right. Maybe Singapore didn’t care, but it could end up bringing negative press to us in the short term, which is something I didn’t want when we were about to prepare for the first fashion week of the year.

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