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, the man who called me “Lo” when he was being sweet and complained about his boss every single Sunday morning, was in bed with a woman I recognized from his office Christmas photos. She had her hand in his hair. He had his face buried in her neck. Neither of them heard me come in.

I stood there.

I don’t know for how long. Long enough that the bottle of wine started to feel heavy. Long enough that I noticed his jacket on the floor and her heels near the door, and the domestic wrongness of those details, the way they were both just living inside my relationship like it was furniture, hit me somewhere beneath my ribs and just stayed there.

I set the pasta on the kitchen counter. Gently. I set the wine down beside it. I went to the bedroom doorway and I said, very quietly, “Ryan.”

He heard that.

The sounds stopped. He looked up. His face went through six expressions in about one second, and the last one, the one that settled, was not guilt. It was something closer to calculation. That was the part that would stay with me longest.

“Lena.” His voice was careful. “This isn’t…..”

“Don’t.” I held up one hand. “Please don’t say what you’re about to say.”

The woman beside him pulled the sheet up. She had the decency to look away. Ryan did not.

“How long,” I said. It wasn’t really a question.

He was quiet.

“How long, Ryan.”

“Lena, it’s complicated….”

I laughed. The sound came out strange, too flat, like something I’d borrowed from someone else. “Okay.” I nodded. Once. “Okay.”

I went to the closet and got my overnight bag from the top shelf, the small grey one I used for weekend trips, the one he’d helped me pick out at the airport last March because my old one broke a wheel. I took it to the dresser and started opening drawers.

“What are you doing?” He’d gotten out of bed. I heard him pulling on jeans.

“What does it look like?”

“Lena, stop. We can talk about this.”

I turned around. He was standing in the middle of the room and he looked exactly like himself, familiar in all the ways that suddenly meant nothing, and I felt the exact moment something inside me went quiet. Not numb. Quiet. Like a door closing without a slam.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” I said.

“You’re not even going to let me explain—”

“Explain what?” I kept my voice level. “How long has it been going on? Does she mean anything? Whether I should have known?” I zipped the bag. “I don’t need the details, Ryan. I really don’t.”

He reached for my arm. I stepped back before he could touch me.

“Don’t.”

He stopped.

I picked up my bag. I looked at him one more time, this man who knew how I took my coffee and complained about his boss every Sunday and apparently had been doing this, whatever this was, for some period of time I would never know. I looked at him and felt nothing landed. Just that quiet. Just that closed door.

“The pasta’s on the counter,” I said. “It’s the good kind. I know you like it.”

I walked out.

The hallway was cold. The elevator took too long. I stood in the lobby of his building and looked at the revolving door and thought, very clearly, I am not going to cry in this lobby. That was the only thought I had. I pushed through the door.

Outside, the city was doing what it always did, indifferent and loud and enormous, and I sat down on the bench across from his building because my legs had made the decision before I had. The bag was in my lap. The night air was sharper than I’d dressed for.

My phone buzzed.

Maya.

I stared at her name for two full rings before I answered.

“Hey,” she said. “How’d the surprise dinner go?”

The sound that came out of me was almost a laugh. “Maya.”

She heard it. She always heard it. Silence on her end, then, softer: “Lena. What happened.”

I opened my mouth. I closed it. Pressed the phone harder against my ear like that would help somehow.

“He was with someone,” I said. “When I got there. He was with someone from his office and I just, I walked in and I…” I stopped. Breathed. “I left.”

“Oh my god.” Her voice was already different, already moving into the register she used when she was putting on shoes to come to me. “Are you okay? Where are you?”

“Outside his building. On the bench.”

“Lena. Go home. Get a cab, I’ll meet you there, just…”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re sitting on a bench outside his building in the cold.”

“I’m okay,” I said again, and this time I almost believed it.

She made a sound that meant she didn’t believe me at all. “This isn’t the first time he’s made you feel like this,” she said, quieter now. “You know that, right? Not cheating. I mean, the cheating is. God. But the feeling. The small version of yourself he always managed to leave you with. This isn’t the first time.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Lena.”

“I know.” My voice came out thin. “I know, Maya.”

The cold from the bench was seeping through my coat. I looked up at Ryan’s building, at the lit window on the fourth floor, and I thought about the pasta still on the counter. I thought about the two years of Sundays, and his voice saying “Lo” when he was trying to be sweet, and the Christmas photo where she was standing three people to his left and smiling, and how none of it had looked like anything at all.

“Mom’s going to call you,” Maya said. “Fair warning. I didn’t tell her but I’m going to because I cannot hold this.”

“I know.”

“She’s going to want to set you up with someone.”

Despite everything, something in my chest shifted. “Maya, it’s been twenty minutes.”

“You know how she is.”

I did. I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “I’ll call her first. I’ll call her tomorrow.”

“Lena.” Her voice was gentle and steady and exactly what it needed to be. “Come home.”

I stood up. Picked up my bag. Took one last look at the building, and then I turned my back on it and started walking toward the main street.

“I’m coming,” I said.

I didn’t know then, standing in the cold with my overnight bag and the hollow space where two years of my life used to be, that my mother would not wait until tomorrow to call. That she would wait exactly three days, and then arrange something I would not have agreed to if she’d asked me first.

I didn’t know that three days from now, I would walk into a restaurant and freeze.

But I was already walking. And behind me, the window on the fourth floor stayed lit.