Accidental Forever: Fake Romance Box Set

by Hazel Parker

  Devon reached for her trembling hand at her side and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You know that’s not true, right?” he verified, but she couldn’t bring herself to agree. “A lot has changed. First of all, he doesn’t have a key here, so you’re safe the minute you lock that door.” She nodded. It didn’t feel true, but logically, she knew he was right. “And second of all, you didn’t drag us anywhere. We came willingly. You’re just as stuck with me as I am with you, if not more so,” he teased, “because I’m not leaving you alone no matter how many times you tell me I should.”

  There was a passion burning in his eyes when she propped herself up on one hand to look him in the eye; he meant what he was saying. She was suddenly very aware that he’d entangled their fingers together rather than just taking her hand under the sheets. His hands were calloused and rough and much bigger than hers, but she could easily slip her hand away from his grip if she wanted to: which was precisely why she didn’t. Abby had gone from splitting her time between her mother and father, always told where to be and when, then to renting a house with a perfectionist roommate, back home, where her mother had been even more unbearable than before out of fear that she’d get lazy and not become anything. Then it was back to a studio apartment that had required her to work more than forty hours a week under a demanding boss. When she’d finally moved in with Trevor, she’d thought she’d be set for a while, but he turned out to be the worst of them all. She’d never had a choice before, never had someone leave a door open for her to choose to walk through. It was alluring; it made her want to stay here like this, lying on the bed hand in hand until she had to leave for work.

  She didn’t know how to say thank you with her words. She’d already tried so many times, and she still felt like she was in the rut of debt, like he didn’t know how much this meant to her that he would care about her without expecting something in return. Because she didn’t have another way to say it, Abby leaned in slowly, tilting her chin up and letting her eyes flutter shut until she felt…

  Until she felt Devon untangle his fingers from her own and sit up all the way on the bed. It wasn’t rude or outraged, but still, she flinched in anticipation of his anger: she’d done the wrong thing, misinterpreted his signals. He didn’t want to kiss her, and she’d very clearly just tried to do that.

  “I think it’s getting late,” he said, reaching up behind him to flip the light switch. “You seem really tired.” She said a small prayer in her head that he didn’t seem like he was going to address the near-kiss and sat up herself, not meeting his eyes again.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry. I just wanted to bring you the blankets and pillows; I didn’t mean to unload all that on you.” Before she could get up out of the bed, he reached out and grabbed her wrist to stop her.

  “If you don’t think you can sleep,” he began, “you’re welcome to stay out here with me for a while.” Abby flushed bright pink and was glad that he couldn’t see it in the dim light.

  “I’m not going to sleep in your bed,” she disclaimed, “I was just—”

  “Oh, whoa, I’m not suggesting that,” he curtailed, laughing lightly. “What kind of guy do you think I am? I just meant that I’m going to stay up for a little while. I slept in so late today, I’m not quite tired enough to sleep yet, so I thought I might watch some television. You’re welcome to watch with me. You know, just until you’re tired enough to fall asleep.”

  It wasn’t about being tired, Abby thought: if only it were that easy. She hadn’t gotten good sleep in months because of all this, no matter how tired she was. Anxiety overrode the body’s need to be well-rested, so she more often than not spent most nights tossing and turning and thinking until the sun rose. It might, she couldn’t deny, help slow her racing thoughts to have some time to decompress before bed, and relaxing, watching low-stress TV with her “bodyguard” might be just the ticket to dreamland that she needed.

  “You’re sure that won’t be weird?” she verified, and he rolled his eyes.

  “It’s a big futon,” he replied, “and I’ll stay on top of the covers so you can get under. That way, there will be a barrier.”

  Abby laughed. “I haven’t heard the ‘leave room for Jesus’ rule be enforced since my high school prom,” she quipped. That must have been enough of an acceptance of his invitation, because Devon took one of the several pillows from the pile she’d made and smacked it into her chest lightly.

  “Just get comfortable,” he said. “I find UFO documentaries just mindless enough to make me drowsy, so I hope you like conspiracies.”

  She smiled. “I dislike them just enough that maybe my brain will shut off just to avoid listening to it.”

  “Here’s hoping,” he mumbled as she got herself situated and comfortable underneath the covers of the bed. The documentary, if she could call it that, that he picked was atrocious, wildly unfactual, and not very engaging, but she found that she wasn’t even able to focus on it because of a single thought that wouldn’t stop replaying in her head, and for once, it wasn’t Trevor. The pressure built inside her like a helium balloon and had to burst sometime.

  “I wasn’t trying to kiss you, you know,” she blurted, completely unprompted and probably a good ten minutes after either of them had last uttered a word. Devon sat up to look at her, blinking in confusion.

  “Look, Abby, I don’t care if you were—”

  “But I wasn’t,” she lied quickly. “I mean, no offense; I get why you’d think that and all…but I’m not that kind of girl.”

  He floundered for a moment. “What do you mean, why I’d think that?”

