Deke (Fake Boyfriend Book 3)

by Eden Finley

Me: Hey, at least you didn’t fuck my sister. Apology accepted.

  Bjorn: LOL! Thanks for being cool about it.

  The next one in line is from Ash. I hold my breath as I read over his words.

  Ash: I’m stupid to think any of this could’ve been for me, aren’t I? Why him?

  I can’t deal with that loaded question right now, so I shoot him a text and apologize for mentioning him at the press conference and tell him we can talk when everything dies down. I can see how he’d assume I did this for Lennon, but it’s not that at all.

  Okay, maybe a part of me is excited that I get to have Lennon for real now, but if it weren’t for Soren, I would’ve taken the out today like Lennon asked.

  My phone starts ringing in my hand as an unknown call comes through. “And so it begins.”

  Instead of answering, I switch my phone off again. If Damon needs me, he can call one of his friends, and if someone from the Dragons needs me, they can call Damon, so there’s no real point torturing me with phone calls I don’t want to deal with.

  When I look back up, Lennon’s gone. I didn’t see him slip away while I was distracted.

  “Where’d Lennon go?” I ask.

  “Drink?” Jet holds up another glass.

  “Why are you avoiding answering my question?”

  Jets eyes don’t hold their usual spark. “He asked to be left alone for a while and went upstairs.”

  Something tells me to respect his wishes, but I go after him anyway.

  I bound up the stairs but hesitate outside his room. He just lost his job. He probably wants to be alone to wrap his head around that.

  Then why do I get the impression he came up here to get away from me and not everyone else? I don’t have any clue why I think that, but it’s like intuition or some shit.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, slipping inside his bedroom and closing the door behind me.

  He’s sitting on his bed using his laptop, and he doesn’t look up at me as he grunts his response.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What do you think I’m doing? I’m emailing everyone I know to see if they’ve got any jobs available.”

  Okay, he’s freaking out. “Everything’s going to be okay. You’ll get another job easy.”

  Lennon’s fingers stop tapping away, and he glares up at me. “Do you know how many jobs there are for sports journalists out there?”

  “Probably about the same amount as there are on the NHL roster,” I point out. “I know about having an unstable job.”

  “Then you should know that everything won’t be okay.”

  “Weren’t you thinking of quitting anyway?” I ask and immediately know it’s a mistake.

  Lennon grits his teeth. “If I quit, I’d have to give two weeks’ notice, and I’d have time to find something else. I would’ve finished out the playoffs and had an opportunity to wrap my head around it. Right now, I’m up shit creek without a paddle.”

  “But you’re a great reporter. Any magazine or publication will be lucky to have you.”

  “There are a lot of great reporters out there, and media as an industry is practically obsolete.”

  “Lennon—”

  “Fuck, do you really not understand this? Imagine if what you did tonight cost you your career. Hasn’t that been your fear all along? We’ve been so worried about what coming out will do to your career, we didn’t even think about mine.”

  “Wait, now you’re blaming me for this? Are you saying if you knew you’d be fired, you would’ve said something to your editor sooner?” I don’t mean to raise my voice, but I think I’m subconsciously meeting his tone.

  “No, but maybe … shit, I dunno, maybe I would’ve distanced myself? Not gotten involved in”—he waves his hand between us—“whatever delusion we’re under.”

  “Delusion?”

  “Even before I lost my job, this was never going to work. I was going to go back to Chicago, and—”

  “Noah and Matt make the New York–Chicago thing work.”

  “They can move around together. We don’t have that luxury.”

  “Then maybe losing your job wasn’t a bad thing, because now you can stay here.” I would love it if that happened.

  “And if my next job is in Atlanta? Or Seattle? Or—”

  “New York,” I suggest. “Don’t write us off because you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  Lennon shakes his head. “I can’t help thinking if this was you in my position that you would hold a little resentment over us, but you’re telling me to stay calm.”

  “I think you’re prematurely freaking out. You’ve got time to find another job, and if money’s an issue, I could always—”

  “No. I’m not taking money from you.”

  “It’d be a loan or whatever. I’m just saying there’s no need to panic yet.”

  Lennon sighs. “I need some time to wrap my head around this and put some feelers out there so I don’t feel completely helpless right now. Can you … can you just let me do my thing and we’ll talk later?”

