Page 61 of How My Fake Alien Boyfriend Learned to Cook and Saved the Family Business

Kal and I developed a menu I was proud of. Because without him there to support me, to cook for me and cheer me on, I didn’t know if I could have done it.

But I was ready. If I failed, I failed—but at least I would fail knowing I did it my way.

I thought of a song my grandma loved, a Frank Sinatra track by the very same name. I’ve had a few regrets up until this point in my journey home. This wouldn’t be one of them.

I did a final walk-through of the restaurant, sent the menu to Al, who would get it printed out and dropped off bright and early the next day, and messaged Eileen Watley, senior coordinator for the Greatest Restaurants of the Great Smoky Mountains Contest, to triple confirm that Southern Charm was ready to host its judges.

And that was that. There was nothing more I could do; I’d done everything on my list except win the contest.

The only problem was Kal.

It would have been so much easier to pretend I didn’t see the change in Kal, or sense the mood shift between us. And during the busiest week of my entire life, I almost would have preferred being left in the dark.

But when you’ve felt the warmth of the sun on your skin for so long, and then it’s taken away, you notice. You can’t help but notice.

I couldn’t deny that Kal’s sudden aloofness affected my mood.

Anytime I’d tried to talk to him about it, it seemed like he would retreat even further. I didn’t want to push him away, but evidently he didn’t need any help. Maybe he was just tired like me, and his version of tired was grumpy rather than loopy, which was how my exhaustion tended to manifest.

What could I do, though? I decided to take a warm shower to try to calm my nervous system, which was displaying an incredible amount of nervousness for just one person.

I left Kal in my living room, flipping through the books on my bookshelf with the enthusiasm of a cat experiencing catnip for the first time. He still had so much to learn about humans and life on Earth, and I found that I was increasingly guilty of imagining a future where I was there to discover those things with him.

When I emerged from the shower, I found Kal sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding something in his hands. He must not have heard me walk into the room, because he jumped when I said, “What’s that?”

I saw the exact moment Kal decided to lie. That’s the thing about good, honest people. They spend so much time being good and honest that you know right away when they’re acting out of character.

Kal’s hands twitched, itching to hide what was in them.

“Nothing,” he said, surreptitiously tossing the thing into his pack, the one he’d kept with him since the day we met. But his jade eyes said otherwise. It wasn’t nothing. It was very distinctly something.

I stood there, short-circuiting.

Confront Kal or let it go? Try to break down the walls I felt him building between us, or ignore it?

Or did it matter at all what I did, because while we were clearly a thing, we also didn’t have a label on that thing—just an undisclosed expiration date.

Before I could decide, Kal jumped up from the floor and pushed past me, the strap of his pack held tightly in his fist. The palm of his hand skimming across my stomach left goosebumps over my arms, and it was enough to distract me.

I could have chased after him, demanded an explanation. I could have shown him it wasn’t that easy to lose me because I cared about him deeply, even if he didn’t believe he deserved it.

I would like to say I didn’t know what stopped me from doing just that, but I did know. It was pure, unbridled fear. Like most people, I would do anything to avoid the sting of rejection in favor of what’s easy.

Then my phone started buzzing, cheerful as a busy bee, and I was properly distracted by a deluge of texts.

It seemed like everyone in my life had a renewed excitement for Southern Charm ever since I’d announced the grand reopening a few days ago. I was fielding texts, calls, and social media posts all week. I’d even gotten a request for an interview in the Roswell Falls Gazette.

Not a particularly remarkable publicity boost, but who was I to turn it down? After years of being in decline, I could finally see a light at the end of the tunnel. A new Southern Charm, a new me.

Instead of trying to decide what to do about Kal, I sat on the couch scrolling mindlessly through phone notifications. What could I reasonably do the evening before one of the biggest days of my life?

And then, ridiculously, I wondered: What would a pithy motivational poster say about this?

Even alien men need space.

I snorted at the thought. But…well. Maybe there was some truth to it. People needed space; I could give Kal space, too.

Besides, I’d been chock full of nerves for days. Maybe I was just projecting my own stress onto Kal and making things seem worse than they actually were.