Chapter 10
tino
I kissed Lilah.
I’d been waiting for this moment for three years and even though it didn’t happen exactly as I’d imagined it—I kissed Lilah Turner. I didn’t even remember what happened for the rest of the day because my mind was so preoccupied with that thought, running it on a loop in my brain.
After school, I went to the gym with Bear, Mako, and Crossy.
Theoretically, I was working out like them—or like Bear and Mako at least. Crossy had sat down about twenty minutes ago to “rest between sets” and still hadn’t gotten up—but I wasn’t sure I’d lifted a single weight since getting here.
I was too preoccupied with how on earth I was going to explain to them that I was fake dating Lilah Turner.
From the way Poppy was acting at breakfast this morning, I had to assume Lilah had already told her about our arrangement.
I probably should have done the same with the boys last night but I chickened out.
I already knew how they were going to react and I hadn’t been ready to deal with it last night.
Heck, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to deal with it now, but news was going to spread quickly about us confirming the relationship so it was either tell them or have them confront me about it later.
Mako hit me on the back of the head with a towel as he walked by and I almost jumped out of my skin.
“What’s your deal tonight?” he asked as he grabbed his water bottle. “You’ve been staring at the floor for, like, ten minutes.”
“Thinking,” I mumbled.
“About Lilah?” Crossy asked from my other side, waggling his eyebrows.
I threw the towel back at him. “Can you not?”
He dodged it easily. “You’ve been weird ever since that party last weekend when everyone asked if you were together. You sad it will never be true?”
Mako snorted. “Unless they actually did kiss in the store and are just lying to us all about it because it went badly.”
Well, I probably wasn’t going to get a better opening than that.
I wiped my palms on my shorts, heartbeat picking up. “So… about that.”
All three of them stopped what they were doing—even Bear, who never stopped mid-set for anything—looked over with varying degrees of shock on their faces.
“We did kiss,” I said. Mako’s water bottle slipped from his fingers, hitting the floor with a loud thud and rolling away. He didn’t even glance down. “Not in the store! But today. We kissed. Well—fake kissed.”
“What the heck is a fake kiss?” Crossy asked. “Like you didn’t actually kiss her? Just pretended to?”
“That makes no sense,” Bear said.
“It makes more sense than Lilah agreeing to kiss him,” Mako disagreed.
I grabbed my phone and shoved it in my pocket then headed for the locker room door. I wasn’t going to stand around and listen to them debate whether Lilah would ever be willing to kiss me when I knew what had happened. When they got over this and followed, I would explain the rest of it.
It took them a few minutes to notice—or to care—that I’d left and by the time they came into the locker room, I was already in the shower.
“Don’t think we’re done talking about this, Tino!” Mako yelled as he came in, his voice echoing on the locker room walls.
“I didn’t think we were!” I yelled back. I heard the other showers turn on, which was only going to make it that much harder for them to hear me, but I guess it was nicer to tell them this in a way where I couldn’t see their incredulous expressions. “Lilah and me, we’re… well we’re fake dating!”
Total silence. For at least a full minute, the only sound in the locker room was the running of the showers. And then:
“You’re what?”
The yell came from Crossy, though I was sure that the two other boys were probably thinking the same thing.
Heck, if they’d told me they were in my situation, I would have thought they were out of their minds.
But they hadn’t been looking into Lilah’s eyes as she looked so defeated about everyone’s treatment of her this week.
They didn’t understand how much I wanted to find some solution for her—or what it would mean to me to get to try with her.
As far as she was concerned, this would be a way for me to see how incompatible we were—but I was taking the chance for it to be the opposite.
I wanted her to see just how well we actually could work together.
“We’re pretending to be together,” I repeated, keeping my voice as casual if I was just telling them the weather. I couldn’t deny that this plan was a little crazy but if I pretended I thought it was normal, maybe I could convince them I thought it was.
Mako laughed, loudly and for longer than I thought was necessary. “Oh my god, you actually did it. You actually found a way to date her without her having to like you.”
“That’s not…” I trailed off with a sigh. Was he really so wrong? “Okay, yeah, kind of.”
“Tino,” Bear said in a voice that made it very clear he was done with me, “why would you agree to that?”
“I didn’t agree to it,” I said, maybe a little too haughtily. “I suggested it.”
The howls of laughter from the other stalls told me what the boys thought of that.
But I didn’t want them to somehow convince themselves that Lilah had tricked me into this and I was pathetic enough to go along with it because I loved her too much to give up this chance.
I’d offered the idea up and I would own up to that.
“And I did it,” I said once there was a break in the laughter, “because everyone is already convinced we’re dating anyway. They’ve been harassing us and nobody will listen when we say it’s not true so we figured it would be easier if we just… go along with it.”
The explanation wasn’t met with even more rounds of laughter, which I took as a win. I knew they would probably never really understand since they would never be in this situation, but I hoped I could at least get them to not look at me like I’d completely lost my mind once we stepped out of here.
“Define easier,” Bear said.
“Well, it’s…” I really should have rehearsed my explanation.
I knew they would make fun of me and laugh until they were blue in the face, and I knew that I would have to list millions of reasons on why this made sense.
“It means we don’t have to keep denying it every five seconds, people can stop speculating why we’re hiding it, and everyone will get bored of it within a couple of weeks because it’s less fun to just know that people are dating than to try to prove it. ”
“That is the dumbest plan I’ve ever heard,” Bear said flatly.
