Chapter Eight: Adjusting to the Lie

I watched him for a week. Not obviously, not in a way he’d notice, but I watched, waiting for the confession to crack somewhere and show me the real story underneath it. It never did. He showed up on time, said the right things to the right cameras, remembered small details about my life I hadn’t told him twice, and if he was hiding something bigger than the article, he was better at it than anyone I’d ever met.

Eventually I stopped watching so hard, because it was exhausting, and because the fake relationship itself had started eating up every spare hour I had anyway.

“Left side,” Cole said, one hand light against my elbow, steering me around a photographer crouched by the curb. “There’s a second one by the flower stand. Don’t look at him directly, he’ll think you’re posing.”

“How do you know all this.”

“I used to be one of them. Different beat, same instincts.”

We’d gotten good at this part, at least, the choreography of being watched. He knew which door to hold, which angle made the best shot, when to laugh at something I said so it looked natural instead of scripted. I knew when to lean into his shoulder, when to let my hand find his without either of us having to ask.

“You’ve done this before,” I said. “The choreography part. Not just with me.”

“Everyone in this business has done it before. You more than most.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No. It’s not.” He said it the way he said most things he didn’t want to explain, easy, deflecting, a small smile attached to soften the refusal. “You’ll have to settle for knowing I’m good at it instead of knowing why.”

“I’m starting to collect a whole list of things I’ll have to settle for with you.”

“Keep the list. Might be useful someday.”

“You’re strange.”

“Never claimed otherwise.”

“You’re getting better at the smiling thing,” I told him, once we’d made it inside the coffee shop Gerald wanted us photographed at, ironically enough, three blocks from the one where this whole mess started.

“High praise.”

“I’m serious. A month ago you looked like someone forced you into it at gunpoint.”

“A month ago someone had.” A short breath of laughter escaped before he caught it, pressing his mouth into something more careful. “I’m adjusting.”

“To the lying, or to me?”

“Do I have to pick one?”

That one landed somewhere it wasn’t supposed to, and I covered it by ordering a coffee I didn’t actually want, standing at the counter longer than necessary just to have my back to him for a few seconds.

The days blurred into a rhythm after that. Matching posts at matching times, so the algorithm liked us. Coordinated appearances so we were never photographed with anyone else long enough to start a different rumor. A running joke between us about whichever paparazzi outfit looked the most ridiculous that day. It should have felt like work. Some days it didn’t feel like anything at all except two people who happened to like being around each other, which was its own kind of dangerous, considering what I knew about him and what I still didn’t.

I noticed my own hands doing the thing again during a lull between appearances, teeth working at the edge of my thumbnail while we waited for a car that was running late. Cole noticed too. He always noticed.

“Here,” he said, and pressed something small and smooth into my palm without any ceremony about it. A polished stone, gray, worn soft at the edges like it had spent years in someone’s pocket.

“What is this.”

“Something to do with your hands that isn’t destroying your nails.” He shrugged, like it wasn’t a big deal, though the way he avoided my eyes told me otherwise. “I’ve had it a long time. Figured it could earn its keep.”

I turned it over in my fingers instead of biting anything, and it helped, more than I wanted to admit. “Where’d you get it.”

“Somewhere I don’t talk about.” He said it lightly enough that I let it go, though I filed the deflection away with all the others, a small stack of things about him I still didn’t have.

I kept the stone in my pocket for the rest of the day, and caught myself reaching for it more than once, not because I needed it, but because it was something of his that I was allowed to hold onto without either of us having to explain what it meant.

He ruined me, I thought, sitting there with his stone warm in my palm. Or maybe he was un-ruining something that had already been broken long before he showed up. I couldn’t decide which, and I hated that it mattered to me either way. Two weeks ago I would have told anyone who asked that this whole arrangement was strictly business, easy to keep at arm’s length. Two weeks ago I hadn’t known what his laugh sounded like when it was real instead of rehearsed.

I caught him watching me sometimes when he thought I wasn’t paying attention, something unguarded in his face for half a second before he remembered to put the careful version back on. I never asked him what he was thinking in those moments. Some part of me was afraid of the answer, and a smaller, more honest part of me was afraid I already knew it.

My phone buzzed on the table between us. Gerald’s name on the screen, which never meant anything good.

New clause, effective immediately. Optics team wants cohabitation for the next stretch. You’re moving into the penthouse together by Friday.

I read it twice before I turned the phone around so Cole could see it too. Whatever ease had settled between us over the last hour disappeared the second his eyes landed on the message.

“Friday,” he said, flat.

“Friday,” I said back, and neither of us moved to pick up our coffee again.

“That wasn’t in the original contract,” he said.

“No. It wasn’t.”

“Do you want to fight it?”

I thought about it, really thought about it, the stone still warm in my pocket where my hand had wandered without permission. “Do you?”

He didn’t answer right away, and for once I didn’t push him to. Outside the window, a photographer we both recognized by now drifted past, phone raised, waiting for exactly this kind of moment to catch on camera. Neither of us moved to give him one.