Not So Fake (The Real Thing Book 1)

by Emma Lyon

  “Does Mom know?” The thought of that made me wince. My father I could handle, but I hated that my mom would be hurt that we’d lied to her.

  “I don’t think so, but that doesn’t mean he won’t tell her. Does that mean it’s true?”

  There was no point continuing to lie, even if I wanted to. “It’s true in that I did hire him, first for Bryce’s wedding, and then for one of Dad’s donor dinners after.” Technically I’d hired him for the weekend, too, but considering how things had progressed, it would be a little weird giving him money for that. “But he’s not an escort like you’re thinking. It’s just a dating service.”

  “So you two really were faking it.” He sounded disappointed. I was surprised at first, then remembered that he’d genuinely seemed to like Zach. Or at least liked him better than Bryce, who he had generally ignored.

  I shook my head. “I mean, I guess it started out that way, but now we’re….” I trailed off because I didn’t exactly know what we were. A few days ago, before we’d gotten back to the city, I would have said we were together, whatever that meant. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  Of course, that was before I’d known my father had cornered him and said those things to him. No wonder Zach had been off.

  “Now you’re what?” Ethan prompted.

  “What exactly did Dad say to him?” I asked, avoiding the question.

  Ethan shrugged. “That he knew what Zach was. That he, uh, didn’t think Zach was good enough for you.”

  My anger built and crested. My father had always had a need to direct my life, but he’d never actively interfered like this before. “What did Zach say?”

  “Nothing.”

  Of course he wasn’t going to confront my father in his own home. But if he’d been holding all of that in, I didn’t have to look far for the reason he’d felt off since we’d gotten back.

  I was relieved, in a way, because if Zach’s withdrawal had to do with what my father had said to him, then that was fixable. I just had to tell him I didn’t feel the same way.

  “Okay, I’ll talk to him.” Zach, not my father, though I was most definitely going to be talking to my father about this, too. “Hey.” Ethan looked up from his coffee. “Thanks for telling me. I’m sorry we lied to you about being boyfriends.”

  Ethan shrugged. “It’s nice not being the fucked up one in the family for once. I mean, you’re the golden child. The one who can do no wrong. I can’t believe you had the balls to hire him in the first place.”

  “I have balls,” I said, and Ethan snickered. I eyed him. “Now that we’re here, are you going to tell me about whoever it was you were texting all weekend?”

  Ethan narrowed his eyes. “This isn’t gossip hour at the coffee shop. Leave my love life out of it.”

  “Oh, so it does have to do with one of your admirers.”

  I got a kick under the table for my trouble. “Go get your food. They just called it.”

  Despite Ethan telling me what my father had done, I felt lighter than I had in days. I was angry with my father, of course—really fucking angry—but at least now I knew why Zach had been acting the way he had.

  We could sort all of this out and put it behind us, and everything would be fine again.

  26

  Zach

  “You look like your dog died,” Seth observed, when I started my shift. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Like I want a hole in the head,” I said. I went down to the other end of the bar to check if anyone needed a refill.

  It wasn’t Seth’s fault everything was unraveling. Though it actually was Seth’s fault, I mused. He was the reason I’d started fake dating in the first place. If it weren’t for him, I never would have met Lane. I wouldn’t be feeling like this.

  “Have you ever fallen for a client?” I asked Seth abruptly, when we had a lull in customers. Apparently I did want to talk about it.

  Seth answered easily, “Yes.”

  Huh. “What happened?”

  Seth busied himself in wiping down the spotless bar. “It was a repeat client. Once a week for a couple of months. We always had fun together. She was really beautiful, you know? Put together. Smart, funny.”

  It was clear Seth wasn’t totally over her. “What happened?”

  Seth shrugged. “She was married. I knew that early on—she’d told me before things escalated between us—but at the time, I thought I was fine with it. We were just having fun. I went in with eyes wide open.”

  “So what changed?”

  “Me, I guess. I started feeling like it was more than it was, and thought she might feel the same. Until she made it clear to me she had no intention of leaving her husband. That for her, I was just a convenient fling.”

  “So why do you keep doing it? Working for Max, I mean.”

  Seth shrugged. “It made me realize why he has that rule to begin with. I was the one who fucked up. She’d never promised me anything more than what we had.”

  I couldn’t help but think there was something screwed up in his logic. That there was no way to date someone, even artificially, without feelings getting involved somewhere.

  Case in point.

  I called Max on my break. I’d known since I’d left for the bay with Lane that I couldn’t keep working for him, but ironically it was not working for him that would put the nail in the coffin of my relationship with Lane. But I was doing the right thing. Right?

  Max was disappointed, if understanding. “I’ve been getting a lot of turnover lately,” he mused on the other end of the phone. “Maybe I need to tweak my model.”

  I hesitated. “You know, I don’t think it’s your model. It’s like, everyone thinks they’re getting what they want, but in the end no one is happy.” I thought of the businessman, looking to cheat on his husband or wife with a meaningless fuck. I thought of me, breaking all of Max’s rules to be with Lane. If Max’s dates really did foster the real, in-person connection he wanted, then they were bound to be much messier than any model could contain.

