Chapter 5
FIVE
REX
Even as I sat and waited for Perry to show up, I wondered if I was really going to do this.
I could come clean to Nigel, but even thinking about telling him that I’d dated his fiancé made my skin crawl.
He’d looked so happy, and I didn’t want to jeopardize that.
I could tell him I broke up with my boyfriend, but I’d rather eat glass than go to his wedding alone.
The more I thought about it, the more I thought that them eloping would save me a lot of stress. They could do a small, intimate ceremony at city hall. Hell, I could fly them to Vegas and they could get married by Elvis and leave me out of it.
The bells above the door jingled, and I looked up to see someone walk in. They were backlit by sunshine and it gave the illusion that they were an angel descending straight from heaven.
It turned out to be Perry, who was right on time and far more gorgeous in person than in his picture.
His dark hair was a bit longer than in the photo, and he brushed it out of his face as he scanned Bennett’s for me.
The brief moment before he spotted me gave me time to look at him.
He had one of those faces with sharp cheekbones and a strong jawline, but still managed to look soft somehow.
Then he saw me and he turned his smile on, and I was a fucking goner. Perry’s face lit up when he smiled, and maybe it was as fake as our relationship, but it still made my heart race.
“You must be Rex. Blue has told me a lot about you.”
“Good things I hope?” I shook Perry’s hand, which was incredibly smooth and warm, and offered him a seat across from me. Ethan Bennett, the owner of the diner, came around with a pot of coffee, filled our cups, and passed over a couple menus.
“Blue absolutely loves his job.” Perry stirred two sugars and a single cream into his coffee.
“I’m glad to hear it.” I took a sip of my coffee to try and cover for the fact that I didn’t know exactly what to say or where to begin. How did one go about arranging a fake boyfriend? This was uncharted territory.
“So, I hear you have a wedding coming up.”
“Not mine, obviously.” Open mouth, insert foot.
Why did Perry have to be so fucking good looking?
There was no way I was in his league. He was dressed in jeans that were torn in an expensive way, not a worked them to death kind of way, and a shirt that looked as soft as butter.
Two-thirds of my wardrobe were scrubs. Back when I first opened my practice, I’d tried to dress normally, but there were only so many shirts I’d been willing to sacrifice after being covered in various fluids.
Scrubs were comfortable and easily replaced.
“Might make it a bit awkward if you were looking for a boyfriend to take to your wedding.” Perry’s grin was impish, like he was genuinely pleased that I was flustered.
“I’ve been trying to come up with alternative solutions all morning and short of faking my death and moving to Portugal, this seems like the next best thing.”
Ethan returned and took our orders. An omelet for me and Perry ordered the waffle stack. We’d agreed to meet for breakfast because it sounded more relaxed than a lunch or dinner date. Plus, it wasn’t really a date so much as a negotiation.
“I’m glad to know that I rate just above moving to Portugal.”
His smile let me know he wasn’t offended by my remarks, so I leaned in, getting a little more comfortable with him as each moment passed.
“You do, but only just. Portugal still isn’t off the table completely.”
“Yeah, but then you’d have to move your practice, and Blue wouldn’t have a job. He’d be very sad.”
“Okay, then I guess there will be no Portugal.”
Perry grinned like he’d won something. “Looks like you’re stuck with me.”
“I don’t think stuck is the right word.”
Perry glanced down at his coffee, trying to school his expression and hide his smile from me.
“So why do you need a fake boyfriend? I know what Blue told me, but I want to hear it from you.”
“My baby brother is getting married, and he doesn’t know that I used to date his fiancé.
It was never serious between us, and he broke up with me after seven or eight months.
I never saw him again until he showed up on Nigel’s arm the other day.
And I might have panicked. I’m not hung up on my ex, but it seemed important at the time, faced with this man from my past, that I not be single. ”
“So you did what any normal person would do.”
I nodded in agreement. “I lied through my teeth. Invented a boyfriend, said I’d bring him to the wedding.
Nigel looked pleased, and it’s not that I need the approval of my baby brother, but I don’t want to disappoint him.
And I don’t want to have to tell him that my fake boyfriend broke up with me just days before his wedding.
That feels like the kind of pathetic that I can’t subscribe to. ”
“Well, Blue came to the right man because I’d love to be your fake boyfriend, but I have conditions.”
“Anything.”
“First, when’s the wedding?”
“It’s in three months.”
Perry let out a low whistle. “That gives us approximately twelve weeks to pull this off. We’ll need to be convincing. I can’t just show up in twelve weeks and hang off your arm all night. People will talk, ask questions, we need time to coordinate our stories.”
“It almost sounds like you’ve done this before.”
“I plead the fifth.”
Our breakfast arrived before Perry could say anything else, and we both tucked into our food, happy to sit in silence and let our conversation rest while we ate a little and got our bearings.
“Let’s talk about those conditions.”
“Of course.”
“I want to go on dates.”
I lifted my gaze and looked at Perry. His eyes were down and focused on his waffles like cutting them was a surgical procedure instead of breakfast.
“Dates?”
“Yes, dates. At least one a week. We need to get to know each other, to get comfortable with each other. We’ll need stories to tell people who might ask.
