Technically Faking

by Robin Hale

  Like I should know what she wanted.

  When I couldn’t take it anymore, I extended my hand toward her the way I’d ended every business meeting for the past ten years. A handshake, a nod, and a murmured goodbye that could hardly have taken place on the same day I’d held her and danced with her and introduced her to my parents. To Dahlia and Cate and the rest of the Lovelace. To the only people whose opinion mattered.

  Amber took my hand with the same startled reflex and then it was over.

  Her door swung closed behind her, the light in the upstairs window turned on, and I got back into the car, flexing my palm and rubbing my fingers together, trying to summon the exact texture of her skin.

  I was an idiot.

  “Miss?” Stevens’ voice came through the partition, reminding me I’d sat there for too long inside my mind.

  “Home, Stevens.”

  “Of course, Ms. Spark.”

  The ride home ached. Everything ached. My palms itched with the need to take back the past hour, to do it over again. To not give up the right to hold Amber in my arms, to feel her breath against my skin. To not let the last time I touched her be something so impersonal as a handshake, for fuck’s sake.

  But it was over. It was done. And regrets were for other people.

  People who didn’t have the most important vote of their lives looming on the horizon.

  16

  AMBER

  Lips pressed against the back of my neck as the whole length of Iris’s body fitted herself to me.

  “You’re going to give in,” she murmured against my neck, lips curving into a smile while her hands slid over my body. One wrapped itself around my wrists, a token restraint, nothing I couldn’t get out of, and the other traced over my hip, my thigh, teased its way between my legs in the hot spray of the shower.

  “You think so?” I countered playfully, lighter than I actually felt.

  I was so fucking hot beneath her hands already. My nipples were tight, begging for her touch even though I didn’t want her to move her hands from where they were. The core of me was molten, heating with every stroke of her fingers, her lips.

  It was amazing that I hadn’t already shattered.

  Sharpness — teeth nipping against my shoulder, shocking a stifled gasp from my mouth as fingers delved lightly between my folds.

  “I think you’ve been dying for me to let you come since I kissed you goodbye this morning.”

  Well, she wasn’t wrong. And, fuck, she was hot. Had anyone ever actually complained about her confidence? Had anyone really described her as arrogant as if it wasn’t the sexiest thing that had ever happened?

  Those people were idiots.

  The pads of her fingers stroked along my outer lips, trailing sparks and fire, dipping occasionally to tease my opening, to slick themselves where I was desperate for her to thrust inside me.

  I pretended the curve of her lips against my shoulder was a smile, not a smirk. But the illusion wouldn’t hold for long.

  I was already losing the feeling of her lips on my skin, the sensation of her breath, the tile beneath my hands.

  The dream dissipated like steam escaping that shower, leaving me cold and clammy in the sheets of my bed. I’d never thought it was too big. Never. But despite being a simple full-size — nothing else could fit in the strange dimensions of my bedroom — it was cavernous and empty.

  Stretching my arms, I could reach both sides of the bed and my body ached for the feeling of Iris’s absurdly expensive sheets, the curve of her back in one of the loose tanks she wore to sleep. I hated that my bed was empty.

  The sun shone cheerily in through the gauzy curtains in my window, reminding me of how beautiful the city could be, but it didn’t make any of it better.

  I scrubbed my hands over my face and pressed my palms against my eyes, scowling.

  “Hey, you in there, princess?” Dave’s voice shook the last, clinging echoes of heat from my hips and thighs, chased the dream away for good.

  “Yeah,” I called back, throat thick from disuse.

  The door opened and Dave stood there, two mugs in his hands in an offering, and raised a brow at me.

  “So I guess I should say thank you,” Dave said as he came to sit on the edge of the mattress and handed me the second coffee.

  “You’re welcome.” I blinked. “What for, though?”

  “I got a raise.” Dave gave me a sidelong look as he took a sip from his mug.

  I pulled myself into a sitting position and gulped down a too-hot mouthful. “Hey, that’s great! Not sure how I helped…?”