  “Huh,” he’d said, but I wasn’t sure he’d really heard me. He was probably already looking for the right algorithm to fix it.

  If there was one, I wish he’d let me know. Because between Lane’s father and the financial consequences of not working for Max anymore, I was in my own complicated mess. And the only way I saw out of it was the last thing my heart wanted.

  When I emerged from the break room, Seth nodded to the bar. “I think Lane Garrett is here to see you.”

  Apparently I wasn’t going to be able to put this off, even though just seeing Lane made my heart stutter and flip over. The wry tilt of his smile. The way his beautiful gray eyes lit up when he saw me. It made doing what I had to do hurt that much more.

  I ignored the question in Seth’s eyes and headed over to Lane. “Can I get you a beer?” I asked him as casually as I could, not leaning in to grab a kiss the way I wanted to. “Or do you want me to mix you up something fancy?”

  “Beer’s good.”

  I felt his eyes on me as I retrieved one of the local brew his mother had stocked at the bay house from the fridge below the bar. I put the beer and a glass in front of him, and before he could say anything, I said, “We need to talk.” I took a breath, trying to decide on the right approach, then realizing there was no good approach for this. “I called Max and told him I was done.”

  Lane didn’t look displeased, but he did look wary, probably because the way I’d said it didn’t make it sound like a good thing. “What does that mean?” he asked cautiously.

  I voiced what I’d been trying so hard to get around. “It means I’ll need to take a year off from school to save up money. And the best way for me to do that is to move back home.”

  I saw him working through the ramifications. To my surprise, he said, “I’m not your ex. I’m not going to bail just because we have to live in different cities for a year. It won’t be easy, but there’s no reason we can’t make it work. I only have another semester o
f coursework left, anyway, and after that I can work on my thesis from anywhere.”

  His willingness to stick with me was both unexpected and warming, but I knew I had to keep to my resolve. Because it wasn’t just about making a long distance relationship work. It was about not standing in the way of Lane and his family.

  “I just don’t think I’m in the best position to offer you anything right now.”

  Lane blinked. “Ethan told me what my father said to you.”

  The knife in my chest twisted. I’d wondered if Ethan had heard that.

  “It’s just my father thinking he knows what’s best for me,” Lane went on quickly, his words tripping over one another. “He’ll get over it. Besides, it’s not like we need his permission to date.”

  Maybe so, but I wasn’t going to be the cause of a rift between Lane and his family. I couldn’t shake the sense that Lane’s father had been right that I’d only hold Lane back. “Maybe he’s right.”

  Lane’s face froze. “What do you mean?”

  I straightened, unconsciously withdrawing from him, and I saw the hurt in Lane’s expression before he covered it up. “He’s just trying to protect you.”

  “Protect himself is more like it. He’s just worried about bad publicity for the campaign.”

  I couldn’t meet his eyes. “I just think that once you’ve had time to think about it, you’ll realize he’s right. And that it’s not worth fighting with your family over.”

  Silence stretched between us. I’d hated all the words I’d just said, but I couldn’t see any other way. I was doing the right thing. I just had to keep telling myself that. “Let’s give it some time, all right?”

  I saw the moment he realized I was breaking up with him. The hurt and disbelief in his eyes, like a dagger to my heart.

  I told myself that we were never actually dating, that we’d just gotten carried away by the moment, but I knew it was a lie. Whatever we were, it was real. Had been real.

  “If that’s what you want.” I barely recognized Lane’s voice.

  It’s not what I want at all. “It’s just…I think it’s what we need to do. For now, anyway.”

  There was a beat of silence, like we were both waiting for something. But there was nothing more I could say.

  “I’ll call you, all right?” But I knew he heard the note in my voice that said I wouldn’t.

  Because despite my for now, this didn’t feel anything but final. I just had to accept that it was actually over.

  27

  Lane

  Cassie took one look at my face Friday night and said, “We’re going out drinking.”

  It was proof of how awful I felt that I didn’t even put up a fight. Since that talk with Zach, a ball of misery had lodged in my chest, squeezing everything else out. It was hard to believe we’d gone from we’d had over the weekend to this. But if Zach was so convinced we couldn’t make it work, then maybe he hadn’t been as serious about me as I was about him.

  Except I knew in my heart that was a lie. By the expression on his face at the bar, Zach was hurting just as much as I was. What I didn’t know was why he was so determined to give up what he wanted. What we both wanted.

  In the meantime, drowning my misery in the shots Cassie kept buying for me, while maybe not the healthiest response, was at least helping to dull the ache in my chest.

  “I can’t believe you hooked up with that hottie from the wedding after all,” Cassie said after I’d spilled everything. She waved her hands expansively to emphasize her point. She’d been downing just as many shots as I had. She punched my arm. “You sly dog.”

  I rubbed my arm, which smarted even through the haze of alcohol—Cassie tended to underestimate her strength—and said, “It doesn’t matter now. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.” I knew that wasn’t quite true, but it sounded morose, and that was how I felt.

  “Look, Lane,” she said seriously, grabbing on to my hand and holding it between hers. “He’ll come around. He’s probably just scared that everything between you two happened so quickly. Men are like cats. They don’t like change.”

