by Hazel Parker
Anna’s tired eyes brightened, and she felt the vigor of studying lift the weight of fatigue from her shoulders. “Study guides!” she chirped so happily that Brett couldn’t help but laugh at her.
“Seriously, Diaz?” he asked, unsure whether or not she was pulling his leg. For anyone else, it would have been a clear joke, but it was sort of on-brand for Anna, the straight-A student who organized her closet by color and kept her socks folded. “This is anal retentive, even for you.”
“Well, I don’t see you coming up with better ideas,” she accused, taking a long sip from her coffee. Now that she could taste it without burning her tongue, she paused in surprise. Brett had often brought her coffee while she was studying, and she always got the same thing: a soy latte with cinnamon on top. She mostly drank her coffee black now and she rarely got it from anywhere but the breakroom, but the familiar flavor was enough to bring back a strong feeling of nostalgia.
“You remembered my drink order?” she asked, earning herself a self-satisfied smile.
“Of course I did,” he confirmed like it was obvious. “I bought you coffee like three times a week.”
“But it’s been so long, I just thought—I mean, you’ve probably had a lot of new…coffee orders in that time.” She didn’t know quite how to insinuate that she assumed that he’d replaced her with a new hot girlfriend as soon as she’d told him that she didn’t want to be his, but she wasn’t sure how to do it without being rude. He didn’t look angry, though, as he shook his head.
“It’s pretty much just been the one,” he replied. “I know a lot more drink orders than coffee and breakfast.” She nodded and forced herself not to let that fact make her feel like she was special to him in some way. Why would she let herself be proud of the fact that she was one of the only girls he knew that he hadn’t slept with? Not knowing how to continue, she cleared her throat and shook her head to clear it before remembering the flash-cards in her hands.
“So,” she focused, “uh, I made these. They’ve got questions on the front and space for answers on the back. I thought we should fill them out together, then use them to memorize each other’s answers.” She handed him a thick stack of cards that made him groan in annoyance.
“Could you have made this anymore lame?”
Anna frowned. “It’s not lame! It’s like a game show.”
“Except without the host or the audience or the fun.”
Settling into her spot at the kitchen table, she threw a marker at his head, which he dodged. “Just answer them and stop whining,” she rolled her eyes. With a sigh, he picked up his drink from the coffee table and came to sit beside her in the kitchen. He leafed through the cards with an expression of distaste.
“I already know all these things about you,” he said. “I know where you work and what you do and where you went to school.”
“Yes, those are the easy ones,” she retorted. “There are a lot of other things, too, though.” He held up a card that said “SIBLINGS?” to face her.
“You have a brother named Mario who’s five years younger than you,” he answered, removing the card to reveal the next one. “You grew up in Harlem, your dad died when you were eight, and your birthday is in March.”
Her eyes widened a bit in surprise. She hadn’t expected him to know that much, honestly, and she was impressed. “How do you remember all that stuff?” she asked, and he groaned again.
“Because you told me,” he replied as if it was obvious. “I don’t get close to a lot of people, Anna.” For a moment, the way he looked into her eyes, she almost forgot why she’d stopped speaking to him back then. “I’m sure you know all that stuff about me, too.” That reminded her.
“I…really don’t,” she admitted. “You never told me a whole lot, Brett. I know you grew up in SoHo and that your grandparents were rich, but honestly, I didn’t even know you had siblings until the other day.”
For some reason, that appeared to be news to him. “Really?” he asked. “I could have sworn I mentioned them at some point.” She shook her head.
“You’re not exactly the easiest person to get close to,” she said. She’d never wanted to pry into his private life by asking questions he didn’t want to answer, but he’d always kept their relationship more surface-level than personal. She never got a chance to know him as deeply as he knew her, and that had been why it had hurt so much when she’d confessed that she liked him and he’d rejected her proposition to date. When he’d said that he didn’t want to be tied down, it had felt like he was telling her that he already knew all he needed to know and he wasn’t interested in her. It was personal and insulting even though she had tried to tell herself that it wasn’t that he didn’t want to date her, but that she didn’t want to date anyone.
Predictably, he didn’t want to comment on that accusation, so instead, he began to leaf through the cards again and showed one to her. “Favorite candy?” he read incredulously. “You really think someone is going to ask us about that?”
“You never know,” she shrugged. “Mine’s chocolate covered cherries, by the way.”
Brett rolled his eyes and sighed. “I like jelly beans.” She gestured to the papers and smiled.
“Well, write it down,” she instructed playfully. Instead of cooperating and getting to work, he sat back in his chair and continued to sort through the cards.
