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And then there was the fact that the thought of actually taking anyone to my brother’s graduation made me feel sick. I didn’t like having anyone around my mom. Not even Sutton or Annie. Julian would never look at me the same. It’d be so humiliating.
I fumbled with the keys as I hurried to my car, trying to fight back tears. I was such an idiot. I wished that my anxiety hadn’t fucking spiked like this.
I dropped my keys and cussed, grabbing them off the freshly paved parking lot. I took a deep breath and tried to calm my racing heart the way my therapist had been teaching me.
Then I dug through my purse for my pills. I took an everyday anxiety medicine to regulate the day-to-day anxiety, but for spikes like this, I had emergency medicine that I always kept with me. I popped a half of a Xanax into my mouth and downed it dry.
“Jen!”
I whipped around, hastily stashing my pills again. My eyes widened in shock at the sight of Julian Wright heading in my direction.
“Hey, wait,” he called.
I froze in place. Why was following me? Hadn’t I embarrassed him?
“Hey.” He smiled that charming Wright smile when he caught up to me. “You move fast.”
“Uh, yeah. What’s up?” I clutched the keys tighter to keep my hands from shaking.
“I didn’t mean for Hollin and Campbell to run you out of there.”
I could barely manage a smile. “No, it’s fine. I really do need to feed the cats.”
“Of course.” He took another step forward. “But…maybe what they were saying wasn’t actually that crazy.”
I winced at the second use of that word tonight. Crazy was a word that had been used about me enough that hearing it in other contexts still hit me a little too hard.
“Unless you really don’t want to do it?”
“The…fake dates?” I asked in confusion.
“Yeah. I mean, I think it sounds like a great idea.”
My eyes widened. “You’re serious?”
“Yeah.”
“But…why?”
“Think about how well we worked together tonight. I saved you from Evan, and you saved me from Ashleigh. We played it all off fine then. We could do it again for bigger stakes. You really don’t want to go to that graduation, and I can think of nothing less I’d like to do than attend that gala.”
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to go to the graduation, but I couldn’t subject you to that.”
“To what?” he asked with a laugh. “It’s a graduation. We’ll tell them I’m your boyfriend. Parents love me.”
“But I haven’t told them we’re dating.”
“So? Make it a surprise. You didn’t know how to tell them on the phone or something.”
“I guess I could do that,” I said.
The possibility materialized before me. Bringing Julian Wright to graduation would make everything better for me. He could keep my mom from vocalizing her biggest disappointments in me. She was usually better around strangers than when it was just me. Usually. Not to mention, I’d have someone to talk to and laugh with about all the rest of it. And no one was immune to the Wright name. It would make me look good either way…even if it was fake. It would get me through graduation.
“But what about you? I don’t make Ashleigh Sinclair jealous,” I said with a self-deprecating laugh.
“You did today.”
I scoffed, “Did you hear her?”
“Don’t let her poison infect you,” he said immediately, reaching out to touch my arm. “There is no hierarchy like her bullshit. She shouldn’t have even said it.”
But it was true. Ashleigh Sinclair might have a shit personality, but she had everything else. Even Julian for two years. If she had been satisfied with where he worked, she’d still have him. They hadn’t broken up because he’d stopped caring about her.
“Okay. I just…don’t know that I’m the kind of person she’d take as a threat.”
Julian waved his hand. “It’ll be fine. You don’t have to do anything about Ashleigh. I’d actually prefer if you weren’t anywhere near her. As long as you’re there, it’ll be good. Just like me being there for you.”
My face flushed at the comment. I’d been so adamantly against this at the mere mention from Campbell and Hollin. But that was when they were pushing it on Julian. It’d felt like they were forcing him into something that he didn’t want. Now, he was trying to convince me to fake date him.
Julian Wright.
The man I’d been pining after for years.
Why wouldn’t I say yes?
It might be a disaster to have him around my parents. I was sure that I wasn’t going to make Ashleigh jealous in the slightest. If we could even keep her thinking we were dating for a whole month. But still…that meant I would have a whole month of his time.
Didn’t I want that?
Yes, it’d be fake. It wouldn’t mean anything. If I was going to have ninety days of no dating, it’d be better to fill that time with fake dates with a friend than nothing.
