Foolish Games: A Brothers Best Friend Fake Dating Romance

eleven

#1 at the Box Office:I Know What You Did Last Summer

Sebastian Swift

Since the cafeteria is the only place where the majority of the student body gathers every day, it’s the heart of the social scene. Unless there’s a pep rally. That takes precedence over everything else, obviously. I’m the object of adoration at most of those, so how could it not?

The next day is a Tuesday though, so nothing exciting is going on, which means the cafeteria is the only place where everyone can sit with their friends who aren’t in their classes, with minimal supervision. It’s also where the rumor mill turns.

Billy cuts in line to join me, throwing an arm around my neck. “I thought we were keeping this thing with you and the Delacroix chick quiet,” he says, punching my side.

“We are, so shut your face, dickhole,” I say, shrugging him off. Some girls already seated give us a dirty look when he knocks into their table, and he makes a big deal of apologizing and flirting until they’re batting their eyes and giving him their numbers. I leave him to it and move up in line.

The room is set up with a center aisle running between long rows of rectangular tables, with the food lines along the walls, leading into the kitchen where we grab our trays. The student population is divided roughly into six groups that form the social pyramid—jocks, preps, nerds, alt kids, gangsters, and losers—with smaller cliques within each group. There’s a little blending between adjacent groups, so someone could be a preppy jock, or a nerdy prep, but that’s about all the social climbing allowed by the established structure.

Rob cuts in line when he finds me, and Billy joins us again but keeps his mouth shut. We goof around to fend off boredom until we get our food and head to our table, where the football team holds court like royalty. Rob sits on my left, and Maddox sits on my right. Most of us are creatures of habit and sit in the same spot every day, or at least the same table. If there aren’t enough chairs, we just grab some from other tables and work them in like puzzle pieces, not worrying about untangling chair legs until later.

Billy’s a free agent who likes to spread the love, so he sits somewhere different every day, and today he heads over to sit with his cousin and the other girls with bad reputations in the losers’ section. Not many jocks would choose to sit with the Slut Club, though they might slum it with one of the girls if they need to wet their dicks without too much effort, but Billy doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks.

“I heard what happened in the library yesterday,” Tommy says, dropping into the seat across from me. “Guess you’re not keeping Viv on the DL anymore?”

He and Randy laugh as Robert’s brows draw low. “What’re they talking about?”

“Nothing,” I assure him. “She just got into it with her ex, and I looked out for her.”

“Yeah,” Keisha says, snorting as she opens a mayo packet and drizzles it over her fries. “That’s what happened.”

Before Robert can figure out if he needs to kick my ass, there’s a murmur of excitement as shit starts to go down elsewhere. I sit with my back to the wall, which means I have a view of the room, but it takes me a minute to find the commotion. With as many different groups as there are in the school, you’d think they’d have beef each other, but most of the drama is in-fighting between cliques within one of the six bigger sections.

My table includes the football team and their girls and a few cheerleaders hoping to tame the players. If we get into it with anyone else, it’s the next table, where the basketball team and their girls sit. We never scuffle with the street crews who sit in a section of gangster tables, but they get into it with each other.

Today, it’s not any of the usual suspects, though. The drama is over near the wall, where the academic nerds sit. My eyes immediately fall on Vivienne, who’s standing with her sack lunch in her hand. Chiclet stands in front of her, gesturing to the one empty seat at their table.

It takes everyone else a minute longer to find the source of the commotion. As far as I know, the nerds have never gotten into any public drama, and if they have feuds between the mathletes and debate team and student council or whatever cliques they have within the larger nerd population, it doesn’t reach my circle any more than conflict between the ambitious, academic nerds and the kind of nerds who stay up all night playing video games, forget to shower or put on deodorant, and come to school wearing the same high-water jeans and Superman T-shirts every day. In truth, most people don’t care about other groups’ conflicts, but a fight is a fight.

That shit’s good entertainment, no matter who you are.

I watch Vivienne’s lips moving, but I can’t hear her over the chatter in the room. Before I know what I’m doing, I shush my table out loud. A few others around the room are doing the same, and pretty soon, the room’s quiet enough for everyone to hear.

As soon as I overhear them, I wish I hadn’t brought more attention to it.

“Are you crazy?” Chiclet demands. “I told you, you can’t sit with us. You’re his ex.”

“This is my table,” Viv says. “Where am I supposed to sit?”

“I don’t know, why don’t you sit over there with your brother?” Chiclet says. “Since you’re apparently sleeping with Sebastian Swift now. Shouldn’t you be sitting with him?”

