Page 65 of Alive At Night

“Guess it is.” Julian’s face was set, eyes blazing. It felt like he’d taken my teasing joke and turned it into a promise. One that wasn’t a joke at all. “Are you packed for the weekend?”

I nodded.

“You still want to leave right after work tomorrow?”

“If that works for you.” I tried to roll my chair back—put some space between the two of us—but I quickly hit the desk behind me. “Although I know that means we won’t get into Manhattan until well after dark, and we might hit rush hour.”

“That’s fine.” Julian shrugged, and to my immense relief, he wheeled himself and his chair back to his desk. “More time for me to increase my bank of knowledge on Juniper St. James. Since it’s apparently lacking.”

“You know I was just kidding about—”

“I take getting to know my fake girlfriend incredibly seriously.” Julian tossed me a smirk over his shoulder. “Don’t ruin my fun.”

“Oh, now it’s fun spending time with me?”

This was a new development that I didn’t know how to handle. Although, I also didn’t think it was true.

“That depends. Are you going to get donut powder all over my car?”

“No, donuts are a morning thing, Julian.” I rolled my eyes. “We’re going in the evening.”

He chuckled while packing his messenger bag, clearly intending to head out after he was done irritating me. “Are you going to bring another one of those damned plants?” he asked.

“No, you know very well that’s an illogical question. Why would I bring plants—”

“Are you going to make me listen to your audiobooks for over three hours?”

I gasped. “How do you know about my audiobooks?”

Julian stood, throwing the strap of his bag onto his shoulder and crossing the office to leave. But before he did, he swiveled and grabbed the top of the doorframe, leaning in as though whatever he was about to say was a secret he’d been holding on to for a long time.

“You need better headphones, Daisy.”

And then he smiled knowingly and walked out the door.

CHAPTERFIFTEEN

julian

IDIDN’T KNOW HOW to stop what was happening.

Part of me wondered if I should reach out to Noah, get to the bottom of why he’d ditched Juniper. Because I highly doubted it had anything to do with football. But the last thing I wanted was to give him a hard time only for him to change his mind.

Like hell did I want him taking Juniper to this wedding.

Which left me as her only option.

This was a bad idea. For fuck’s sake, I’d spent years keeping Juni at arm’s length, and now I was pretending to be her boyfriend for a weekend?

Bright fucking idea.

But Halloween had fucked me over, and now escorting Juniper to the wedding was exactly the excuse my brain needed to justify being close to her. I couldn’t shake the itch to touch her. I couldn’t stop thinking of how it had felt to have her beneath the sheets. Christ, I thought about her more than any man should think about a woman who was his coworker and sister’s best friend. And it was damn annoying, honestly.

There were so many reasons why this was a terrible idea. And incidentally, one of those reasons was blowing up my phone.

GEMS: You better be nice to her this weekend.

GEMS: She’s really nervous about meeting Sofia.

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