We have to craft a familiarity. We’ll have to do things like hold hands and kiss or dance.
We’ll have to move like a couple, instead of a couple of strangers. ”
“What kind of dates?”
Perry shrugged. “Dinner. Movies. Museums. There’s a new cat cafe we can check out. Now that I have Gumball, I’m at less of a risk of adopting the whole cafe.”
“Gumball?”
Perry’s eyes lit up and he pulled his phone out. “He’s my cat.” He opened his phone and showed me a picture of a long-haired black cat. He had his mouth hanging open and his tongue was sticking out. Gumball’s stare was vacant, like the lights were on, but nobody was home.
“He’s perfect. Look at him. Why is his name Gumball?”
“Because his brain is as smooth as a gumball.” Perry swiped to another photo.
In this one, he was sprawled out on his back with his legs in the air.
“He was raised by dogs, and he thinks he is one sometimes. He even pants like a dog. At first, it freaked me out. I was terrified that there was something wrong with him, but three hundred dollars later, the vet’s best guess was that he grew up with dogs and learned to pant from them. ”
Perry tucked his phone away. “I showed you mine, now you show me yours.”
I pulled my phone out and opened it to the picture album. “The dog is Danish and the cats are Crash and Cookie.”
“Only three pets? I thought, you know, you being a vet and all, that you’d have a hell of a lot more.”
“Trust me, it’s hard to resist. Sometimes I’ll foster an animal while I try to get it a new home or get it placed in a rescue somewhere. Mostly, I try to leave the animals at work, but every so often my work comes home with me.”
“What was the strangest animal you ever almost kept?”
“A potbellied pig. The owners were unaware of how big pigs get and how smart they are. They were ill-equipped to handle him. I didn’t want to leave him in the kennels at work because not only are they not designed for pigs, but the noise bothered him.
Piggles wasn’t a fan of dogs, which they discovered after they got a new puppy.
He was tied to a fence post outside the office before we opened. ”
“How long did you have him?”
“Three very interesting days before I found a farm to take him.”
“A real farm or a euphemism for farm? Did you put Piggles in the freezer?”
“No, that little piggy did not go to market. There was also the parrot that I took for a week while I waited for the owner’s son to come collect him. Animal control had found him in the home with his deceased owner and they didn’t know what to do with a parrot, so they brought him to me.”
“Aren’t there, like, rescues and organizations for stuff like that?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, but most of the time the animals need at least a basic eval first. It doesn’t happen often where I get stuck with a strange houseguest, so I don’t mind. Some of my exes minded.”
“That’s dumb. I’d be stoked if my boyfriend brought home a pig and was like this is Stanley, he’s our son now.”
“Stanley?”
Perry looked at me and lifted one of his well-sculpted eyebrows. “Piggles?”
“Hey, I didn’t name him. He came with a note surrendering ownership of Piggles to the vet clinic.”
The more I talked to Perry, the more confident I became that I could do this. I could totally pretend to be Perry’s boyfriend. He was good company, compassionate, funny, and easy on the eyes.
“So, a date a week.”
“Minimum.”
“And some mild PDA for practice.”
Perry nodded. “That’s the idea. If we don’t get used to each other, we’ll look weird and awkward at the wedding, and they’ll either discover our lie or start asking uncomfortable questions.”
“I can do a date a week,” I told him.
He leaned closer, his brow furrowing. “Before we take this further, I have to know if you’re okay with what I do? Blue did tell you, right?”
I nodded. “I know what you do. I also know what Blue does. It’s not a secret, and it never has been. And for the record, even if we were dating for real, it still wouldn’t be a problem.”
Perry’s eyebrows climbed into his hairline. “Really?”
“I know you don’t have a reason to believe me, but it doesn’t bother me.”
“What if we were really boyfriends? Would me sleeping with other men bother you then?”
“In a word, no. If you’re having sex with them at work, in a controlled environment where it’s clearly work, then no. Now if you were sneaking around trying to hide things and keeping secrets, then yes. Because the first scenario is work and the second is cheating.”
He leaned back in his seat and narrowed his eyes at me. “It sounds almost too good to be true, you know. A man modern enough to have a porn star for a boyfriend who is cool with the part about him having sex with other men.”
“In college, I was in a throuple. It didn’t work out for a lot of reasons, but we had a lot of talks about jealousy, and I learned a lot about myself through that experience.”
He whistled. “I bet. What did you learn?” Perry asked, hanging off my every word.
“Well, for starters, I learned what kinds of things I’m okay with in a relationship.”
“And that’s your partner having sex with other people?”
“If I know about it, yeah. If it’s something previously discussed and agreed on, sure. If it’s some kind of clandestine thing that is kept from me, no.”
“Don’t you get jealous?”
“Yeah, but everyone gets jealous. That doesn’t mean that I have to act like a fool because of it.”
Perry leaned forward, putting his chin on the palm of his hand, and gave me a dreamy smile. “I have an amazing boyfriend.”
“So do I,” I said, returning the compliment. I smiled at him and tried to hide the fact that I liked it far too much when he said that.