Hard to Pretend (Hard to Love #2)

4. Chris

4

M y palms were sweating as I waited at a stop light on the way to the address Seb gave me. What was I thinking? This was an incredibly bad idea. I knew it, and I was pretty sure that he knew it too. Pretending to date someone I’d hooked up with one time was an insane idea.

Agreeing to it made me question his sanity a little too.

It had been one thing, pretending for five minutes at a coffee shop. It had been a spur of the moment flash of idiocy. It hadn’t been anything that could or should have had real life consequences. Which, in hindsight, was a naive thought. After all, I wasn’t pretending for a stranger. I was pretending for one of my best friends. Of course Mason would tell our other friends, and they would want to meet my mystery man.

I sighed as the light turned green.

I could call and cancel. I could tell my friends that we broke up or confess that I’d never been dating this guy in the first place. They might tease me for it, mercilessly, but I wouldn’t have to play pretend. It would be a momentary lapse of judgment. If I kept it up, it would become a deep hole I couldn’t climb out of. I kept driving toward Seb’s.

Maybe I was just hoping that Seb would be the genius to suggest that this was a bad idea and blow me off so that I didn’t have to be the bad guy.

Except that I knew that wasn’t the case either.

I didn’t want to admit to my friends that I’d lied. I didn’t want to face the music, the consequences of my actions.

Besides, it was just one party. One night. I could talk to Seb tonight about how we were going to break up.

I could do this.

I turned up the music and after two songs, I was parked in front of a run down apartment building. The building itself had a few cracks in the bricks on the corner. The fake wood shutters were faded from the sunlight, and the balconies looked weathered with age. The sidewalk leading up to the buildings was cracked, but the grass was neatly kept and the bushes out front were trimmed.

I climbed out of the car and locked it before walking toward the building. Seb’s apartment was on the third floor, up creaking metal stairs. The four doors on his landing all had place mats in front of them. Two of the doors had actual wreaths, and while the paint was peeling on the walls between the doors, it didn’t look as bad as I might have originally thought. I was judging a book by its cover.

I took another deep breath and knocked.

I heard Seb call out and a few moments later, the door opened. He stepped back to let me in, and I got my first glimpse of his apartment. It was a lot better than the exterior made it look. The cream colored walls didn’t have any peeling paint, and there was a faint citrus smell in the air. The hard wood floors weren’t quite polished, but they looked neat and well done. Seb led me to the living room just past the small entry way.

It was small. No, it was cozy. He had an overstuffed cream colored couch with a blanket decorated with lemons draped over the back. There were matching yellow throw pillows and even a little yellow rug underneath a white coffee table. My eyes moved around the rest of the room. A white bookshelf sat against one wall, filled with a few books and a lot of Pop Funko figurines. There were a few framed pictures on the shelf—mostly of Seb with a few other guys. They looked vaguely familiar.

“Do you have a thing for lemons?” I asked, still looking around.

“What?”

“Lemons,” I repeated. “I mean, the blanket, the yellow pillows and carpet, the citrus smell?” What was I even asking? God, this was going to be terrible and not because of him .

“My mom bought me the blanket for Christmas a few years ago,” he explained. “Then when I moved in here, I found the yellow throw pillows at a thrift store. One of my friends, Matt, he bought me the rug because he kept bitching that the wood floors were too cold when he crashed on my couch.” He paused. “And the citrus is a wax melt, because I wanted the place to smell good when you came over.” He bit his bottom lip and looked down at his bare feet.

I laughed. “Well, I’m impressed. You should see my place.” He raised an eyebrow. Right. He had seen my place, and I definitely had not cleaned it before going out to Goliath that night. “Clutter city, if you remember.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” he countered, “and you should see my place when I’m not expecting company. Just don’t open any closets or look under my bed.”

The mention of his bed reminded me of the night we’d spent together, of the way he’d been in my bed. I remembered the way his light brown skin glistened with sweat. I remembered the sounds he made and the easy way he changed positions with nothing more than a light touch.

I had to get my thoughts together. We were here for a purpose. Which was to figure out how we were going to make this fake relationship work. That wasn’t going to done by thinking about his bed or the night we’d spent in mine. It would be done by sitting down and figuring out our story and getting to know one another so that if one of my friends asked us questions, we weren’t caught in my lie.

