Page 36 of The Faceoff

I stop again.

I squint at him.

“Seen together,” I repeat.

“Yeah.”

“Like.” I'm genuinely trying to parse this. “Seen together how? At — places? Doing what? Are you proposing we start a book club?”

He bites his lip — an actual nervous tell, which is fascinating coming from someone who has spent the last fifteen minutes radiating self-assurance — and then he says it plainly, the way he said I have a proposal, like he's decided the only way to get the sentence out is to not decorate it:

“Fake dating.”

I look at him. I keep looking at him.

He holds the look, which I'll give him credit for. Most people can't.

“You want to fake date,” I say slowly, “me.”

“It solves both problems.” He says it fast now, the pitch he's clearly been building toward. “Bella thinks I'll come crawling back within a week — she said it last night, I heard her say it. As long as I'm single and around, she's going to keep circling, because in her head it's just a matter of time. But if I'm visibly with someone — if there's a girlfriend in the picture, someone she has to factor in — the math changes. She can't wait me out if there's nothing to wait for.”

“And me?”

“Same thing, other direction. Evan's counting on you being alone. He texts, he shows up, he gives it a week, he tries again — and the whole plan runs on you not having anyone else. He grabbed your arm last night in front of fifty people and called you his girlfriend while you were telling him you weren't.” His jaw does the thing again. “If you're with someone — visibly, publicly — he loses the story he's telling himself. There's no door for him to push on.”

I take a sip of chai, mostly to have something to do with my face, which I am now monitoring with the vigilance of air traffic control.

It's not a stupid plan.

That's the irritating part. I can see the architecture of it — I'm a theater major, I understand the difference between what a thing is and what a thing looks like, and I understand that to a certain kind of person, the looks-like is the whole game. Evan operates entirely on the looks-like. His persistence isn't about me, it's about the version of events where I come back and the story stays intact. Remove the possibility and you remove the persistence.

It's not a stupid plan.

It's just a plan with a fatal flaw, which I am about to explain to him.

“No one will believe it,” I say.

He frowns. “Why not?”

“Because, Beau.” I stop walking — we're half a block from the shop now, the bell-over-the-door close enough that I lower my voice. “Look at me. And then look at you. And then think, for one honest second, about the last four girls you were seen with.”

“That's not⁠—”

“You have a type. Everyone has a type, but you have a publicized type. Bella's type. The type that gets into your hockey jacket and shows up at the games in it and knows the difference between a power play and a penalty kill. The type that's — visible. Magnetic. Built for the camera.” I gesture at myself, the cream sweater, the boots that are a half size too big, the general silhouette of a person who dresses to not be perceived. “I am not that. If you want this to be believable, you cast for it. You want someone people will buy. Wren, maybe — no, Wren would never, but at least people would believe it. Margo, absolutely, Margo's exactly your speed. Me?” I shake my head. “Nobody's going to look at the two of us and think yeah, that tracks. They're going to think you lost a bet.”

He's quiet for a second.

Then he says, “You're wrong about a couple of things in there.”

“I'm rarely wrong.”

“You're wrong about my type.” He says it evenly, no heat. “And you're wrong that nobody would believe it, but we don't have to settle that right now.”

“It's not a small flaw, Beau. The entire premise depends on people believing it. If they don't, you've got a worse problem than Bella and I've got a worse problem than Evan, because now we're the couple nobody buys and everyone's talking about, and⁠—”

“Sloane.”

“—I genuinely do not have the bandwidth to be a subject of speculation, I'm trying to get into Yale, I have an audition in February, I cannot be the theater girl who fake-dated the hockey captain and⁠—”