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“You laughed. I saw it. The real one.”
“I had a lapse.” But she says it with the corner of her mouth going, and she doesn’t take her hand back, and when we get to her corner she stops and looks at me in the streetlight with her hair down and the borrowed boots and something on her face she hasn’t decided to put there.
“Goodnight, Sorensen.”
“Night, Beckett.”
She goes. I watch her reach the front door, watch her and Margo disappear inside, and I stand on the corner in the cold a while longer than the cold makes reasonable, the way I’ve started to do, and then I walk home alone with the whole loud night going quiet in me.
The plan is working. Bella’s gone. Evan spent the night watching a door that won’t open.
And I’m walking home half in love with a girl who thinks I don’t know it, in a town that’s gone to sleep around us, and the joke — the real joke, the one only I’m in on — is that the performance ended somewhere weeks ago and nobody told the audience.
I notice that too.
A beat late.
The way I notice everything that matters.
Chapter 17
Sloane
The thing nobody warns you about a fake relationship is the paperwork.
Not literal paperwork — though there is a literal list, and the list has eight rules, and I have read all eight of them often enough lately to suspect I’m using them as a worry stone. I mean the maintenance. The constant low-grade administration of a lie you’ve started telling well enough that people have stopped checking it. We have a Thanksgiving problem, technically. The break is in two weeks, and a fake girlfriend who vanishes for a week without a story is a fake girlfriend people start asking about, and so we are, as of tonight, supposed to be “ironing out logistics,” which is how I have ended up on the floor of the Raven House living room at nine on a Tuesday with my back against Beau’s couch and my entire friend group arranged around me like this is a thing we do now.
It is, apparently, a thing we do now.
I don’t remember agreeing to it. That’s the part that unsettles me. There was no meeting, no vote, no moment where someone said let’s start spending our evenings at the hockey house — it just accreted, the way these things do when you stop guarding the door, and now Wren’s got her feet in Cash’s lap on the other couch and June’s reading in the good armchair like she pays rent and Margo is in the kitchen doing something to Theo’s cooking that Theo is allowing, and I’m on the floor, and it’s warm, and I am suspicious of how much I don’t hate it.
“You’re doing the thing,” Margo says, appearing with two mugs and folding down next to me.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you sit in a nice room being happy and your face files a complaint about it.”
“My face does not file complaints.”
“Your face is, right now, as we speak, filling out the form.” She hands me a mug. “Drink your tea and be a person.”
Beau’s across the room being captain at a video game, which is to say losing a video game with great dignity while Cash narrates his failures, and every so often his eyes find me on the floor and do the thing they do and I look away before mine can do anything back.
This is the part I haven’t worked out how to manage.
The public stuff I can manage. The public stuff is choreography — I’m good at choreography, I’ve been blocking my own movements through rooms since I was nine. It’s the private stuff that’s started to slip, the unscheduled hours like this one where there’s no audience to perform for and we keep being a couple anyway. There’s no one here we need to convince. Wren, June, and Margo know it’s fake. Cash, Wyatt, and Theo think it’s real but they’re his people, not a crowd, and you don’t perform for your people. So whatever this is — me on his floor, him finding me across the room, the warmth I’m filing complaints about — it isn’t the plan.
I know exactly what it is. I have a rule about it. The rule is in pen.
“Beckett.” Cash, from the couch, pointing the controller at me like a microphone. “Settle something. Beau says you can name every Sondheim musical in order. I say no human can do that and he’s lying to seem cultured.”
“Why would naming Sondheim musicals make him seem cultured to you? You set your own eyebrow on fire.”
“That was one time—”
“It’s framed in the hall, Cash, I walked past the photo on the way in. Someone laminated it.”
“Wyatt laminated it,” Theo says, from the kitchen doorway, deadpan, holding a wooden spoon.
