Page 28 of The Snuggle Is Real

That makes me glance back at Malcolm, bewildered.

Then I realize one entire end of the table is beefy football players. I grin. “Your mother doesn’t want me tempted?” I ask.

“None of those guys are single,” Malcolm says with a frown. “But would they tempt you if they were?”

It’s a very uncharacteristic question. “I have no idea. I don’t know them. But obviously not while we’re fake dating.”

He just gives a grunt of acknowledgement.

We're placed in the middle of the table, across from Ian and Winnie, next to Dylan and Lauren. MacKay and Faith are at the head, looking like couple goals. Relatives and friends I don't recognize fill in the rest—an uncle with a booming laugh, the footballers, a very old woman in a purple hat who I'm told is Great-Aunt Opal and who stares at me intensely.

The table is set with a little printed menu at each place. Roasted butternut squash soup. Arugula salad with candied pecans, goat cheese, and heirloom tomatoes. Bourbon-glazed pork tenderloin. Dessert is listed only as A Surprise from Sweet Thang.

"If the surprise is apple, I'm filing a complaint," I tell Malcolm.

"With who?"

"The Geneva Confection."

He laughs at my really bad joke. He reaches over and plucks the heirloom tomatoes off of my salad plate before the server has even finished setting it down. He deposits them on his own plate without comment and goes back to buttering his roll.

I stare at him.

He doesn't look up. "What?"

"Nothing," I say.

It's not nothing.

I have hated raw tomatoes since I was six years old and my grandfather made me eat one straight off the vine like an apple and it exploded down the front of my Easter dress. I told Malcolm that story once. Once. Sophomore year, in the dining hall, when I was picking tomatoes out of a sandwich wrap and he asked why I didn't just order it without them.

That was fourteen years ago.

He’s been removing tomatoes from my sight ever since.

"You two are so cute it's making me sick," Dylan says, from my left.

"Thank you?" I say.

"Dylan, do I like tomatoes?" Lauren asks.

“I have no idea. You change your mind constantly because you’re a Gemini.”

“Good point.”

“Sickening,” I tease.

“Aw, so we make people sick too, babe,” Lauren says to her boyfriend.

Somewhere between the soup and the salad, a server comes around taking drink orders. I haven't decided yet. I'm scanning the cocktail menu, which has a lot of bourbon on it, surprise, surprise, when Malcolm stands and says, "Be right back."

He returns four minutes later with two glasses. A bourbon neat for himself.

And for me, a sparkling water with two limes.

Two. Not one.

He sets it down at my elbow and sits without saying a word, like he didn't just hand me a small, fizzy piece of evidence that he pays more attention to me than anyone else on the planet.