“It has liability.”
“We can work with both.”
Amy opened a new page.
“How long have we supposedly been dating?”
“Three months.”
Amy looked up so quickly the pen nearly slipped from her fingers. “We met three weeks ago.”
“People won’t know.”
“Tessa will forget.”
Tessa remembered a typo in my résumé for two years. “Tessa loves lying for entertainment.”
“That is true.” Amy drew a line through the number. “Two months?”
“Six weeks.”
“That means we started dating before you became my trainer.”
“Ethically cleaner.”
“Emotionally fast.”
I watched her calculate the fictional timeline, brow furrowed in concentration. I spoke before I could make the thought harmless.
“You flirted with me within five minutes.”
“You were yelling about a reservation.”
“You were beautiful when angry.”
I said it before I could turn it into a joke. Amy’s fingers stopped on the page. I had imagined saying it before; I had never said it aloud. Her brown eyes held mine. I could have laughed or added something ridiculous. Instead, I let the truth remain.
“You are,” I said.
The room tightened around us. Amy looked down at the notebook.
“Six weeks,” she said.
Her voice was quieter.
“Six weeks,” I agreed.
We built a relationship history from a dropped resistance band, coffee after training, a river walk, and six weeks of fictionaldating. Amy chose reliability as my favorite thing about her. I chose her dry humor.
“You claim I am not funny.”
“You do not know when you are funny.”
“That is different.”
“Fine. Your eyes.”
She stopped writing, then changed the subject by recording that her favorite thing about me was my ability to make people feel capable.