“You only got with Poppy because she made a bet about being the first girl you would ever ask on a date,” I snapped back. “I’m not sure you have any right to judge what Lilah and I are doing.”
“Aha!” Mako called. “So you admit it—you think you’ll end up with her at the end of this!”
Yes.
“I didn’t say that!”
“You’ve been trying to get her to say yes for two years, and the only way you finally ‘got’ her is by pretending.”
“You’re trying to make me sound pathetic,” I accused.
“No, you’re doing that all on your own,” he responded.
“Appreciate the support.” I stepped out of the shower and grabbed my clothes from my locker, muttering under my breath about annoying friends.
I shouldn’t have told them about any of this.
I should have just said that Lilah and I actually had started dating today—or better yet, that the kiss in the store had been real and we were too nervous to tell everyone about it until today.
Even once the fake break-up happened, they wouldn’t have made fun of me this much if they thought I was heartbroken.
And if everything went according to my hopes, there wouldn’t even be a break up.
“I’m just saying,” Bear said as he stepped out of his own shower. The other boys followed suit moments later. “You’re going to catch feelings—worse ones than you already have—and she’s going to hate you when it blows up.”
“It’s not going to blow up. We have it all planned out.”
Mako laughed. “That’s what people always say right before something blows up.”
Crossy pointed at me with his water bottle. “You should see your face every time you say her name. You’re already done for, man.”
I groaned. “Can we not turn this into a group therapy session?”
“Fine,” Bear said, crossing his arms and frowning. Not that that was unusual—he was almost always frowning. “Then let’s talk about how dumb it is. What, are you guys gonna hold hands in the hallway? Sit together at lunch like it’s middle school?”
“You don’t need to make it sound so idiotic,” I said.
I hated that my voice was starting to sound petulant, but there was nothing they could say right now that would make me change my mind and they weren’t taking the hint.
“Everyone has been asking about the relationship so we’re just confirming it.
We’ll go on some dates, kiss, do whatever we need to do.
Everyone will be obsessed for a few days and then they’ll get over it. ”
Mako cackled. “This is so good. I can’t wait to see you staring at her like you’re in love while she looks like she’s planning your death.”
“How’s that any different from their daily routine now?” Bear asked.
I didn’t dignify that with a response. I pulled my hoodie on roughly without putting on a shirt underneath, ready to get out of this conversation. The inside of it got wet from my freshly washed hair and felt disgusting but I didn’t take it off.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
Mako rolled his eyes. “Wait two minutes for us, drama queen.”
Crossy looked at me curiously as he pulled his jacket on. “So how’s it supposed to end? You guys have a big fake breakup? You dump her? She dumps you?”
“We didn’t plan the breakup exactly,” I said. “Just that we’ll casually break up. Something that won’t be interesting enough for people to start talking about us again—a mutual decision that it didn’t work out.”
Unless we don’t. I wouldn’t begrudge Lilah if she did want to go through the fake breakup, of course, but there wouldn’t be any part of me that would stop hoping for it to work out anyway.
Mako tossed his towel into the bin. “If it makes you feel any better, I give it two weeks before she gets sick of pretending.”
“How would that make me feel better?”
“Aren’t you a little concerned this is going to prove to her once and for all that she never wants to date you?” Crossy asked.
Without thinking, I said, “Well, that’s her plan. But I don’t see it happening.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Mako said, waving his hands in front of me. “Are you saying you agreed to help her prove that you’re terrible together?” He didn’t wait for my response before he burst out laughing. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Dude,” Crossy said, throwing an arm around my shoulder, “you are so down bad.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“Am not.”
“Say her name without smiling,” he said.
I opened my mouth. Closed it again. “That doesn’t prove anything.”
“It proves everything,” Mako said from the floor.
Bear just muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “hopeless.”
“I’m leaving you all here,” I announced. I walked out without waiting for them, but I’d waited around long enough that they were all ready too and followed me immediately.
“So, what do you even talk about with her when you’re fake dating?” Mako asked. “Like, do you have scripts? Do you practice saying cute stuff in the mirror?”
“Yeah,” Bear chimed in from the next stall. “You gonna start calling her babe now?”
“I swear to God—”
Crossy started singing obnoxiously. “Lilah and Tino sittin’ in a tree—F-A-K-I-N-G—”
“You’re twelve.”
He laughed. “You’re jealous I thought of it first.”
Mako added, “He’s just mad because it’s true!”
“I hate all of you.”
“Love you too, fake boyfriend!” Crossy said in a shrill voice. “Hey, I have an idea! When she fake dumps you, we’ll throw you a fake breakup party. Balloons, cake, the whole thing.”
“Looking forward to it,” I said dryly.
We stepped out of the gym into the cold night air.
The campus was quiet—just the hum of distant lights and the crunch of gravel under our shoes.
For a minute, we just walked, joking and bumping shoulders, the cold biting through our hoodies.
The others started arguing about whether we should grab food, but I barely heard them because my eyes had already snagged on something up in the distance.
Well, more like someone.
“Let’s go to the tuck shop,” I said, cutting off their argument. And then I headed that direction without waiting to see if any of them were following. I didn’t care what they thought of any of this or if they teased me for being so in love with her—I wanted to see my fake girlfriend.