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I squirmed. “Well. Sort of? Yes. And they naturally asked if I’d be attending his sister’s wedding on New Year’s Eve in Vermont as his date?—”
“Naturally.” She snorted.
“And since we were going to, uh, do the fake-boyfriend thing again so soon, we sort of decided to… just… pretend for the month.”
“That’s… unbelievable.” Surprisingly, her lips twitched. “Literally. You mean to tell me that for the past six weeks, you’ve been living a lie?”
I nodded, miserable.
“So when I called you a couple weeks ago and the two of you were cuddled on the sofa doing a jigsaw puzzle and teasing each other like a couple of the old ladies at Grandma Currier’s nursing home… that was fake?”
“Well, I… I mean, yes,” I admitted. “Essentially.”
“Damn.” She shook her head. “And when you told me he called in a favor with a friend to get you reservations at that exclusive dessert restaurant with the gold-flaked, gooey chocolate thing, that was all an act? The photos looked so real.”
I frowned. “I mean, no. Roscoe’s is real. And the cake is very real. And we were really there. But…”
Abby lowered her voice to a horrified whisper and leaned toward me. “And the sex? Are you faking the orgasms too?”
“No!” I exclaimed, shoving her shoulder gently. “Abigail Currier! Obviously, that’s real.”
She grinned, but her grin quickly faded. “It’s pretty obvious that your feelings are real too.”
I sniffed. “How can you tell?”
“Your face is still wet from tears.” She ran a thumb across my cheek. “So you want Oscar, but you’re worried he doesn’t feel the same way, is that it? You think he’s faking how he’s feeling? Because, Hugh, that’s just not?—”
“No! No, it’s the exact opposite.” I fiddled with the edge of the throw blanket on the back of the sofa so I wouldn’t have to meet her eyes. “I think he might feel the same way I do, but he… he won’t let it be real. He won’t admit that it is. He’s keeping that wall up?—”
“His toxic-torture wall?”
I nodded, then swallowed through a throat thickened from deep emotion. “I get it. He’s scared. I am too. But I really thought this was it, Abs. That he was The One. I feel it like… like I feel when I’ve taken the perfect shot. I can feel it in my chest. In my heart. In my bones. So I’ve tried to persevere, you know? To approach him like an animal with a hurt paw and let him know he’s safe with me. To show him, over the last few weeks, how good the two of us could be together if he’d just let me into his heart all the way. I just… I don’t know if I can keep doing that because the clock is ticking down, and if he doesn’t want me enough to try…” I shuddered out a breath, unable to complete the sentence.
Rafa had already mentioned the idea of taking a trip in January. A wild weekend away, he called it. He’d made it sound like it was something he needed—a way to recover from a Grindr hookup gone wrong or something—but I’d recognized the offer for what it was: a way to distract me from my broken heart now that all things Shonda Rhimes were laden with Oscar-related memories.
“I don’t want to pressure him when he’s made it clear he doesn’t want what I want,” I continued bravely. “I want to be a better friend to him than that. And deep down, Abs, I know it’s not supposed to be this hard. If it was right, if Oscar was meant to be my happily ever after, it would be easy.” I tapped the picture of her and Dex. “Like this. Pure happiness, zero struggle. Like a key in a lock.”
Abby laughed. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Hugh. You’re such a damn romantic.”
The words were an ice-water shock after her warm sympathy from a moment ago. I drew myself up straighter in my seat and lifted my chin. “That’s not an insult, you know. Being romantic isn’t a bad thing.”
“Oh, honey, it is when it blinds you to the reality of things. You know what happened three minutes before this photo was taken? I was about to rip our marriage certificate in half—the one we’d just signed—because he didn’t want to stop and take a picture to commemorate our wedding ceremony. And you remember that we had this wedding ceremony at the courthouse in the first place because we had a monster fight a few days before, right? I hit every weak spot the man has with laser accuracy, and if my students ever used the language I used, I’d keep them in detention until graduation. It was brutal. Love isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, and anyone who goes into a relationship expecting it to be is doomed to disappointment.”
“That’s not true. Mom and Dad’s love was easy,” I argued.
Abby sighed. “How do you know? We only saw the good parts. For all we know, they kept the hard bits out of sight. Nobody’s love is easy, Hugh, because people aren’t easy. We’re all a mass of contradictions and imperfections.” She scooted closer, putting a hand on my knee. “That’s the reality of it. Love is choosing your partner even when you’re pissed off at them. Love is giving your partner the chance to do the right thing. Love is compromise and not always getting what you want. Love is learning all the rules to a game you don’t particularly like so you can understand what your partner is yelling at the television about.”
“You make it sound so glamorous,” I grumbled.
Abby laughed. “That’s the thing. It’s not glamorous. Not in the day-to-day. You photograph weddings and film videos about how people fell in love. You capture people’s best moments. And that’s great and important and inspiring work, but… it’s not the whole story. I would argue it’s not even the most important part of the story. No one could live up to that ideal all day, every day. But this?—”
She reached for a stack of photos on a side table and rifled through them until she found a specific shot. She shoved it at me.
I stared down at a picture of Oscar and me. We were standing together outside the bar, the sky dark around us except for thin shards of colored lights from the neon beer logos in the pub’s window. We were in profile, almost in silhouette. Oscar had his arm around me and was smiling at me. I vaguely remembered the moment when he’d offered me his coat.
The picture was striking. The expression on our faces. Even from the side, the way we looked at each other was obvious. The absolute adoration.
“I know you said your relationship was fake, but this is real,” she said, tapping the photo. “My friend Chelsea took it out the window because Sage said he wished he’d gotten a picture of the two of you to show his mom. You weren’t putting on a show here. You didn’t realize anyone was looking at you. This was just the two of you together, in love.”
