Hard to Pretend (Hard to Love #2)

5. Seb

5

I was overthinking this decision. It wasn’t a real date, and I shouldn’t be obsessing over what I was going to wear like it was. But even if it wasn’t a real date, I still wanted to look good. I didn’t want my outfit to be the thing that told Chris’s friends that this wasn’t real. If nothing else, I could use this as a dress rehearsal for when I finally did find that something real I craved.

“You realize you have three green button downs?” Holden asked as I threw another shirt option on the bed. “I mean, you’ve tossed out five shirts as options, and three of them are green button downs.”

I looked at my bed and the small hill of clothing that was growing there. He was right. There were three almost identical green button downs, mere shades of difference separating them. “Should I take that as a sign?”

“And just put on a green button down instead of obsessing about what you’re going to wear out for your date with your fake boyfriend?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah,” I clarified.

Holden nodded his head, an amused grin on his lips. “Yeah,” he said, “and then you should calm the fuck down. I mean this is a one time fake date, right?” He paused. “Two time fake date. Since you played pretend at the coffee shop already.”

“That was an impromptu performance,” I countered. “It wasn’t a date. It was saving a…” I didn’t know what to call Chris. I couldn’t say friend , because we weren’t friends. We were two guys who had slept together once and then ran into one another months later. We could become friends. After the other night when we stayed up too late talking on my couch, we could easily become friends. Maybe we would, after all of this. Maybe I could just consider him that now, for the sake of having a label.

The word wouldn’t form on my tongue, and the sentence hung incomplete in the air between us.

“A what?” Holden prompted.

“I have no idea.”

“You realize this is going to be a disaster, right?” Holden asked.

“You don’t know that.”

Holden sat down on the edge of my bed, pushing the shirts all to the middle before holding up one of the green shirts and offering it to me. “Wear that one and stop obsessing,” he ordered. He picked up another green shirt and began toying with one of its small buttons. He looked deep in thought, which was not his default setting by a long shot. I waited for him to say whatever it was that was on his mind. “Okay, so I do know that this is going to end in disaster. Think about every movie or book that does the fake dating thing.”

“Those aren’t real.”

“Because real people don’t pretend to date someone.” Holden toyed with the button for another moment. “Real people would just tell their friends that they’re okay being single or that they haven’t met the right person, and if they did the fake dating thing, then what does it say about what they think about their friends?” He paused again. I opened my mouth to answer, but he cut me off. “It says that the friendship isn’t as strong as they think, because I couldn’t imagine lying to you guys about dating or not dating someone. We all tell each other everything.”

Not quite true, but I understood where he was coming from. I understood his hesitation and concern about what Chris was doing. “Not every friendship is like ours though,” I pointed out after weighing his words. “And we don’t know how long they’ve been up his ass before he got annoyed, saw someone he kind of knew, and decided to take the chance. ”

“And that’d be okay for a one time thing, but I mean now you’re going on an actual date. You’re meeting his friends and acting like you’re in a relationship with him. And then what? You’re going to break his heart and these people are going to hate you based on a lie that someone else decided to tell their friends? That one of their friends decided to tell them?”

“We’re not going to have a dramatic breakup. It’s going to be amicable. It just didn’t work out.”

“And at least one of his friends will kind of hate you for it.”

“None of us hate any of Matt’s exes for things not working out,” I pointed out.

Holden shook his head. “Actually, Eli kind of hates Lucas for taking that job in Texas and breaking Matt’s heart.”

“Lucas and Matt were together for three years, not a few weeks or months or—”

“You don’t even remember how long you’ve been with Chris?”

I groaned. That was something we’d talked about, and I’d completely blanked on it already. Maybe we’d talked about a few too many things that night. We’d made the lie too complex and now the more important details were slipping away.

I blamed Chris. He had been too easy to talk to.

“You really don’t remember how long you’re supposed to have been with him, do you?” Holden laughed. “Like I said, this is going to be a disaster. ”

“You sound like Eli.”

“Eli would have a point.” Holden stuck his tongue out at me.

I grabbed a shirt from my closet and threw it at him before saying fuck it and putting on the green button down Holden had handed me. He might not be right about this thing crashing and burning, but he was right about me pointlessly obsessing over this whole situation.

