Worst Faking Idea
SNEAK PEEK! - NORA’S POV
Text conversation with THIRD CHOICE
But if you wanna hook up somet ime , you got my number
Not anymore I don’t. [Middle finger emoji.]
I kick the bathroom door with my spiky heel and then swear a blue streak, because damn, that hurt.
Obviously, I knew the man whose name I didn’t bother to write down last night wasn’t going to be a great solution to my problem, but I figured he’d be an acceptable placeholder.
My friend Hannah and I went out last night on a mission to find me a last-minute fake boyfriend for my mother’s wedding, which is being held here.
Not here in this bathroom, but in my ginger beer brewery—The Ginger Station.
A magical place, which looks even more magical today, with the exposed wooden beams covered in fairy lights and tiny roses.
We set up the special events room for the ceremony, and the reception will be held in the tasting room.
Everything’s ready. Everything except for my date.
Unfortunately, Hannah and I got a little too drunk last night. Much too drunk.
To be honest, I couldn’t pick THIRD CHOICE out of a lineup.
All I know is that choices one and two listened to my looney tunes story and had the sense to bail.
So I’d settled for Unlucky Number Three—until about five seconds ago, when he cancelled on me a considerate hour before my mother’s wedding ceremony.
Even now, Mom’s having her hair done, along with a few of our other relatives. I opted out, since I was hoping to sort out this whole date situation.
I’m not worried about how mom will react to my dateless-ness. My mom’s not one of those mothers who’d shove her daughter down any old aisle. She could give a shit whether I have a boyfriend or not.
But I’m not being histrionic when I say my entire career hinges on me being in a serious relationship—or pretending to be in one.
Yes, I know how that sounds.
It’s also one-hundred-percent true.
My friend and business partner, José, started The Ginger Station together. We’re a ginger beer brewery that distributes to dozens of stores and bars around Western North Carolina. It was our dream, and now it’s our reality.
Unfortunately, he is now engaged to a psychopath.
Pansy can’t stomach the fact that José and I briefly dated. Nothing on heaven and earth could convince her that I no longer have the slightest intellectual curiosity about his dick. She knows I’ve seen it, and that’s enough for her to hate me forever.
A couple of months ago, I poured him a drink after the brewery closed for the night and flat-out asked if he was on his way out.
José had sighed and gripped the edge of the bar, which we’d sanded together years ago. He didn’t need to tell me it was a sign of the nerves squeezing him. I’d known him for a decade. “I don’t know, Nora. It’s hard for Pansy, knowing we spend so much time together.”
“What would make her feel better?” I’d asked tightly, my heart pounding.
I was anxious but also furious that my future was going to be decided by a woman named Pansy who loves Bon Jovi so much she got a tattoo of “livin’ on a prayer” on her inner wrist. Her bad taste in tattoos wasn’t the problem, though—it was that she’d pussy-whipped my best friend into being an echo of himself.
She’d convinced him she was the only thing he should want, and any dream he’d had before should be forgotten.
“Are you honestly asking me that?” he’d asked, raising his eyebrows. “Or is this another bid to pick on her?”
“Honestly asking.”
He rubbed a divot in the wooden bar, his dark hair tumbling over his face. “She’d feel better if you had a boyfriend.”
“So tell her I do. It’s super serious. His name is Marco, and I want fifteen of his babies. We’d need to get a fleet of minivans, but it would be worth it to have the whole block looking like him.”
He scowled at me. “A lot of people would be jealous in her situation, Nora. She’s not being unreasonable.” He scooted his chair back an inch, signaling the conversation was over.
I placed on hand on his arm to keep him from leaving, but he looked down at my hand as if I’d grabbed his junk.
I pulled back, wounded. “We can’t even touch each other anymore?”
A sigh ripped from him. “Look, I’m sorry.”
“We tried being together for two months. Two months out of ten years. This is ridiculous, José.”
I knew he agreed with me. It was there in the lines of his face, which I knew almost as well as my own, but he said, “I can’t tell her the way she feels is ridiculous.”
“So tell her I have a boyfriend,” I insisted, my voice hard. “I’ll find one, so it won’t be a lie.”
He laughed, looking more like himself for a second, but it slipped into a grimace. “I don’t want to force you into dating someone just so—”
“I’ll do it, and hey, maybe he’ll be my soulmate, and I’ll have Pansy to thank. Just don’t ask me to name my kid after her.”