  “Ms. Vogle said she met you at the Ada Lovelace fundraiser this past weekend.” The mug was the perfect prop for Dave’s little speech. “And then she told me she was raising my salary. It isn’t even review season. So…thanks.”

  I blinked again. “I really don’t think I did anything.”

  Dave shrugged. “She made these things sound related.” A frown took over the handsome line of his mouth. “She also sounded vaguely horrified that I have roommates.”

  If it weren’t for the mug of coffee in my hands, I would’ve burrowed back into the sheets. “I’m so sorry. All I said was that we were roommates!” I peeked out from behind the mug. “Would it help if I told her how you freak yourself out if you listen to that murder podcast you like while you’re home alone?”

  Dave snorted and nudged my knee. “No, thanks ever so.” Humor glinted in his eyes. “Don’t worry about it. Not going to complain about a raise, even if my boss apparently thinks she’s taking terrible advantage of me now. You know, I don’t think she’d ever considered that I lived someplace. Like, maybe she thought I had a kennel in the basement at the firm or something. Keep all the assistants down there.”

  “Rich people are weird,” I sighed, sagging back against the headboard.

  “You said it.”

  * * *

  THE DAY CRAWLED. It should’ve been impossible for time to move that slowly, but somehow it did. It was just that there was nothing left to do. I’d already scheduled and launched all my last-ditch social media posts. The only things that waited for me were the projects I’d let fall by the wayside while Iris Spark became my entire priority list.

  It was humiliating.

  The vote was happening in a few hours — if it hadn’t happened already — and I still couldn’t focus on the work I’d promised anyone else. I only wanted to know how the vote would go.

  ‘Thank you.’ She’d said. ‘For your help with all of this. You were the right person for the job.’

  I’d played the words over and over again in my mind, looking for meaning that wasn’t there. I knew it wasn’t there. Nothing she’d said to me had sounded anything at all like ‘Stay’ or ‘I want to keep seeing you’ or ‘This is real for me’. We’d fallen into bed together. Proximity could do that, sometimes. Like going to summer camp and falling in love with a stranger you’d never see again, or the intense friendships that would come up in the few weeks it took to rehearse and perform a show in community theater.

  I clung to the thought of the vote with everything I had. It was stupid; I knew that. The vote was entirely out of my hands. There was nothing I could do about it anymore — but it was important. It was the benchmark. The only way I could know if I’d — If I’d done what I’d set out to do.

  If I’d done well enough that Iris might want to see me again.

  I could hear her voice, stripped of socially-instilled gentleness and deference, scoffing at the idea. ‘You can’t make people do anything, Kowalczyk. You can only give them something to react to.’

  And I couldn’t even do that anymore.

  Rows and columns of carefully collated data swam in front of my eyes as I stared at my laptop screen. I had three weeks of results I’d hardly looked at — half of it from the batch script Iris had written for me, and every time I thought about that I had to fight to keep myself from childish sobbing — but none of it mattered.

  I didn’t c
are about the numbers. I didn’t care about my empire. I didn’t care about trending topics or the latest memes or anyone’s viral post.

  I kept swiping my phone open, hoping to see a text message from Iris: some too-formal thing, business-like, or a sharp-edged joke about some idiot she had to deal with. A loving barb about one of her insane family members.

  But there’d been nothing for the past two days. Nothing since an awkward goodbye so wrapped up in all the things I couldn’t bring myself to say that I wanted to choke on my own tongue.

  The phone in my hands, checked for the thousandth time, chirped and I nearly flung it across the room, heart leaping into my chest as the familiar text tone followed it.

  The first notification was an email from my bank, letting me know there had been a deposit authorized on behalf of ‘I. SPARK’ — oh. Right.

  A dull ache rose from my bones and seeped into all of the muscles of my body as realization settled in. The invoice. She’d mentioned Carrie would be handling the invoice and it was — that was it.