My eyes meet Viv’s, and I shrug and give her a smirk. She could have pretended we were dating, but she chose to take the high road. I never take the high road, so she’s all by her lonesome up there.

“We’re not together,” she mumbles, so quiet I have to strain to hear.

“What?” Robert demands beside me, and I turn to see him glaring at me with a murderous expression. That’s the Delacroix I should have been watching, not Vivienne. Apparently my instinct for self-preservation goes right out the window when a girl that fine is within sight.

“Or hey, maybe you can sit over there with the Slut Club,” Chiclet says, pointing to the table where Lexi and her friends sit. “Since you’re apparently such a pro.”

Everyone is turning from me to the nerds to the skanks, and a murmur of excitement goes up. Yep, I definitely shouldn’t have let my curiosity get the better of me and made sure my table could hear them. I’m officially as dumb as Viv thinks I am. Also officially dead now that Rob thinks I nailed his sister, but hey, I had a good run. Eighteen years isn’t nothing.

“Come on, dude,” I say, shoving back from the table. “You know me. That chick’s lying.”

My chair leg catches on Maddox’s, and he grunts as he’s pushed backwards from the table. But he stands to let me up before Robert can knock my teeth in. I jump up, and Rob grabs the front of my shirt.

“What did I fucking tell you?” he demands.

“It’s not like that,” I say, holding both his arms and giving him a warning look. “Come on, let’s not do this in front of the whole room.”

“I can’t think of a better time to do it,” he snarls, his face twisted with rage.

The whole room is buzzing now, everyone waiting for a real fight to break out.

“I didn’t fuck your sister,” I say quietly, so only he can hear me over the din. “I just said it to mess with Nerd Boy Chad over there.”

“Why the fuck would you make that up?” he asks, shaking me.

I hold up both hands, refusing to fight back. “Dude, you’re my best friend. I’d never do that to you. That loser over there—who you apparently gave the stamp of approval—was trying to humiliate Viv. I was just looking out for her, the same way you’d look out for Mel if you saw someone giving her shit. You can ask her.”

Robert’s nostrils flare, and he works his jaw back and forth. “What did you do?”

“I just told them we hooked up at the party, to help her save face, since apparently Chad was cheating on her. You know where I was the other night. I was at the party with you, man. You saw her leave, and you know I stayed.”

He shoves me away from him at last, releasing my shirt. A few “boos” ring out in the room, and some ketchup packets fly our way when we fail to deliver the anticipated brawl. Not that Robert Ambrose Delacroix IV would ever get his hands dirty in a brawl. He’s a hot head and he’ll tussle a little, but at his core, he’s as much a blueblood as Vivienne. They’re not the kind of family that fights with fists.

While our attention was on each other, Vivienne apparently won her squabble with Chiclet, as she’s now sitting at her usual table with the rest of the nerd herd. Rob is still watching me with suspicion, so I ignore his sister for the rest of lunch and go on as usual. She had her chance with me, after all. She wasn’t interested.

And now that she’s established she’s not leaving her group just because she got dumped, I can concentrate on figuring out how to come up with five hundred dollars in the next month. There’s no way I can go through with the stupid bet now.

I can’t do that to Rob, can’t ruin two years of friendship and shit all over the bro code. He’s my boy, someone who’s been there for me on the field and off. I’m not going to fuck that up because I can’t keep my dick in my pants, no matter how tempting it is. I’ll just have to find some other odd jobs around town that pay ridiculous amounts of cash in a short period of time.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a big market for gigolos in Faulkner.

I’m more fucked than if there were, though.

I’m on my way to class after lunch when Vivienne appears out of nowhere and grabs my arm. “Come here,” she says, dragging me toward the library.

“If you’re going to have your way with me, we can just do it in a bathroom stall like regular people,” I say as she pushes open the door. Her face is set in determination as she drags me past the checkout desk and into the stacks. When we reach the back of the library, she passes the tables where we sit during tutoring and pulls me into the AV room beyond them.

“Oh, Ms. Delacroix, we can’t keep meeting like this,” I say, grinning down at her as she closes the door.

“Let’s do it,” she says firmly.

“Right now?” I ask, looking around the tiny room cramped with rectangular tables, a computer on each one. Shelves line two walls, each one crammed with overhead projectors, extension cords, boxes of floppy disks, VHS tapes, and other random school crap I can barely see past the TV carts that teachers check out to show movies when they’re too hungover to teach class that day.

