Fake it with me
"I bet you can't make her like you."
"Watch me."
Neither of them knew the other one was having that exact same conversation.
Ava Bennett has never lost anything worth keeping. Not competitions, not arguments, and certainly not the cheer captain election she has spent three years bleeding for. She is disciplined, intimidating, and completely immune to Mason Reed's charm. Or so she tells herself.
Mason Reed has never met a girl he couldn't win over. Football captain, school golden boy, wanted by everyone and challenged by no one. Until Ava Bennett looks straight through him like he is nothing, and suddenly winning becomes personal.
When their friends separately dare them to do the impossible, both accept. Neither knows the other made the same bet. So when Mason proposes a fake relationship, the terms are coldly practical. His playboy reputation is costing him his shot at the Elite Prospects Football Program, the most prestigious talent pipeline in the state. Ava needs the popularity surge to pull ahead in the captain election. They hate each other. They agree anyway.
The rules are simple. No feelings. No jealousy. No catching feelings.
They break every single one.
But secrets this size never stay buried, and when the truth finally surfaces, it doesn't just destroy what they built. It forces them to confront the one question neither of them is brave enough to answer.
If it started as a lie, how do you know when it became real?
So......
Fake It With Me, Because the most dangerous game is the one where you forget you're playing.
Ler
Chapter: CHAPTER TEN: THE PERFECT GIRLThe thing about Ava Bennett, Ethan had decided, was that she was two completely different people depending on whether she thought anyone was watching.He had not arrived at this conclusion quickly. Ethan Cole was not the kind of person who formed conclusions quickly about anything, which was something his mother called patience and his older brother called overthinking and which Ethan himself considered simply the reasonable practice of collecting enough information before deciding what it meant. He had been collecting information about Ava Bennett since the beginning of the year, not deliberately, not with any particular agenda, just in the way you collected information about someone who occupied the same spaces you did and was interesting enough that your attention kept returning to them without being asked.He had AP History with her on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.He had watched her correct Mr. Patterson twice, both times accurately, both times with the particular precision o
Última atualização: 2026-07-01
Chapter: CHAPTER NINE: ETHAN COLEThe message sat unanswered for three days.Ava was aware of this in the background of everything she did, the way you were aware of a door you had decided not to open, present and specific and requiring a small continuous effort to leave alone. She went to practice. She attended her classes. She worked on the campaign strategy document that now had eleven bullet points and was beginning to look like something functional. She did all of this with the quiet discipline that governed most of her life, and she did not open Mason's message again, and she did not respond to it, and she told herself this was because she had nothing to say and not because the question had unsettled her in a way she hadn't finished processing.She was good at telling herself things.It was Tuesday when she met Ethan Cole.Not met in the way you met someone for the first time, because Ethan had been at Crestwood since sophomore year and occupied the particular social category of people Ava knew existed without h
Última atualização: 2026-07-01
Chapter: CHAPTER EIGHT: PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONEThe four words were: *Everyone is watching you.*Ava had spent the rest of lunch trying to identify the number. It wasn't saved in her contacts. It wasn't the same number Mason had used yesterday. She had typed back a single question mark and received nothing, and by the time the bell rang for fifth period the message was sitting in her phone like a splinter, small and specific and impossible to ignore.She told herself it was nothing. A joke. Someone from the group chat being dramatic about the corridor argument. Crestwood High had a well-documented appetite for other people's business, and she and Mason had apparently given it something to feed on this morning, so it followed that someone would find a way to make it worse.She told herself this through fifth period and most of sixth, and she had almost convinced herself by the time she walked into the main hall after school for the Fall Kickoff event and found that it was, in fact, completely true.Everyone was watching her.Not in
Última atualização: 2026-07-01
Chapter: CHAPTER SEVEN: THE FIRST BATTLEThe school's Fall Kickoff event had been on the calendar since August, and for most of Crestwood High it was simply the first real social event of the year, a Friday afternoon occasion involving food, music, a student showcase, and the general atmosphere of people who were happy summer was over and happier still to have somewhere to be.For Ava Bennett, it was a logistics problem that someone had failed to solve correctly.She found out about the scheduling conflict on Friday morning, forty minutes before first period, when she arrived at the events board outside the main office to confirm the cheer squad's performance slot and found a printed memo pinned directly over the confirmation she had received two weeks ago.The memo informed her that the football team's season opening presentation, which included a highlight reel, a team introduction, and remarks from the captain, had been allocated the same thirty-minute window as the cheer squad's showcase, in the same space, on the same s
Última atualização: 2026-07-01
Chapter: CHAPTER SIX: BROTHERSNoah Ellis had a theory about Mason Reed.The theory was this: Mason was the most self-aware person Noah had ever met who worked the hardest to pretend he wasn't. Everything Mason did, the jokes, the charm, the easy confidence that filled whatever room he walked into, was deliberate. Not fake, Noah had never thought it was fake, but deliberate, the way an architect is deliberate, building something functional and beautiful that also happened to hide its own foundations.Most people never looked for the foundations.Noah had been looking for them for four years, which was how long he had known Mason Reed, and he had found enough of them by now to understand that the public version and the private version were not opposites but they were not identical either, and the distance between them was where all the interesting and occasionally alarming things lived.He was thinking about this on Thursday evening while Mason ran the same passing drill for the fourth consecutive time in the empty
Última atualização: 2026-07-01
Chapter: CHAPTER FIVE: CAPTAIN MATERIALAva did not sleep well.This was not something she would ever admit to anyone, including Sofia, including Mia, including the journal she had stopped keeping in ninth grade precisely because she didn't want a written record of the things that kept her up at night. But the fact was that she lay in bed until past midnight with her phone face down on her nightstand and Mason Reed's four words sitting in the back of her mind like a splinter she couldn't locate well enough to remove.She had not responded to his text.She told herself this was because she had nothing to say. She told herself this at eleven pm, and again at eleven thirty, and again just before midnight when she picked up her phone, looked at the message, put the phone back down, and stared at the ceiling until sleep eventually arrived out of what felt like pity.She was up by six.By seven she was in the school library with her laptop open and a document on the screen titled CAPTAIN CAMPAIGN — STRATEGY, which currently conta
Última atualização: 2026-07-01
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