Page 75 of The Faceoff

By the time the guys are up, I’ve got the shoulder iced and the ache dulled and I’m at the counter with a fresh coffee, and I make the mistake of checking the thread one more time, and Sloane’s sent something about Margaret trying to install a “BookTok shelf” and using the word algorithm incorrectly four times, and I’m grinning at it when Cash walks in.

He stops. Looks at me. Narrows his eyes.

“Why are you smiling like that?”

“I’m not smiling.”

“You’re smiling like that. At your phone. You’ve got the—” he gestures at his own face, vaguely “—the thing. The face. Wyatt. Wyatt. Come look at his face.”

“I’m reading something funny.”

“What’s funny?”

“Margaret thinks BookTok is a person.”

This is true, and it’s also a deflection, and Cash — who is a lot sharper than the volume suggests — clocks the deflection even as he laughs at the Margaret part. He grabs the coffee pot and points it at me. “You’ve been weird as hell since yesterday. You came home and went straight up and you’ve been weird.”

“I’m not weird.”

“Theo.” Cash raises his voice toward the stairs. “Back me up. Beau’s being weird.”

“Beau’s always weird,” Theo says, coming down, because Theo’s first contribution to any morning is contrarian by reflex. He looks at me for about one second — Theo’s whole personality is one-second looks that see too much — and then says, flatly, on his way to the fridge, “He kissed the theater girl in the drama building. It’s all over campus. He’s weird because it went well.”

The kitchen goes quiet.

“He WHAT?” Cash says.

“I’m getting eggs,” Theo says, getting eggs.

“You kissed her? In public?” Cash rounds on me, delighted, betrayed, alight. “And you didn’t lead with that? Holy shit. I had to hear it from Theo, who heard it from — Theo, who the fuck did you hear it from?”

“Margo.”

“Why are you texting Margo⁠—”

“I’m not. She posted something. There was a comment.” Theo cracks an egg. “People saw it. Drama kids gossip more than we do. It’s done numbers.”

Wyatt’s wandered in by now, hair a disaster, and he’s looking at me with the warm steady attention he brings to things, and he doesn’t pile on the way Cash does. He just says, mild, “You okay?”

And that’s the one that gets me, because it’s not did you kiss her or was it good — it’s you okay, the actual question, the one Wyatt always asks because he actually wants the answer, and I don’t have a clean one. Because the honest answer is no. The honest answer is that I kissed my fake girlfriend to win a scene and lost a part of myself I’m not going to find again, and I can’t say any of that in a kitchen full of guys at six-forty in the morning.

“I’m fine,” I say. “It was strategy. Her — there’s a girl in her department who was about to make trouble. I handled it.”

“You handled it,” Cash repeats, gleeful. “With your mouth.”

“Cash.”

“Strategically.”

“I will pour this coffee on you.”

“He’s blushing,” Theo observes, to the eggs.

“I’m not—” I am not blushing. I refuse to be a man who blushes. “Eat your eggs, Theo.”

But Cash is grinning at me across the counter, and Wyatt’s got a small private smile like he’s worked something out and isn’t going to say it, and Theo’s gone back to his eggs having detonated the room and walked away from the crater the way he does, and I sit there in the warm chaos of my own kitchen with a bag of melting ice and a phone full of a girl who’s never far from my hand lately, and I think: they bought it. The whole point is that people buy it. The plan’s working.

The plan’s working, and the strategy worked, and Bella’s gone quiet — I noticed that too, three days of silence where there used to be texts — and Vivienne’s stumped, and the entire arrangement is performing exactly as designed.