  The number — and holy shit was that a staggering number — was going to make a huge difference in handling the rent hike that had loomed so much larger not so long ago. It was great. Better than I’d expected.

  Which was probably why it made me feel like I’d been hit by a garbage truck.

  Fuck, I was an idiot. I’d known the score the whole way through.

  But it was different seeing the deposit in my account the same as any other contract work. I didn’t routinely have my world rocked by posting cute one-offs for a local bookstore.

  My forehead met the lip of my desk with a satisfying thud. I was so fucking stupid. I shouldn’t have slept with her. I knew it when I was doing it. Knew it the first time, the second, and the seventh.

  And I kept going back.

  I groaned and the phone chirped again, reminding me of the uncleared text notification.

  Right. Probably from Carrie, making sure I knew that the deposit had gone through from her end.

  I peeled my sandpaper eyelids open and stared morosely down at the screen. Sure enough, the contact was ‘CARRIE’.

  ‘Ms. Kowalczyk, please let me know if there is a problem with the delivery of your fee. And if you wish to keep track of the board’s decision, I believe the Wall Street Journal’s video stream will cover it. Best wishes.’

  Man, that sucked.

  I sat back in my desk chair and brought up the WSJ’s video stream without considering if I should look. There wasn’t anything I could do — did I want to torture myself? But not only that, it was the end of my contracting adventure for Iris Spark and I was back to being handled by her assistant.

  My heart ached at the thought. Had Iris not wanted to talk to me anymore? Was that it? Was I beneath her notice?

  Perversely, the thought tried to twist itself into a golden spark of hope. Maybe it would be too hard for her to talk with me, thinking things were over? What if she’d been as torn up about it as I was?

  Pain flared at the base of my skull, a tension headache that I was definitely not getting out of while I tortured myself over things with Iris.

  The WSJ page finally loaded and my jaw dropped.

  Oh, no.

  * * *

  “YOU’VE REACHED Iris Spark’s office, Carrie Liebe speaking. May I take a message?”

  Carrie’s voice came through in professional detachment, pretending she didn’t already know it was me on the other end of the line.

  “Where is she?” I blurted without preamble.

  “Ms. Spark is at the Lovelace with her cousin,” Carrie returned smoothly.

  I let out the breath I’d been holding and pressed my forehead against the wall. “Okay,” I breathed. “Okay. So she isn’t alone. That’s good. Is she —” The words stuck in my throat, and I realized I didn’t know what was going to come next. I’d called Carrie as soon as I had the first fragments of a plan together — a stupid plan, probably, but the only one I’d been able to come up with when my brain shorted out. And damn, that was embarrassing, I should’ve planned for this. Why hadn’t I planned for this?

  “No,” Carrie agreed. “She isn’t alone. I believe Ms. Fallon is planning something of a soiree.”

  Okay. “Do you know how tight the turnaround is on Iris’s apartment? Is the board giving her time to find something else?” Then I just needed to get Dave and Rain on board and I could run the numbers again and make sure — wait. “Ms. Fallon?”

  “Yes, Dahlia Fallon. Ms. Spark’s cousin?” Carrie said. “As far as I am aware, the apartment is included in the settlement.”

  Fallon. Jesus Christ. Iris Spark had been Iris Fallon.

  I stared down at the notebook in my lap, full of my scribbling efforts to find a way out of this mess, certain it was somehow responsible for the humiliation burning up the back of my neck.

  “Do you — ah, do you have an address for the Lovelace? All Iris ever mentioned was that it was somewhere around Noe Valley,” I said once my mouth cooperated with my brain enough to figure out how.

  “I’ll forward the address to your phone, Ms. Kowalczyk. Shall I inform Ms. Fallon that you are accepting her invitation?”

  Carrie’s calm, professional demeanor was laced through with amusement, but the foundation of the world I lived in had been rocked, eroded and I couldn’t put together what she found so funny.

  “Yeah, go ahead and do that.” I’d take a rideshare over to the club and figure out the rest when I got there. Or something. It would work out. “Thank you, Carrie.”