“What?” Vivienne snaps.

“I mean, I’m no romantic, but even I’ve never fucked a girl in storage room. But hey, it looks like a nerd paradise with all these computers, so if you’re into it, I’m down.”

I reach for the bottom edge of my t-shirt, peeling it up over my head. When I drop it to the floor, Vivienne gulps, her eyes widening as she stares at me with naked lust.

Damn, if she’s going to make it this easy, maybe I’ll go ahead with the bet after all. Easy money is the best kind of money, and it’s not like I’m being forced to fuck a zero. She’s a ten on a bad day, and the desire in her eyes is already making me hard. The money’s just a bonus.

I step towards her, picturing her long legs wrapped around my hips while I hold her ass and pound into her snug little cunt. I can almost hear her moaning my name when I pin her up against the door and make her cum the way I bet that carrot top little nerd never did.

She glowers at me. “I’m not sleeping with you. This is a business arrangement.”

“So let’s get down to business,” I say, running my hand down over my eight-pack abs. “You get to pretend to be my girlfriend, and I get to fuck you.”

“Uh, no,” she says, holding up a hand. “None of that. Just two enemies agreeing to work together for the common good.”

“Which is?”

“Destroying the evil villain and the bitch who sat on his lap and made out with him for the entire lunch period to make me as uncomfortable as possible.”

“Damn.”

“I know,” she says, crossing her arms. “She’s the devil.”

“Are you sure you’re not the devil?”

“I’m a Delacroix,” she says, a little smirk playing with her pink lips. “That’s worse.”

“Good to know.”

“This is your fault,” Vivienne reminds me, jabbing a finger toward me. “Plus, you offered.”

“Okay, okay,” I say, hooking my thumb over my belt buckle. “To make it official, we should probably seal it with a fuck.”

She glares, her pretty lips all smushed together in a way that makes me want to kiss them until she can’t breathe. “Is this a joke to you? Because I can find someone else to pretend to be my boyfriend.”

I scoff at that. “Oh yeah? Who?”

“Jerome,” she mutters.

“That puppy dog who follows you around?” I ask, laughing. “No, no. See, fucking your ex’s best friend is amateur level.”

“What do you mean?” she demands, and I know the girl’s already thought about it. That realization makes me want to go apeshit and break every fucking computer in the room. It was bad enough when she was just thinking about her boyfriend. I brush away the caveman urge and smile instead.

“You poor little nerd,” I say, reaching out and pulling her into my arms. “You so desperately need me.”

Her hands settle onto my bare skin, and I swear, I see fucking stars from the contact.

“Get off me,” she says, shoving me away. Her cheeks are flushed, but I can’t blame the girl for getting hot. She was just pressed up against Sebastian Swift’s bare chest. If I’m affected, she damn sure better be.

I sigh and park my ass on the edge of a table, crossing my arms and giving her a minute to eye-grope my pecs and arms before I explain. “If you fuck his friend, what happens afterwards?”

“I don’t know,” she mutters. “Chaz will bug out?”

I shake my head. “You’re killing me, Smalls.”

“What?”

“Think, Nerd Girl. Sleep with his friend, and they’ll laugh at you together. You think this kid won’t tell Nerd Boy Chad about you the second it’s over? They’ll go back to being friends, you’ll get a reputation, and they’ll kick you out of the group. Fucking his enemy—that’s next level villainy.”

“How do you know so much about this?” she asks, narrowing her eyes at me.

“What can I say, I’m a dating expert.”

She feigns shock. “You’ve loved someone other than yourself?”

“Who said anything about love?”

“Okay, seriously,” she says, crossing her arms to mirror my pose. “How does this work? And before you say something all… Sebastian… I’m not sleeping with you, so don’t make a joke that I don’t know how sex works.”

“We’ll see.”

“See what?” she demands. “If Chaz was right and I suck in bed?”

“Hey, I didn’t say it,” I protest, holding up both hands.

“But you believe him, don’t you?”

I pat my thigh with my fingers. “Only one way to find out.”

“For the hundredth time, we’re not fucking,” she says, grinding her teeth in irritation.

I just smirk at her. “Sure, we’re not.”

“You’re the most infuriating man I’ve ever met,” she huffs.

“And yet, here you are, begging to spend more time with me.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“If you say so.”

She takes a breath and blows it out, then seems to collect herself. “So, let’s establish a set of ground rules. We have to convince people we’re dating, which means you have to act like a boyfriend, not a manwhore. How about you walk me to all my classes, except when you have to run across campus to the football field of course. I’ll sit with you at lunch. We need to send each other at least one note per day. And you can carry my books.”