“Would you like a drink?” Seb asked. I looked over at him and noticed that he looked nervous. He was rubbing the back of his neck. He didn’t seem like the same guy I’d taken home after the club. He’d been so confident that night.

“I’m good,” I told him. “We should—” I looked over at the couch. “Sit. We should sit.”

He nodded and sat down on the couch. I sat on the opposite end and angled my body toward him. We needed to get started, but suddenly, my tongue felt heavy and dry. Maybe I should have taken him up on that offer of a drink. Maybe I should have just called the whole thing off. Followed my instincts and not shown up, not dove deeper into this lie.

He cleared his throat. “So,” he started. He rubbed the back of his neck again, “we already told your friend how we met, so we should stick with that. We don’t want Jason to contradict us.”

“Mason,” I corrected.

“Mason. Sorry,” he amended. “We also told him how long we were together, so it’d make sense that we don’t know everything about each other.”

“But we should know some things,” I pointed out. “I wouldn’t bring a complete stranger around my friends.”

“Neither would I. Except when they pick me up at a bar. ”

“The guys you were with the night we met?”

“Yeah. We get together every Thursday night. Have since we were kids.”

“That’s pretty impressive. Should I know them yet?”

“Probably not, but you’d have heard stories.”

Seb leaned back on the couch. Just the mention of his friends seemed to relax him. He wasn’t holding his shoulders as tightly as he’d been moments before. I wanted to encourage it, to keep that relaxed version of him present. “Tell me about them?”

“I met Jonas in preschool, and his mom used to watch me on Thursday nights when we were in elementary school,” he explained. “He’s been my best friend for so long that I don’t actually have any memories of a time when he wasn’t my best friend.” I felt a twinge of jealousy at that. I had friends, but nothing like that. “Then we met Holden and Eli in middle school, I think. It might have been fifth grade. I can’t remember really. Matt joined us last, in high school.”

“What are they like?”

“A lot of fun. Jonas can be a big grump sometimes, but he’s also one of the nicest people I know once you get past that. And Matt’s got the biggest heart and one of the coolest heads. He’s really logical. The kind of guy you go to with any problems you have. He’s our rock.” Seb’s eyes were soft as he talked about his friends. There was a love there that I wished I could experience. I loved my friends, but it didn’t seem to come close to the way he loved his. “Holden can be an idiot sometimes, but he also sees through a lot of people’s bullshit. And finally, there’s Eli, who just doesn’t take anyone’s bullshit. Holden and Eli live together and are basically joined at the hip.”

“Have they ever…” I asked, trailing off. I wasn’t sure how to word the question.

What I was asking sparked behind Seb’s eyes and he shook his head. “No,” he told me immediately. “I don’t think it’s like that for them.” He paused for a moment. I could almost see the wheels turning in his head, thoughts forming behind his dark brown eyes and then disappearing. “No, I mean, if it were like that for them, they’d tell us. They’d also already be married the way they are. And neither of them are really shy. If you ever meet them for real—” He stopped himself from continuing. This wasn’t something that would have us meeting his friends in a real enough way that I’d actually be able to observe them together.

This was us gearing up for one night of make believe. Nothing more and nothing less.

A beat passed before Seb spoke, putting our conversation back on track. “What about your friends?”

“You’ve met Mason. We’ve been friends since college. He was my roommate, and we really hit it off. He’s mostly harmless, but he has a big mouth.” Obviously. If he didn’t, then we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with. “Lucille, she’s the birthday girl, and she’s a bit of a control freak, but she’s sweet. Natalie will be there. She’s amazing and really nice. She wants everyone to be happy and bends over backwards to make it happen.”

“Sounds kind of like you,” he observed.

I snorted. I’d never considered myself to be a people pleaser, but I could imagine it from his perspective. We were only in this situation because I was trying to avoid embarrassment, but from his perspective? Maybe it looked like I was trying to make everyone happy.

“Actually, I’m just really non-confrontational,” I admitted, ducking my head a little. “The idea of telling them that I don’t actually have a boyfriend after our show at the coffee shop?”

“I get it. I’d play pretend too.”