  “Of course, Ms. Kowalczyk. I’m sure Ms. Spark will be relieved to see you.”

  The line went dead and I was left for a moment in the surreal wreckage of my former life: the bedroom that had been the seat of my ambitions for years, the bed that had been the first place I’d slept in San Francisco for more than a single night, the desk that had contained all of my plans, my future right up until the moment that it hadn’t.

  When I’d bumped into Iris Spark — formerly Iris Fallon, and that was never, ever going to be anything other than bizarre — in a coffee shop and sent her drink crashing to the ground, I hadn’t anticipated that I’d been sending my messy little life crashing along with it.

  It’d only been three weeks, but I couldn’t go back without being absolutely sure there was no way forward.

  17

  IRIS

  “Aren’t you the picture of cheer.”

  The sound of Dahlia’s voice hit me a split second before I caught sight of the champagne she held out.

  “Thanks.” I accepted the glass and braced for whatever she was winding up to say. She always did have a flair for the dramatic.

  “I thought we were celebrating your golden parachute,” Dahlia remarked, leaning back against the railing of the Lovelace’s patio. “You don’t seem to be in the mood.”

  “It’s fine.” It was fine. Or it would be, once I got past my ridiculous fixation on Amber. She’d done her job. She’d completed the campaign. Hell, she’d done well enough that the board had been obligated to diamond stud that parachute.

  It was ridiculous to feel like she’d walked out as soon as her work was done when I’d been the one driving away.

  I couldn’t blame her for staying put, obviously. But I couldn’t stop wishing that she hadn’t.

  “Yeah, you look like it’s fine.” Dahlia didn’t bother trying to hide her sarcasm behind something gentle. “Want to tell me what’s actually going on?”

  “I’ve — ended things with Amber.”

  “What?” The shock in her voice drew my eyes away from the bubbles climbing the walls of my glass to take in the expression on Dahlia’s face. “What happened? Did she — she wouldn’t, right? She wouldn’t walk out because of the vote.” Dahlia looked unconvinced even as she struggled to fit the pieces together.

  “Not exactly,” I said wryly. “Her work was finished. I’d hired her.”

  The champagne was sweet and gentle and nothing near the burn
I wanted. Dahlia had probably done it on purpose. Despite appearances, most things she did turned out to be that way.

  “I didn’t realize Amber was an escort,” Dahlia remarked mildly.

  “She isn’t,” I hissed. I swallowed, took a moment to settle the vicious possessiveness that had risen in my gut. I was feral. “She’s a social media consultant. I hired her to run a social media campaign for me. To push back against the…ousting.”

  Silence reigned in the warm lamplight on the patio, hand-crafted bulbs glimmering and stars doing their best to fight through the city’s light pollution above. After a long moment, Dahlia spoke.

  “That’s insane.”

  I snorted. “You sound impressed.”

  “I am,” she insisted. “It’s impressively insane.” She reached out a well-manicured hand, stopped my fingers from picking at my cuticles, and forced me to meet her eyes. “No one does that, Iris.”

  I frowned. “Seems common enough in the film industry.”

  “No, I mean — no one looks at someone they’ve hired the way you looked at her.” Dahlia’s voice was gentle and I hated the sound of her going easy on me. It wasn’t how we were with each other, and that, more than anything else, began to drive home how thoroughly I’d fucked up. “Have you told her how you feel?”

  I glared, holding Dahlia’s gaze until she put her hands up in surrender.

  “Okay, you haven’t.” She took a contemplative sip of champagne. “You should, though.”

  “Right. The humiliation will help the rest of this pass much more easily. Brilliant, Dahlia.”

  Dahlia’s theatrical eye-roll was closer to how I wanted her to treat me. “This isn’t that complicated. You want her. You got close to her and fell for her and there’s no reason the two of you can’t be together.” She leaned against my shoulder and nudged me. “If it were going to blow everything up, it would have when it was fake.”