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My tongue darted out to wet my lips. “I don’t—um.”
He raised one eyebrow. “Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong. I’ll wait.”
“You’re wrong,” I said weakly.
“That was lame. Try again.”
I spun on the stool and got up, running my fingers through my hair. “Fine. What if you’re right? Neither of us wants a relationship, Mason. I don’t think that’s changed just because we get along as well as we do. Unless you’ve suddenly changed your mind overnight.”
“I didn’t say that, did I? There’s more between us than just a sexual attraction. We can lie about it all we like, but it’s not going to change anything.”
“I quite like lying to myself. I’m rather adept at living in denial. It’s why I don’t go to the gym anymore. I can convince myself the cake I ate last night didn’t contribute to my love handles.”
“What love handles?”
“Good response.”
“Thank you. Can you stop avoiding the point of the conversation now?”
“I’m not avoiding anything.”
“You’re avoiding everything.”
“I disagree.”
“Then we agree to disagree.” He stalked over to me and stopped right in front of me, one hand reaching out. His fingers brushed my skin as he pushed my hair behind my ear, and they traced a trail down the side of my neck. “Would it be that bad?” he asked in a low voice. “If this turned into something more?”
I didn’t reply.
“I have feelings for you, Lauren. Real feelings. I don’t care where they came from or the reason they’re able to exist in the first place. I don’t care that this relationship is fake—because nobody else ever doubted that it was anything other than real. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
It did. It told me a lot of things. It told me that nobody has doubted us. Nobody has looked at us and thought, “Fucking hell, they’re awkward together.” That somehow we pulled this thing off, no matter how many physical boundaries we set.
Of course, we’d broken past them all in private, but whatever.
Even without being all over each other, without putting on a display of affection for everyone to see, we still convinced them that our relationship was real.
That was a job well done.
And one that told me more than I was willing to accept.
Like the fact that this fake relationship could potentially be a very successful real one if we’d let it. If I would let it.
I cleared my throat and turned my face away, but Mason captured my face in his hands. His grip was so steady and firm that I had no choice but to meet his eyes. They were a mass of emotion; determination and uncertainty and raw feelings that I wish I’d never seen.
He dipped his head and pressed his lips against mine. They were warm and soft, just like I remembered from two nights ago, except this time he smelled like sawdust and fresh air.
I leaned into him, squeezing my eyes shut tight.
“You feel that. I know you do,” he said in a low voice against my lips. “I’m not crazy, Lauren. There’s something about you that I don’t think I can give up.”
“That’ll be the sarcasm. It’s scintillating.”
“For the love of—”
“What?”
He dropped his hands and stepped back. “You’ll die before you admit the truth, won’t you?”
“No.” I took my own step back from him. “I can’t admit it, Mason. I can’t tell you how I really feel, because if I do, then I can’t walk away from this.”
“I’m not walking away from it. I’m not walking away from what I know is between us.”
“If I tell you how you make me feel it’ll give you the power to break my heart. I have no desire to give anyone that power.”
“And what if you don’t tell me? What if you keep it all to yourself, and in two weeks, when we put an end to the charade we began, you break your own heart because you were too fucking stubborn to admit the truth?”
“I—” Had not thought that far ahead. “All right, say I admit it. Say I tell you I have feelings for you that are way too real for my liking. What happens then? Your darling ex tells your family we’ve been faking it and now we have to convince them it’s real? Nobody is going to believe us!”
“Oh, fuck me—Lauren, it doesn’t matter!” Mason ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t owe anyone but you anything. I don’t owe my mother, my sister, my aunt, my grandpa—I don’t owe them a single fucking thing where my relationships are concerned. The only person I give a shit about is you. You are the only person I want to convince about us.”
Silence passed between us for a minute. The longest minute ever. Until I dipped my head to look at the floor and said, “I’m not unconvinced, okay? I’m reluctant. There’s a difference.”