“Nora.”
“Tell her, José,” I said, my voice dangerously close to pleading. “We can’t lose this place. We can’t.”
I don’t have the money to buy him out.
But that wasn’t the only reason I was desperate for him to stay. He’d poured as much of himself into the brewery as I had. And it was working. For either of us to step back now would be unthinkable. I mean, what would he even do?
He’d be…livin’ on a prayer, if you’ll excuse the pun.
“All right,” he said after a moment. “I don’t want to lose this either.”
I knew he wasn’t just talking about the brewery. He was talking about our friendship and our working relationship.
Of course, Pansy had dozens of questions about my new boyfriend.
She wanted to know his name.
Marco.
She was desperately curious about his job.
Computers, but it was classified.
Most of all, she wanted to know when they could meet him.
In a reckless game of kick the can, I said it would happen at my mother’s wedding.
Back then, the wedding had been months in the future, and I’d figured there was plenty of time for me to start dating a man who’d be willing to pretend his name was Marco.
And, no shit, I’d actually met a guy whose name was Marco. I’d half convinced myself I should marry him just to make my life easier, but he’d broken up with me a week ago, saying he’d felt I liked the idea of him better than the reality.
No one could say that wasn’t fair.
I’d shifted to Plan B—find a reckless liar who doesn’t see any harm in playing a part—but my reckless liar had a hangover, and now I’m out of luck.
Unless Pansy is an even bigger dipshit than I thought, she’s going to realize Marco is as fake as an orange tan.
I didn’t get good results the first time, but I kick the bathroom door again.
Yup. Still doesn’t feel good. And this time someone yelps on the other side.
“Is someone out there?” I ask incredulously.
“Uh…yeah,” says a familiar voice. “And we need to talk.”
Suddenly, I know exactly who’s behind that door—
Cormac Peebles, my soon-to-be stepbrother.
Cormac and I went to school together. Elementary, middle, and high school, but it was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
He only said one thing to me from the start of Kindergarten through the first half of senior year—“there’s toilet paper caught on your shoe.
You should probably do something about that.
” That happened in sixth grade, during a particularly bad week for me socially.
Then I accidentally knocked over his science fair project in the second half of senior year, and suddenly he wouldn’t stop talking. He’s still talking about it, as if I was the stumbling block between him and a brilliant science career.
I open the door, already sighing, and am a little caught off-guard when I see him.
He looks pretty good in a collared shirt.
Who knew. He’s been palling around with my friend Briar’s boyfriend, and I guess they’ve been working out together.
His curly, light brown hair is a bit better contained than usual, and his gray eyes perfectly match the color of his dress pants behind his tortoiseshell glasses.
“What’s up, Cormac?” I ask.
He adjusts his glasses and looks away from me.
“Were you looking for me, or did you have a sudden, urgent need for a private bathroom?”
I shouldn’t provoke him, but he’s easily as rude to me as I am to him. It goes without saying that neither of us are pleased we’ll be stitched together permanently through our parents’ marriage.
He gestures to the door leading to the back hallway of The Ginger Station. “There are bathrooms out there.”
“Indeed. This one is attached to my office.”
“Which is why I figured you might be back here. I checked the other office first, but your mom and a few other women are in there, and they have really big hair. Anyway, I’m getting off track.
I was hoping we could…” He rocks on his heels.
“Air our differences. You know, we’re going to have to spend a lot of time together… ”
I rub my forehead, feeling that hangover reassert itself. “Is this really the time to have this discussion? Our parents are getting married in an hour.”
“Forty-five minutes,” he says, unironically.
“Exactly.” My hand drops from my forehead. “Can’t we argue later?”
“I’d prefer it if we don’t argue at all. I might think my dad’s making a mistake, but—”
Fury blasts through me, and I poke a finger into his chest. “Do you seriously think your dad is too good for my mom?” I hiss. “Choose your next words very carefully.”
He frowns and pushes my finger away. “No, of course not. Your mom’s not the problem. I like your mom. I just don’t see any reason for them to make their relationship legally binding.”
“That makes a surprising amount of sense,” I concede. “But I think it’s a little too late for either of us to try to talk them out of it.”
He nods. “Yeah, I tried last night, and he didn’t take it well.”
“What the fuck?” I ask in furious disbelief. “You tried to talk him into leaving her at the altar?”
Cormac laughs. He actually laughs!