  I frowned. “I’m pretty sure that’s a sweeping generalization of an entire gender.”

  “Well, some men are like cats. Maybe he’s one of them.”

  I wasn’t sure how we’d gotten to cat comparisons. “What if he doesn’t come around?”

  She shrugged. “Then you don’t need him anyway.” She looked up toward the door and frowned. “What the hell is he doing here?”

  I followed her gaze and froze when I saw who’d just walked in. It was Bryce.

  We’d decided on O’Shea’s, which was the closest bar to headquarters, but Bryce hadn’t been at headquarters in weeks. There was no reason for him to be here, unless….

  My half-formed thought was confirmed when he spotted us and headed our way.

  “No,” Cassie declared loudly as he approached. “No fucking way.”

  “Hey,” Bryce said brightly, ignoring Cassie’s glare.

  “Fuck off,” Cassie said, just as brightly.

  His eyes narrowed. “I’m here to talk to Lane, not you.” While her eyes shot daggers at him, he turned to me. I’d been frozen in shock since he’d first appeared, but now a rush of anger filled the void in my chest. Most of it was probably the alcohol, but I suddenly really wanted to know what he had to say to me, because I had a few choice words to say back. “Can we talk in private?”

  “Don’t do it, Lane,” Cassie warned. “He’s nothing but a prick.”

  “Bitch,” Bryce muttered under his breath, which did nothing to endear me to him. But I still wanted to know why he was here and what he thought he had to say to me.

  “It’s okay,” I told Cassie. “It’ll just be for a few minutes.”

  “Fine,” she said, her chair scraping backward as she stood up. “I’m going to the ladies’ room while you talk.” She pointed a finger at Bryce. “You’d better be done by the time I get back.” She flounced off in the direction of the bathrooms.

  Bryce wrinkled his nose in distaste. “Why do you still hang out with her?”

  “Because she’s my friend and I like her,” I said pointedly. “What the hell do you want?”

  Bryce hesitated, then took the seat next to me. “You didn’t answer my text.”

  I wished for another shot to blur my head even more. “Didn’t you just get back from your honeymoon?”

  Bryce ignored that and said in a rush, “I know things didn’t work out the way you wanted between us, but it was never because I didn’t still love you. I thought maybe I’d stop, you know? Find a way to get over you.”

  He paused as if expecting a response from me, but I was in a state of half-drunk disbelief. I understood all the individual words he was saying, but not how they fit together. What he was saying was so ridiculously implausible.

  He went on, “But I haven’t been able to get over wanting you. Maybe you can love more than one person, you know?”

  It was so quintessentially Bryce. Of course he’d continue to navel-gaze on his own selfish needs without any consideration for the people around him. “What about Hope? You know, the woman you married?”

  He hesitated. “We’d have to be careful, of course—”

  “Oh my God,” I broke in. I couldn’t believe I’d spent two years with the person in front of me, suggesting what I was pretty sure he was suggesting. “You need to stop now.”

  The part of me not disgusted by him almost felt sorry for him. The world was changing—plenty of politicians were out as gay these days—but he still thought he had to lie to his own wife to have what he wanted.

  But it wasn’t really about being out or not being out. It was about Bryce wanting it both ways.

  “Look, Bryce, it’s over between us.” I said it as kindly as I could, because I knew how it felt to be rejected. Twice now.

  “I don’t think you really mean that.”

  “I do,” I said firmly. “I really, really do
.”

  He frowned. “Is this because of that guy you were with at the wedding? Who was that, anyway?”

  At the mention of Zach, my heart flipped unhappily. The haze of alcohol left my head in a rush, leaving me tragically clear-headed. What I wouldn’t give to have him here with me now. Because even when he’d broken my heart, Zach had never made me feel as small as Bryce did.

  “I think you need to go.”

  Bryce looked angry now that I’d turned him down. He wasn’t used to that—he was used to getting what he wanted, and I’d been all too willing to go along with that when we were together. But not now. Even if Zach and I were through, I could never go back to Bryce. Not after knowing the real thing.

  “If that’s how you feel,” he said flatly, “though I think you’re being overly dramatic about it all. We were good together. Don’t you remember that?”

  “Goodbye, Bryce,” I said firmly, and to my relief, Bryce didn’t seem inclined to push it. He got up and pushed his chair back noisily, and had turned back to the door when I added, “If you don’t love Hope, you should tell her now, so you can both get on with your lives. She doesn’t deserve this from you.”

  I heard his snort before he left. Poor Hope. And poor Bryce. Because he was going to go through life never admitting what he wanted nor appreciating what he had.

  “Is that prick gone?” Cassie said loudly when she returned, looking around as if she could laser Bryce dead with her eyes.

  “Like a freight train,” I affirmed. “And not coming back.”

  “Thank God,” she said, taking her seat again. “I thought I might have to stage an intervention.” She looked me up and down and frowned. “You look sad and sober again, and we can’t have that. Time to escalate to tequila.”

  I sighed and let her order the shots, knowing I was going to regret it in the morning. Right now, the last thing I wanted was to be left alone with my thoughts.