A soft bubble of laughter escaped my lips before I continued telling him about my other friends, or at least the ones most likely to be at the party. It wasn’t like he needed a full run down given that he’d be meeting them. When I finished, I tried to think of other questions to get to know him. We went over allergies (none for him, bees for me), favorite food (we both agreed that Pie in the Sky had the best pizza in King’s Bay), and favorite colors. (His was periwinkle, which I thought was so interesting. I’d never heard anyone claim periwinkle as their favorite color. I felt generic telling him my favorite color was green. )

“What’s your favorite quote?” he asked when it was his turn.

I studied him for a moment. It was a weird question, not something that most people would ask in a random conversation. “Why?” It didn’t seem like it’d be useful at the party.

“You can tell a lot about someone by their favorite quote,” he explained.

I nodded. I wasn’t sure what he could tell about me from my favorite quote, but I went with it anyway. It was an easier decision than it probably should have been. “I love myself enough to be who I am.” He looked at me curiously, his head cocked to the side. “Essex Hemphill. He was a poet and activist in DC in the ‘80s. I found his work a few years ago, and that quote stuck with me.” I breathed a deep breath, wondering what he was getting from my favorite quote. Instead of asking, I turned the question back around on him. “What’s yours?”

“Man who stand on toilet is high on pot?” He sounded sheepish. Was he kidding me? My incredulity must have been written all over his face, because he laughed. “I know. It’s nowhere near as deep as yours. I’ve just—Its always made me laugh.”

The confession brought gales of laughter from both of us. We kept going with the question and answer method of getting to know one another for awhile until he yawned. I looked at my phone and saw how late it was getting. “I should head on out, let you get to bed.”

He nodded and stood up from the couch to walk me out.

There was a moment at the door where we both paused, unsure how to move forward with saying goodbye. Did we kiss goodbye? Hug? Shake hands? None of the above?

It turned out to be none of the above. We both looked at each other for another awkward moment, and I slipped away like a coward.

The day after I went to Seb’s was like any other day. Except I kept thinking about the way our eyes lingered at the door. I kept replaying the moment in my mind, playing out different scenarios. Some of them were innocent: a chaste kiss, lips on lips. Other ones heated up and ended up with us repeating the night we’d spent together months ago. I’d never been as distracted by a man who wasn’t physically there as I was by Seb.

Which explained how I didn’t see my brother until he was directly in front of me, waving his hand in front of my face and saying my name obnoxiously.

“What?” I snapped as I pulled myself out of my mental haze .

Joshua, my annoying older brother, looked put out by my tone. “Damn, I just wanted to say hi.” The glimmer in his dark eyes, mirrors of my own, told me that he was planning on doing more than saying hi. “What are you doing?”

I motioned around the grocery store and to the cart in front of me. I thought it was pretty obvious.

“Okay, duh.” Josh laughed that boisterous laugh of his and looked back up at me. “Planning a dinner for your new boyfriend ?”

I was going to murder Mason. It was one thing for him to tell my friends about Seb. I felt bad enough lying to them. It was another thing entirely to tell my brother about my alleged relationship. “No.”

“Good. I’d really like to meet him before you kill him with your attempts at cooking.”

I wanted to pick up a can of ravioli from my cart and throw it at him. “How do you even know about Seb?”

“Mason.” Suspicions confirmed. “He couldn’t shut up about him. Apparently, he’s really hot?”

“He is.” At least that part wasn’t a lie. “But I would like to be able to tell someone myself about my relationship without Mason blabbing it all over town.”

“He thought I already knew. Ripped me a new one for not telling him.”

“Can’t you find your own friends?” I groaned. “Why do you have to be friends with all of my friends? ”

“Because I’m the nicer Singh brother?” he suggested. “Or maybe because people naturally love me.”

I let out a heavy sigh. “Have you told Mom?”

“No.” At least that was something.

“Good. I really don’t want her starting to plan a wedding with a guy I only just started seeing.”

This wasn’t the plan. I wasn’t planning on adding my brother to the list of people I was lying to. Damn it.

This hole kept getting deeper, and instead of climbing out of it, I just took the shovel and made it worse. Josh followed me through the store, asking questions about my relationship. I should have shut it down, but instead I answered them.

All of them.

Maybe I should just chalk it up to good practice for our date.