“You could give me a million years to learn all this information, and I would still fail whatever test you’ve inevitably got planned.”
Hesitantly, she nodded. She didn’t want to argue about it—it wasn’t worth doing so, anyway, because even if he agreed to try, there was no point if he didn’t retain it.
“Do you have a better idea?” she asked again, this time sincerely. Brett bit his lip contemplatively and met her eyes as if trying to study her without exchanging any words at all.
“I say we just get through the important things and dodge questions we don’t know the answer to,” he suggested. Anna didn’t love that idea. She was a meticulous planner, so flying by the seat of her pants didn’t sit well with her. However, she had to acknowledge that it did sound a hell of a lot more plausible than learning the intimate details of one another’s lives just for a short-lived rouse.
“Okay,” she agreed reluctantly. “What do you think are the important things?”
He’d been sorting through her flashcards, making Anna feel a bit relieved that they weren’t made completely in vain, for the most vital ones and setting them aside into a small pile.
“How did I ask you out?”
For some reason, Anna flushed pink. She hated to admit that she’d thought a bit about this, and it wasn’t a brand new scene in her mind. “Well, how romantic do you want to have been?” she asked. “Would you prefer to have eased into it without even noticing, or do you want to have given me, like, a dream proposal?”
His lips twitched up into an almost-teasing smirk. “Let’s say I went the dream-boat route.”
Anna took a breath and closed her eyes to try to picture her go-to romantic fantasy. It had barely changed since she’d first thought it up while living next to Brett, but the perpetrator of the scene had been updated to accommodate her more recent crushes. Though there hadn’t been many, she couldn’t deny that she’d played through this thought process with her coworker Josh once or twice.
“So, first you have to promise you won’t laugh,” she disclaimed. “I know it’s stupid. I read a lot of romance novels, and I’ve seen a lot of movies, so it’s probably super cheesy and cliché.”
Brett rolled his eyes. “You’re stalling,” he accused. “Just tell me. I promise I won’t laugh.”
Another steadying breath allowed her to speak, but she couldn’t look him in the eyes as she did so. “I think it’d be romantic to make it a surprise,” she began. “I’ve always kind of had this vision of a guy showing up with flowers and taking me out to dinner somewhere nice, a place with live music or something. And then at the end of the meal, the ba
nd would start to play our song, and he’d ask me to be his girlfriend.”
Brett laughed out loud; he couldn’t help it. It shattered Anna’s dreamy expression and turned her face crimson.
“You said you wouldn’t laugh!”
“That sounds more like a proposal than just asking someone to date you,” he pointed out.
She stared at her hands on the table. “Well, I mean, it’s kind of functioning under the assumption that that relationship is going to be my last relationship. I told you that I know it’s silly, but you asked for the movie version, so I gave it to you.”
He nodded. “It certainly is…theatrical,” he agreed. “But I’m okay with telling everyone I swept you off your feet like that. Hell, maybe it’ll help me get a real girlfriend once you and I end this fake romance. One of my cousins might finally think I’m worth setting up with one of their friends or something.”
Part of Anna didn’t love the idea of using her romantic dream to falsify a relationship, but she couldn’t very well tell Brett that after she’d gone into so much detail. Using her favorite scenario, something she’d been replaying in her head at night for years and just wishing for the right guy to confess it to so that he might use it in real life: it felt like it was cheapened. Now, if a prospective boyfriend really wanted to go through with it, the only person she’d be able to think of was Brett.
Still, she’d agreed to this, and she reminded herself that the sacrifice was for Eustice. It wasn’t likely to have ever happened, anyway, so why should she care about ruining it?
“Sounds good,” she said, writing it down on an unused piece of cardstock. “What else do you think people might ask? It’s your family, after all, so you know them better than I do.”
Almost like he doubted that, Brett tugged at the collar of his sweater. “Uh, I don’t even know,” he admitted. “My mom isn’t too nosy; she’ll probably leave you alone for the most part and just bombard me with questions, so I can just lie, and she’ll never know the difference. My dad is a lot more hands-on. He’ll want to know what kinds of things we do for fun, if I’m treating you right, that kind of stuff.”
Anna’s heart melted a little at the thought of a future father-in-law caring so much about his son’s partners. “Aw,” she cooed, “that’s so sweet.”
Brett shrugged. “He raised us to be respectful; I can give him that,” he said. That surprised Anna a little, but she supposed that he could have a constant string of women in and out of his apartment and still be respectful so long as they knew exactly what they were signing up for, and she couldn’t remember a single incident of him lying to her in her year of being with him almost every day. “So, what kinds of places would your ideal boyfriend take you out on dates?”
