Page 14 of Faking It with the Omega

“Fuck off, you know what I mean.”

He chuckles. “Okay, so let’s grab a drink after your session this Thursday. You can tell me all about your childhood pets and how you like your eggs cooked and what shoe size you wear, and I’ll tell you about my deathly fear of snails and how I got the scar on my ass.”

“I don’t think either of those things are going to come up at a wedding,” I laugh despite myself, my stomach flipping idiotically at the thought of sitting in a bar with Jed, just the two of us.

“Yeah, but you’re curious now.”

And he’s right, again. I am curious; about what he likes and doesn’t like, his weird, irrational fears, his childhood and his food preferences and what movies make him cry. I’m so fucking curious it’s kind of pathetic.

“Need me to stop him terrorizing you, Aiden?” Max, one of the co-owners of The Foundry, booms from behind us, his hand landing heavily on my shoulder. “You’re meant to be helping the patrons, Jed, not distracting them. Especially our potential future omega heavyweight champions.”

I flash Max an appreciative look, feeling a twinge of excitement at his words, and he gives my shoulder a hard squeeze.

“I’m not terrorizing, I’m mentoring,” Jed grins, throwing the towel that was wrapped around his neck at Max, who snorts and catches it, giving Jed a sceptical look. “Okay, maybe I’m cajoling Aiden into a second “date”.”

“Oh, fantastic,” I say. “You’ve told everyone about our fake relationship. Great. Thanks.”

“Hey, it must be a pretty special fake relationship to get Jed to go on a second date,” Max rumbles with a chuckle. “One and done, that’s Jed’s policy. I don’t think he’s been on a second date since Friends ended.”

My stomach twists, whatever small, misguided spark of hope that had been lit a few moments ago snuffed out just as quickly. Because Jed isn’t agreeing to all this because he likes me. He’s doing it because it’s an easy favor for a gym client. A few fake dates where he gets free food and gets to play the hero, with no actual commitment at the end of it. Just a fun story to tell at parties.

“Fake date,” I correct quietly.

“I’m an exemplary fake boyfriend, I’ll have you know.” Jed says, rolling his eyes at Max, although his grin falters when he notices the change in my expression.

I swallow, hard, shifting my gaze away from Jed and back to the weight rack. “Max is right,” I say, forcing some weak humor into my voice. “Stop distracting me so I can finish a fucking set.”

Jed’s lips turn down slightly, as close as I’ve ever seen to a frown on his face as he looks at me with a quiet intensity that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. His nostrils flare instinctively, like he’s trying to get a read on my scent, but I’m back to wearing blockers. Back to being blessedly unreadable.

“Yeah,” he says. “Alright. But I’ll see you Thursday for your session, and we’ll get our shit together at Duke’s after.”

“Sure,” I nod.

“Okay,” he grins, the intensity from a moment ago gone. “It’s a date.”

“Fake date,” I mumble, but Max is already dragging him away.

As it turns out, going for drinks with a hot guy after you’ve just spent an hour with him, working up a sweat and having his hands all over you as he corrects your form, makes it much harder for the primal part of your brain to differentiate between a real date and a fake date.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I tell Jed about my boring office job in administration as quickly as possible, although he does a good job of pretending to find my anecdotes about my unhinged coworkers more amusing than they actually are. When I ask where he grew up, he responds with a wry “fucking everywhere” and gives me a potted history of all the places he moved to growing up with two parents in the military.

In fact, the more questions I ask, the more that seems to be a theme in Jed’s life; never standing still. He worked what sounds like a hundred odd jobs after school, getting fired from half of them and eventually channeling all his energy into boxing until he went pro. I want to ask him a thousand questions about his career, but he glosses over why it was cut short—something about an injury—and swiftly moves the subject on.

It’s… fun. Really fucking fun. Jed is as interesting as he is hilarious, and to my surprise I keep making him roar his loud, gleeful laugh even when I’m not really trying to. One drink turns to two, which turns to three, and by the time the bar staff are not-so-subtly turning up the lights and mopping the floors, I think we’ve both forgotten why we’re even there, the conversation having moved so far away from what we’re supposed to be talking about.

After my next session, Jed simply throws my coat at me when I get out of the locker room, slings an arm around my shoulders and steers me to the bar. And if I already looked forward to my Thursday sessions with Jed, before long our late-night mutual study sessions have become the absolute highlight of my week.

Over the next five weeks, we manage to build up a surprisingly encyclopedic knowledge of each other’s lives. Probably more in-depth than is entirely necessary for one evening of casual conversation.

I learn that despite his seemingly boundless energy, Jed can’t make it out of bed in the morning without a vat of strong black coffee, he has a not entirely surprising soft spot for gratuitously violent b-movies, and he’s kept every pair of boxing gloves he’s ever owned.

In return, I tell him about my burning hatred of cilantro, every one of the near death experiences I had on an ill-advised back-packing trip with my friends when I was eighteen, and even begrudgingly admit that I haven’t been able to sleep without white noise since I was a kid.

By the time the wedding rolls around, I have an entire mental dossier on Jed, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do with my Thursday evenings when this is over. We also have our own fake backstory down to a science—first impressions, our favorite date spot, even where we were when we decided to be "exclusive". Jed’s first suggestion was that it happened on the top of a mountain, and that he was wearing a full, baby blue tuxedo. I managed to talk him down, until we settled on it being on a hike, and we were both wearing jeans.

It’s foolproof. Airtight. Unshakeable.