  “Well, you’re an attractive guy, and you’re probably used to having women being all over you. Of course you assumed I was doing the same thing.”

  Devon laughed humorlessly. “So you’re trying to dodge the fact that you tried to kiss me by calling me narcissistic?”

  “I didn’t say that!” Abby replied. “I just…I just wasn’t trying to kiss you, okay? Let’s drop it.”

  “Hey, you brought it up,” he shrugged, seemingly content to leave it at that, which made her both grateful for not having to talk about it anymore and regretful that she’d even drawn attention to it. Several minutes passed, so quiet and comfortable that she could feel herself getting drowsy before he spoke again.

  “I didn’t turn you down because I don’t think you’re attractive,” he finally said. Abby, who was lying on her side with her eyes closed, didn’t dare stir, trying to slow her breathing so as not to give away that she was even conscious. “I just don’t trust that you wouldn’t regret it tomorrow.”

  He was right—if he’d kissed her back, she probably would have regretted it. It could make the new living arrangement awkward, and worse, it could jeopardize her friendship with Chandra, which was the last thing that she wanted. It had felt like a proper payment in the moment, and she was still getting used to the idea that Devon wasn’t trying to collect a debt at all. He was content to just be in her house protecting her in exchange for a place to live, content to just watch television with her and not ask her to do anything else, content to just exist and let her do the same. Since he wasn’t seeming to call her bluff on pretending to have fallen asleep, she assumed that he believed it, particularly when she felt him adjust to look over at her, heard him sigh lightly, and then listened to the television turn off. Devon reached over to the pile and grabbed a second, much thinner and smaller, blanket and laid it over his body even though Abby knew that it wouldn’t be enough to cover him completely.

  “Goodnight, Abby,” he whispered, turning over to face the other way in the bed. He didn’t get under the covers to join her, leaving the barrier that she so desperately needed, and in an instant, she recognized something: her heart was not racing because she was nervous. She trusted fully that Devon wasn’t going to try to take advantage of her while she slept, and she knew that with both of them in the same room, that Trevor had no chance of breaking into the house to get to her, even if he were clever enough to
use her bedroom window. There wasn’t a single scenario in her mind that put her in any danger, and she wasn’t afraid.

  So why was her heart still racing?

  Chapter Six: Devon

  Devon woke up the next morning to a quiet, strange chiming sound from the other room. Not fully awake, he sat up in bed, reaching out blindly for whatever could be making it and froze when his hand touched a warm body—right. Abby. She’d fallen asleep on the other side of the futon and he hadn’t had the heart to wake her and move her, especially since she’d looked so peaceful. She probably hadn’t had much sleep in a while, so he was happy to allow her to get what little she could. But what the hell was beeping?

  He shook Abby’s shoulder lightly, and she startled awake as if from a nightmare, which made him feel a little guilty. Abby took a moment to look around owlishly, then rubbed her still-sleepy eyes.

  “Sorry for waking you,” Devon apologized, “but I can’t figure out what that sound is.”

  Abby groaned as she stretched, seemingly unbothered by the noise until she figured out what it was, which woke her abruptly and she jerked upright with wide eyes.

  “Shit!” she exclaimed, jumping up out of bed and rushing to her bedroom. “My alarm!” When she came back from the other room, she was cursing at her now-silenced phone. “Damn it; it’s been going off for like twenty minutes. I’m going to be so late for work.”

  Devon watched the blur of Abby rush through the apartment in increasing stages of readiness until, in record time, she was standing in front of him, dressed in business-casual attire and holding a briefcase. Her hair was tied up into a neat bun, and she’d applied light makeup to cover the dark circles under her eyes and a dark brown lipstick. She was beautiful, alluring but not overtly so, and was undoubtedly the office hottie. Before she could catch him staring, Devon cleared his throat and began to look around distractedly for his keys.

  “Where is it that you work?” he asked once he found them, grabbing his coat and handing her her own. She tucked a scarf into the coat and buttoned it up snugly. She took his phone from his hand when he offered it and entered the address of the building into his map app and saved it as “Abby’s Job.” It was an insurance company building.

  “I’m a claims adjuster,” she said. “I review car accidents all day.” As Devon unlocked the old truck, she got into the passenger seat, huddling up against the seat while they waited for his heat to kick on, which judging by the fact that her workplace was only twenty minutes away, it would be a toss-up as to whether it would even happen before he dropped her off.

  “Sounds exciting.”

  Abby groaned. “It’s not,” she disagreed. “It is, however, as depressing as it sounds.” Devon couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Well, I hope that the day passes quickly, then,” he said. “What time should I come to pick you up?” She told him that she clocked out every day at five and that she never stayed a minute longer, so he promised to be there at that time, and they fell into a comfortable silence for the rest of the drive, listening to the radio as it cycled through advertisements and talk shows without ever seeming to play any actual music. He got as close to the doors as he could get to let her out and watched her walk away, then headed back to the apartment to tackle some work of his own.