Holden, thankfully, dropped it while I got dressed. Instead of telling me all the other thoughts he had about my arrangement with Chris, he regaled me with tales of some guy he’d hooked up with the weekend before. He’d mentioned him over text, but I hadn’t gotten all the details. (Maybe Chris’s friends were onto something by not telling each other everything, because about five minutes in, I remembered that Holden had a bad habit of oversharing.)

Holden and I exchanged a few more stories about memorable hookups after that. I thought about telling him about my hookup with Chris, some of the nitty gritty details that had escaped my initial retelling, parts that I’d spent too long replaying since running into him at the coffee shop, but decided against it.

It turned out to be both a good and bad thing, because Chris arrived a few minutes into Holden’s next story. Luckily, he was only talking about his nephew’s latest attempts to learn to ride a bike without training wheels. I could only imagine what Chris would’ve said if he’d walked in while Holden was talking about one of his more colorful hookups.

He’d probably run screaming after realizing that my friends were, in fact, crazy.

I let Chris in and reintroduced him to Holden.

“You look familiar,” Holden muttered, staring at him with narrowed eyes and a cocked head.

Which was why it may have been a bad thing that I hadn’t opted to tell the Chris story to Holden.

“We’ve met before,” Chris told him.

The studious look on Holden’s face transformed to confusion. “When did we—” He looked at me, raising an eyebrow. I could practically hear the question in his head, asking if one of us had slept with him.

“You guys met at Goliath. About eight ago. Before Jonas and Silas started dating.” I hoped the prompting would help him put the puzzle pieces together. It didn’t. In fact, he looked more confused than he had before. “You guys met him before I left with him.”

“Oh.” Holden blinked. “Wait, you’re fake dating a guy that you slept with? I mean I guess that makes sense how he knows you and you don’t have to pretend to know what the sex is like, but remember what I said earlier? Double it. Triple it.”

“Okay, I think it’s time for you to go so Chris and I can get to our party,” I grumbled, practically yanking his arm off as I pulled him to his feet and off my couch. I did not need him telling Chris how much he thought this was going to crash, burn, and end in apocalyptic disaster. Chris already knew this was a bad idea. He didn’t need my idiot best friend to point it out.

We followed Holden out of the apartment and said goodbye at the door. He went one way up the sidewalk to his car and we went the other way to the parking lot where Chris had parked his.

It was time to go to this party and hope Holden wasn’t right.

“Okay, quick refresher,” I requested as we parked in front of Chris’s friends’ house. “We’ve been dating a few weeks right?”

“About a month,” he confirmed. Okay, so I was right. A month was basically a few weeks. I took a deep breath, and he reached over the center console to squeeze my arm. “I know this was my idea, but if you want to back out I can say that you got sick last minute. Food poisoning or something.”

“We’re already here.” It would be pointless to leave now. Any of his friends could have looked out the window and saw us already there. It was too late for cold feet, even if they did feel like icicles.

“We’ll make this as painless as we can, right?”

“And then we’ll break up in another week or two and pretend we never did this.”

And maybe we’d find some way to be friends after all of that. We could be those exes that managed to stay friends after a failed relationship, especially since our breakup would be amicable, mutual, and most importantly, fake.

We got out of the car and walked to front door. Chris didn’t bother knocking. He just took my hand and walked inside.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting from a birthday party, but it wasn’t a small group—mostly couples—sitting around a table with a collection of board games piled up in the center. There was a second folding table pushed against a wall covered in a pale blue table cloth. Snacks sat on top of it with bottles of soda lined up neatly beside some glasses. A blue cooler sat on the floor next to the table.

“You made it!” The words were accompanied by a short redhead turning around, bright smile on her face. She bounced out of her seat and practically ran to hug Chris. Her eyes landed on me over his shoulder and her smile grew bigger. “And you must be the mystery boyfriend!”

Chris laughed as he pulled away from the hug. “This is Seb,” he introduced. “Seb, this is Natalie. Her husband, Ronnie, is sitting over there,” he pointed to a lanky brunette having a heated debate with a blonde guy at the head of the table. “Come on over. I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

“Where’s Mason?” I asked as I looked over to the people at the table. He was the only person I would have recognized, and he was noticeably absent .