For the next several hours, they shared personal details, mostly superficial and factual. Anna learned the things that she should and shouldn’t say to his family and learned that really, Brett wasn’t too close to any of his relatives. She’d been so concerned about learning details about Brett that would expose the lie if she didn’t know them, but as it turned out, neither of his parents or his siblings knew much about him, either. Anna had always wanted siblings: she’d grown up lonely. She’d always dreamed of having an older sister that would paint her nails and give her advice, or an older brother who could chase away the guys who treated her poorly. Maybe it was just different with boys, but Brett shared only very few fond memories of his childhood. In fact, most of the things he did disclose were complaints or criticisms, and despite the fact that he’d had the siblings that she’d always wanted, it seemed as though Brett had grown up lonely, too.
By noon, Anna was starving. She’d been too rushed to eat breakfast, so even though her go-to order of chicken lo mein and dumplings would normally be enough to last her two meals, she was able to eat all of it plus her fortune cookie. Brett had footed the bill for the take out, for which she was grateful. It brought back memories, sitting beside him at a table covered in study materials and watching him try and fail to operate chopsticks before finally getting frustrated enough to use a fork.
“You know, I’ve missed this,” she admitted after they’d both pushed away their empty cartons, sipping at her iced tea.
“Missed what?”
“This,” she replied vaguely, gesturing around the kitchen. “You and me, just doing nothing together. It was always something I looked forward to.” He laughed.
“You looked forward to doing nothing?” he accused, and she shook her head, meeting his eyes with a shy smile.
“Doing nothing with you,” she corrected. His lips were tugged up at the corners like he was trying not to make fun of her, a playful, casual expression that was unique to him. Vaguely, without averting her gaze from his mouth, she could see that his brown eyes were gazing at her own, but she dared not glance up for fear that a sudden movement, even one so slight, could shatter the moment and ruin it for good. He shifted so that his elbows rested on the table in front of him, leaning forward slightly, and she mirrored him. The distance that separated them was uncomfortable: too large to traverse for a kiss, but too small to be just friendly. She tilted her head upward, and he reached out his hand to caress her cheek, a motion she leaned into. His thumb grazed her cheekbone, and his fingers pushed a few stray hairs behind her ear before resting against the top of her neck.
“I’m not going to lie; there were times when I thought about the old apartment after I moved out.”
He nodded. “Then why didn’t you just stay?” he asked. “We could have just kept messing around every weekend if you hadn’t gotten so busy and moved across town.” Anna startled a little: he knew full well why she couldn’t do that, and it was a bold thing for him to ask of her considering he’d been the one to reject her when she’d asked him to date.
“I had a degree to finish,” she replied pointedly, irritably. “I needed to be in a place where I could focus on school so I could get a job.”
“You were focusing just fine with me for a year,” he pointed out, which made anger bubble up inside her. Had he completely forgotten the circumstances under which they’d parted ways?
“Yeah,” she snapped, “and then I asked you out.” He paled a bit, almost like he truly didn’t remember and that this was a surprise, but she could see on his face that it was not.
“Oh,” he said. “That.”
She sat back in her seat defensively, crossing her arms, the moment of near-kissing bliss forgotten. “If you liked what we had, why did you tell me you weren’t interested in me?”
“I didn’t want to start dating you because I figured you’d get all attached. I wasn’t ready to be tied down.”
That made her laugh, but it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “And you thought I was?” she challenged. “I was twenty, Brett; it’s not like I was asking you to marry me.”
He shrugged. “I mean, can you blame me for thinking that you might have been, though?” he asked. “You weren’t exactly playing the field and having fun. I figured that you wanted to settle down.”
“Not everyone has to sleep with everyone they meet to feel fulfilled,” she bit. “Doesn’t mean I wasn’t having a good time.”
Brett set his jaw at the insult. She hadn’t thought that it would affect him, really—a lot of guys were proud of their prowess—but, at least from her mouth, the words seemed to dig into him.
“Yes, I was with a lot of women. I still am. Is that a problem?”
“Why would it be? We’re not actually together,” she reminded him harshly. “You can do whatever the hell you want, and it doesn’t matter to me one bit.” That was a lie, and they both knew it.
“At least I get attention from people who are actually attracted to me, no strings attached,” he countered. Anna felt the tips of her ears turn red with embarrassment and anger. He knew, then, or at least had made a lucky guess, that she hadn’t been asked out by anyone for real…ever. Brett was the closest thing she’d ever had to a boyfriend, and the first time he hadn’t wa
nted her, and now he was only using her. She’d always blamed being shy, being quiet, being intimidatingly smart and good at what she did, but maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe she just wasn’t what guys wanted.