  Devon didn’t like boredom and working from home could sometimes be a recipe for it. Though there were days that he had so much work that he didn’t even have enough time to finish it all, there were also days like this, where about three hours of diligent focus was enough to get everything done and then he had the rest of the day to himself to do whatever he wanted. Sometimes he’d use that time to go to the gym, sometimes he cleaned or prepared his meals for the rest of the day, but today, he’d intentionally finished as much as he could as early as possible to give himself time to put together a surprise for Abby.

  He’d gone to the hardware store and bought a home security system, one of the old-fashioned ones that beeped and alerted the police if someone forced the door of the apartment open but with the new addition of a smartphone app that went along with it. It hadn’t cost too much—under two hundred for the whole thing and with an operative cost of fifteen dollars a month to sustain. It might make both of them feel a little safer, he thought, to be able to know if someone got into the home when they were out. Devon had only just opened the package when there was a knock on the door, which made his blood run cold. He slowly, quietly crept to the door, avoiding the windows as best he could, and looked out to see…

  “Chandra?” he asked, opening the door for her. “What are you doing here?” She was dressed for work but not covered enough in flour and sugar to suggest that she’d already been there, so she was probably stopping by the apartment on her way to a late-day shift.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” she shrugged. “I’m guessing Abby’s not home?”

  “She went to work,” he informed. “Did you need something?”

  “Yeah, I needed to make sure she went to work,” Chandra admitted. “You know she took some time off to move and deal with…all this, so I just needed to see that she made it and wasn’t a basket case in the living room.” She looked around the room at the unpacked security system and smiled. “She bought a burglar alarm?”

  “No, I did,” Devon explained. “I thought it might help her feel a little safer, especially while she’s at work and I’m here alone, or if I have to leave while she’s at work.”

  Chandra shrugged. “Hey, whatever gives her some peace of mind. How much was the alarm? I can help pitch in; it’ll be our gift to her.”

  “Nah, don’t worry about it. It wasn’t too expensive. Plus, she really needed it. She’s acting like she’s doing better, but I think she’s still pretty messed up by the whole thing. Last night, she didn’t even sleep in her own bed, and I think it’s because she was freaked out.”

  At that, Chandra hesitated. “Where did she sleep, then?”

  “Out here on the futon.”

  “With you?”

  “I mean, physically in the same bed,” he admitted, “but it’s not like we were sleeping together.”

  Chandra gave him a dangerously disapproving look. “You’d better not be,” she warned. “That’s my best friend, and you’re living with her. If you get kicked out of here for hanky panky, I’m not letting you come back to stay with me. She’s fragile right now.”

  “I know, I know,” he dismissed. “I’m not going to do anything that makes her uncomfortable. I’ll be a perfect gentleman.”

  Nodding, Chandra turned her attention back to the alarm system on the floor of the apartment, then seemed to notice the boxes of furniture that still hadn’t been thrown away and the clutter of the place. Something about it, Devon had to admit, didn’t feel much like home.

  “I expect nothing less,” she said. She hesitated, looked at her watch, then sighed. “If I didn’t have to be at work soon, I’d offer to help you clean up some of this stuff a little more.” Devon shook his head and ushered her out: knowing Chandra, she’d make herself late to the restaurant to do something nice for her friend and end up in trouble if he didn’t push her out.

  “I’m going to get the empty boxes to the trash on my way to pick Abby up from work,” he promised. “Now, get out of here before you’re tardy again. I’ll text you sometime tonight.”

  Chandra let herself be pushed out the door, and Devon turned his attention back to the alarm system. It wasn’t difficult to install: just a matter of putting part of it onto the door and the panel onto the wall. The hard part would be trying to figure out how to navigate the app later, but then, he’d have Abby, and she was smart; she’d be able to do it with no problem, he was sure.

  With the security system up and running, Devon turned his attention to the clock and realized that Abby was about to get off work, so he loaded the empty boxes into the bed of his truck and tossed them into the recycling bin and pulled up her building on his GPS to go get her. The whole way, he couldn’t help but t
hink about what Chandra had told him about Abby being delicate, and it became much more obvious to him that she was right. Abby was under enough stress that she would accept the help of a near-stranger to drive her to and from work just to feel a little safer, and he’d been so slack with his boundaries the night before. With a woman in a sound state of mind, it might be okay to hold hands in a bed before going to sleep, but Abby…she might mistake the fact that he liked her for predatory inclinations. She was cute, beautiful, even, and definitely someone that he’d normally have a lot of interest in even despite the fact that Chandra surely wouldn’t approve. However, the things he might normally do to show a woman that he liked her might scare Abby off, and he really, really didn’t want to do that. Not only was she responsible for his place to live, but when, if, she got her feet back under her a little bit more, he might like to ask her out, and he couldn’t do that if he’d already made her feel unsafe. He’d have to be more careful next time.