Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO

~ Lena POV ~ “Surprise,” I whispered to the empty hallway, and the word tasted like a joke with no punchline. The door swung open before I could knock. I’d used my key. Of course I’d used my key, because this was my boyfriend’s apartment and I had a key and I’d spent forty minutes at the grocery store choosing between the good pasta and the better pasta because Ryan always said the good pasta was fine, but I knew he liked the better pasta, so I bought the better one. I was standing in the hallway with the better pasta and a bottle of red wine tucked under my arm, and the bedroom door was open, and the light was on, and there were sounds coming from inside that my brain refused to process for exactly three full seconds. Three seconds. Then I processed them. I didn’t scream. I didn’t drop the pasta. I walked four steps closer because some part of me, the stupid part, the part that still believed in better pasta, needed to be sure. I was sure. Ryan Blake, my boyfriend of two years,

He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. He looked at me the way you look at a contract before you’ve decided whether to pick up the pen, and said, “Define real.” I shifted in my chair. Ryan was still at his table, still pretending he wasn’t watching us, still doing the thing where his chin was angled slightly away but his eyes kept drifting back. I knew that angle. I’d watched it across dinner parties and work events for two years, Ryan cataloguing a room while performing disinterest. “Convincing,” I said. “Nothing complicated. You treat me like someone you’re actually here with. I do the same. He watches. That’s it.” “For the rest of the evening.” “For the rest of the evening.” Adrian was quiet for a moment. He turned his water glass once, a single slow rotation, fingers loose around the base. “And what exactly do you think that accomplishes?” “He cheated on me,” I said. “Three days ago. He hasn’t apologised, he hasn’t called, and he just walked into the same restaurant and looked

The car arrived at six fifty-eight. I know because I checked my phone three times in the two minutes before it appeared at the kerb, which was two times more than a person who had this under control would check. The driver didn’t knock. He sent a text: “Ms. Carter. Whenever you’re ready.” I looked at myself in the mirror one last time. Black dress, clean lines, nothing that tried too hard. Hair up. The kind of presentation that said I belong here without announcing it. Maya had spent forty minutes on my preparation the way she approached everything she cared about, thoroughly and with running commentary. “Posture,” she’d said, circling me like a stylist before a shoot. “You do that thing when you’re nervous where your shoulders come forward.” “I’m not nervous.” She’d given me the look. The one that meant she loved me and didn’t believe me and wasn’t going to argue about it. “Just remember why you’re doing this. Ryan’s face. Keep that in your pocket.” Ryan’s face. The rearrangin

~ Lena POV -Adrian’s assistant had emailed the dress code at eight in the morning: “Business formal. Event begins at seven. Car at six forty-five.”That was it. No context, no briefing, no indication of what I was walking into beyond a building name and a time. I spent my lunch break looking up Cole Industries’ recent events calendar and found a quarterly stakeholder reception, two hundred guests, board members and investors and the particular category of New York socialite who collected charity board seats the way other people collected air miles.Great.I told Maya over the phone while I was doing my makeup.“Two hundred people,” she said.“At least.”“And you’re going as his girlfriend.”“I’m going as his guest.” I blended the corner of my eye. “There’s a difference.”“There really isn’t, Lena.”She wasn’t wrong. I put the phone on speaker and finished my face and tried not to think about the specific weight of two hundred people’s attention, which was a thing I was generally fine

~ Lena POV ~The documents were ready by ten, which meant I had no reason to linger.I told myself that twice in the lobby of Cole Industries while the security desk printed my visitor pass and the city noise dropped away behind the revolving doors. Twelve floors of glass and clean lines above me. A handoff that would take four minutes, five if Adrian had questions, and then I would leave and that would be the whole of it.His assistant met me at the lift. Priya, early thirties, the kind of efficiency that had been refined into something close to art. She greeted me with professional neutrality, the specific warmth of someone who was paid to be pleasant and had decided to actually mean it, at least partially. She offered water. I declined. She showed me to the waiting area outside Adrian’s office and told me he was finishing a meeting.I sat.The floor was quiet in the way that expensive floors were quiet, carpeted and climate-controlled and designed to absorb everything that wasn’t p