I snort. “What do you think this is, 1950? It has to be believable. No one would buy that shit from me. They’ll know something’s up.”

One sentence from me, and she’s back to giving me her withering glare. “Because you’d never be a gentleman?”

“No,” I say, chuckling. “I’m not going to turn into a different person just because I have a girlfriend.”

“Well, you can’t go around collecting girls’ numbers for your little black book.”

“Wait, I have to give up sex? Then you better rethink that whole not-fucking part of the arrangement.”

She sighs. “You can still sleep with girls. Just keep it on the downlow.”

I rub my chin. “So now I’m a cheater?”

“It’s not like you’ve ever been faithful before,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“Hey, that’s not fair. I’ve never cheated on anyone.”

“Because you’ve never had a real girlfriend.”

“I’ve had a girlfriend,” I protest. “Lots of them, actually.”

“Of course you have,” she says. “Anyway, you can do your thing, just keep it between you and her. I’ll come to all your football games and hang out with the other guys’ girlfriends.”

“You gonna paint my number on your cheek?” The thought of a girl like her with my jersey number on her face, standing at the game and cheering for me, is intriguing. But there’s still the issue of her brother.

“Sure,” she says. “And I’ll decorate your locker on game days, just like the other girls.”

“With sexy pictures?”

She swallows and narrows her eyes. “Is that what they do?”

“Yep,” I say.

“Are you messing with me?”

“If you don’t believe me, I’ve got a stack of pictures at home I’ve collected over the years.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Gross.”

“Trust me, not a single one of them is gross.”

“I think I’d rather pretend to like Jerome than be a girl on your stack.”

“Aww, are you jealous?” I ask. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep yours on the top of the pile.”

“Not helping.”

“Hey, would you rather I kept them in my locker and traded them like baseball cards? Because that’s what a lot of the guys do.”

She holds up a hand. “I don’t need to know.”

“So, you gonna do it or what?” I ask. “Because from where I’m sitting, you’re getting a whole lot out of this, and I’m not sure what I’m getting, except used. I like to have fun and yeah, most of my relationships haven’t lasted longer than a few months, but that doesn’t mean I’m some escort you can just rent out like a waiter whenever you need me for your next event. If we’re not fucking, what’s in it for me?”

I wait for her back down, but she nods, a determined fire in her eyes that makes me want to see exactly how she’ll rise to the challenge. “You’re right,” she says. “I’m sorry. I was bugging about Chaz, and you’d already offered… I don’t want you to feel used, though. I want it to be fair. I’ll put a few pictures in, but I’m not promising full frontal nudity, and you cannot share them with anyone. You have to burn them when we ‘break up’ too.”

“Hm, not your best offer, but I accept for now.”

“Okay,” she says, sounding relieved. “So that’s all the girlfriend stuff I have to do. But we can’t have it look like I’m just chasing after you. So what are you going to do, besides letting me use your social status to make Chaz think I can do better than him, and apparently look at scantily clad pictures of me?”

“I could come to your… I don’t know. Quiz bowls? Mathlete meets? Debate… Debates?”

“It’s a debate tournament,” she says. “And I’m not in mathletes. That’s my weak subject.”

“Aren’t you afraid of telling me your weaknesses? I might exploit them for my own gain.”

“I think I’ll survive,” she says, rolling her eyes. “And no one comes to those things except our parents. But I also play violin. You could come to my recital next month.”

“Princess, you underestimate me,” I say, swiping my t-shirt off the floor and turning it right-side out. “If you really want that dweeb back, I can get it done in under a week. But there’s one more thing I’m going to need from you if we’re doing this.”

“If you say sex, I swear I’ll scream.”

“As tempting as that is, I’d rather hear you scream during sex,” I say, dragging my t-shirt over my head and pushing my arms through the sleeves. “But no. We can fake this thing for the whole school, but I’m not losing my best friend for you. Which means we’re going to have to let Rob in on it.”

“Deal,” she says, holding out her hand. As I take her small, delicate hand in my rough one, I wonder if I’m even dumber than she thinks I am, because I just keep getting myself in deeper and deeper. If this blows up in our faces, Viv looks like a fool. But I could lose so much more—not just Viv, but my best friend, the respect of all the friends we’re about to lie to… Hell, if I’m not careful and I have to pay that five hundred, I could lose our fucking house.

How’s that for being man of the house, Dad?