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“Jake,” he murmurs back.
“We can’t kiss like that.” My voice sounds all breathy and affected, which is not acceptable. He cannot know just how much I liked that kiss. How much I want him to do it again and again, deeper next time.
“We just did. Did you hate it?” He’s laughing at me, I can hear it in his voice, and that’s when I realize my eyes had drifted shut.
I snap them open and find him looking at me with a totally different but equally hard-to-read expression. He sighs. “We don’t need to figure it out tonight. It’s okay.”
“It’s not. We don’t kiss each other.” I hate how plaintive I sound, how small and unsure, when I always prefer to be brassy and bossy with Jacob to make up for the age and experience gap between us. “And if we start doing that, then I just don’t know—”
As if what I just said doesn’t mean anything to him at all, he kisses me again. More tongue this time, harder and more demanding, and it’s very hard for my brain to remember why it’s not okay when his lips are playing against mine in that brain-scrambling, better-than-fantasies delicious way. “Yes,” he whispers against my mouth when he finally lets go of my lower lip with a pop. “Look at that. You survived kissing me again. Now let’s go downstairs and have dinner, and then make gingerbread cookies or whatever you were about to do before I arrived.”
I can’t remember anything from before he arrived. “And we’ll just pretend that you’re my boyfriend?”
His gaze drops to my mouth and stays there as he nods slowly. “Think you can manage that?”
I blink away from him, knowing the answer is yes. Yes, I can pretend to be in love with him for a few days. Easiest thing I’d ever do. But what do we do about the single bed in the corner of the room?
Would anyone notice if I grabbed extra blankets and pillows to sleep on the floor?
As if Jacob—Jake—can read my mind, he grips my chin and drags my attention back to his face. “One thing at a time.”
I nod.
* * *
Downstairs, they’re still bustling around, getting dishes on the table, and nobody notices that I’m clearly shellshocked. Nobody except Jacob—Jake, ohGod, I need to remember that—who sticks right by my side, cool as a cucumber.
We couldn’t be more opposite in this moment, and I’ve spent the last two years noticing all the ways we aren’t the same. I’m fire, he’s ice. He’s mature and I’m a girl playing dress-up as an adult. I’m impulsive and he thinks everything through with careful precision.
I throw this “pretend to be my boyfriend” plan in his lap and then panic. He picks it up and carefully manages the chaos I’ve created.
Once we sit to eat, he handles the conversation so deftly, my parents don’t even realize he’s not really answering their questions about our relationship.
He uses all of his lawyer tricks to spin stories and take control of the conversation, steering it as close to the truth as possible without revealing my deceptions.
He’s a lawyer. We met through work. Yes, he knows my boss. Yes, he thinks I could do better, but he knows I’m very good at what I do, and that I’ve excelled in the role I fell into, and he’s sure I’ll land on my feet, but he’s pretty sure my boss wants me back.
All said smoothly, with the straightest of faces.
And by the end of dinner, they all think they know him and I’m starting to believe this is going to be just fine.
But one person at the table isn’t fooled, and as soon as we’ve cleared the plates, Nana pushes me in the direction of the kitchen. “Let’s go make a cheese ball for tomorrow. And everyone else…decorate the tree. That includes you, Jake.”
Everyone else does exactly as they’re told, even Jacob, who doesn’t looked panicked in the slightest at being separated from me, when I’m dying inside.
In the kitchen, Nana pulls out the ingredients for her famous cheese ball appetizer. She mixes everything together while I play it cool and wait for her to say something, anything.
“You weren’t expecting him?” she finally asks.
“We had a fight yesterday,” I confess. It’s the truth, if only part of it.
“Ah.” She hands me dried cranberries. “Chop these. Did your fight have anything to do with your job?”
I hate how close she is already. “Uh…”
“And chop these, too.” She slides walnuts at me. “There’s more to the quitting story than you first said, isn’t there?”
“It’s not the best fit for me, even if I am good at it.” I’m very good at being everything Jacob needs. But doing that is slowly destroying me from the inside out, because I’m not getting what I need in return, and he can’t give it to me, and the kisses he laid on me upstairs just proved to me I was right on the money.