“He’s in the kitchen helping Luce finish dinner,” Natalie supplied. “Because you know Luce. She has to cook. Even on her birthday.”

I shot a confused look at Chris. Was this something that I was supposed to know? In all the limited information he’d shared about his friends, he’d not mentioned that the birthday girl had to be cooking all the time?

“Luce is a chef,” he explained. “Mason offered to do the cooking tonight, and she agreed, but I’m guessing she’s not actually relinquishing control.”

“Maybe you could go introduce your boyfriend as a distraction,” Natalie suggested with an impish grin. “You do not know how excited she’s been to meet him. All week. I think she was more surprised than I was that you had a secret boyfriend, Christopher!”

I laughed and looked over at Chris. “If it’ll save the birthday girl from cooking, maybe we should?”

“Give you a chance to say hi to Mason,” he agreed.

I waved awkwardly at the people sitting around the table and followed Chris into the kitchen, my hand still in his. I tried not to feel weird about the way his hand felt in mine or the fact that my hand was starting to sweat. I wondered how long we’d be holding hands. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it; I just wasn’t used to it. Maybe that was it. It felt more intimate than the time we’d hooked up.

Now that I was thinking about it, I wasn’t sure when the last time I actually held anyone’s hand was .

Chris squeezed my hand to pull me out of my thoughts as we entered the kitchen. Mason stood beside a frazzled looking blonde woman, looking distinctly annoyed as she stirred a pot of something. He looked up to see us and his face changed almost immediately. “You guys made it!”

“I told you we’d be here,” Chris replied. He let go of my hand to give his friend a hug.

The frazzled blonde looked up. Her eyes landed on me and her face brightened immediately. “Mase, you were right. He’s…” She looked me up and down, nodding approvingly, still holding the white plastic spoon.

“Right?”

“I’m what?” I asked, because the ghost of the unsaid and unknown adjective hanging in the air kind of terrified me.

“Hot,” the blonde supplied. “Mason said you were hot and that Chris really scored with you.”

I felt my face burn and looked down, trying to hide the flush to my cheeks.

“Can you not embarrass him?” Chris asked, shaking his head. “Or scare him off? Christ, Luce. You’ve been up my ass to get a boyfriend for how long, and now you’re trying to scare the one I’ve found off. Not really productive.”

“If he’s scared off by a little compliment and some light teasing, he’s never going to survive,” Luce shot back. “Now introduce me. ”

She passed the spoon over to Mason, who immediately went back to paying attention to the food on the stove. It smelled like my mom’s spaghetti, and I wondered if that was what we were having. It’d be a good dinner for a group. Mom used to bust it out when I’d have the guys over.

“What are you making?” I asked without preamble.

Maybe because the idea of formal introductions felt weird.

“Spaghetti,” Luce answered. “So you’re Seb?”

We made small talk for a few more minutes before Luce went back to hovering over the stove. Chris and I left the kitchen as soon as Luce and Mason started bickering. “We tried,” he declared as we made our way to the table.

“It worked for a few minutes.” I waited for Chris to find a seat before taking the empty one directly beside him.

I was between Chris and the man he’d motioned to when talking about Natalie’s husband. There were two other people at the table, and Chris introduced them as Mason’s date, Vince, and Luce’s partner, River. We all chatted until Luce and Mason brought food out.

Dinner was a loud affair, and luckily, I didn’t have to talk too much. The little tidbits Chris and I had shared about ourselves had come in handy when questions were directed at us. I noticed that Chris was a master at deflection. He’d direct questions back to his friends or bring them into the conversation, conveniently directing it away from us and the web of lies we were weaving.

After we ate, we played board games. The reason Luce wanted Chris to have a date became apparent pretty quickly. Most of the games had teams, and if he’d come alone, he wouldn’t have had a teammate. We didn’t do great at Pictionary, but we’d somehow kicked ass at Taboo. I usually only kicked ass at Taboo while playing with my friends, and that was solely due to the amount of inside jokes and history we shared.

At the end of the party, I had six new contacts in my phone. It was a little depressing to know that I’d never use them, that the basis of getting to know them was actually a lie, and I’d probably never see them again.