  I want to keep arguing, because I have no doubt he’ll be grabbed by any sporting magazine looking to hire, but then it occurs to me that no one might be hiring, and if I was staring down the end of my hockey career, I’d be high-strung too.

  Still, I don’t want to leave him. I want to stay in this room and prove to him we’re not a delusion. What we have is real whether he’s ready to see that or not.

  If he’s not ready, and I push, I’m gonna lose him. If I keep telling him it’ll be fine when he doesn’t believe it, I’ll lose him.

  He’s right that if this had happened the other way around and I lost my career tonight, I’d be inconsolable and would most likely take it out on anyone and everyone who tried to rationalize it to me.

  And that’s why I know I have to give him space, even if I don’t like it.

  I turn on my heel, and head downstairs.

  “God, again?” I complain as Soren and I come up on the screen again as soon as I sit down. “Don’t they have like other shit to report on?”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Matt says. “At least y’all got each other. I’m still waiting for someone else in football to say somethin’.”

  Jet feeds me another drink, and when I down that one, he runs off to get me another.

  Matt and Noah talk about shit like nothing’s wrong, but they can all obviously sense the tension after Lennon’s and my fight.

  He called us a delusion. Like he has no faith in us ever working out. That it’d be impossible to have a relationship with me. And as much as I keep telling myself he doesn’t truly believe that—it was said in the heat of the moment and in the middle of a freak out—I can’t help running worst-case scenarios in my head.

  What if he really can’t forgive that I’m partially responsible for him losing his job? What if he decides being in the limelight isn’t worth it? What if he thinks I’m not worth it.

  Ash realized I wasn’t worth waiting for. Maybe Lennon will realize I’m too much effort. Especially if being with me will interfere with his career.

  I figure when he calms down he’ll come to find me, but he still hasn’t, and it’s getting late.

  “You know, you could always take my seat,” Jet says from where he sits across from me.

  “Huh?”

  “Well, with how many times you’re turning your head to watch the stairs, I’d say it’d be safer to prevent injury.”

  Matt stares at me, concern etched in his scrunched brow. “How was he when you went up there?”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t hear him yelling at me.”

  All three of them suddenly lose eye contact with me.

  “You did hear.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Noah says. “Matt and I made long distance work.”

  Jet coughs and splutters. “For a few weeks when you were all mopey and broken up. Then you moved for him.”

  “Long distance isn’t even the issue right now,” I
say. “He’s ready to throw us away because of a possible job that could possibly be in another city. He’s lashing out at me because it’s my personal shit that cost him his job. And the more I think about it, the more I think he has a right to be upset. I just don’t wanna lose him over it.”

  “Maybe he needs some space,” Noah says. “Time to clear his head.”

  “And what if when his head clears, it tells him to walk away?” I ask, but it’s more to myself than the others. “We’ll be over before we’ve even really started.”

  “Then maybe it’ll be better that way.” Noah shrugs. “Because once you’re in, you’re all in, and then it’s so much harder when you have to walk away.”

  I stand quickly, because I need to fix this, but I come to the conclusion Jet’s been feeding me doubles as my legs wobble more than after a grueling skate. But I’m not belligerent drunk or angry drunk. I’m just sad drunk.

  Sad because the same night I come out to everyone, the rest of my world crumbles.

  Sad because we should be celebrating, and instead, I’m worrying about the future and what it could possibly hold for Lennon and me.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  LENNON

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. That’s the sound my panicky brain makes as I check my bank balance and work out how long I can survive while being unemployed.

  It’s funny. Until I got the call from Harry, I thought I held all the cards. We’d beaten them to outing Soren, so I thought it was over. Apparently, that makes me “not a team player” or whatever.

  In retrospect, I should’ve seen it coming. If Harry’s going to stoop low enough to out someone, he wouldn’t bat an eye at firing someone even if I was pulling in more views than Kevin. The gap between our readership isn’t big enough to argue the better reporter defense.

  When I threatened to quit, I had the security of giving at least two weeks’ notice to find something else.

  Now … I have nothing and am starting at square one.

  And after a quick search online, it’s obvious there’s no jobs. My kind of position is rarely advertised. It’s all about who you know and your connections. So instead of a frivolous job search, I open my email contacts to put some feelers out.

  Shit, I’m gonna need a new résumé, get all my past articles together … Crap, what if Harry takes them all down? Is that a thing?

  Sporting Health was my first job straight out of college. I don’t know the protocol with this.

  I open my folders on my computer where they’re saved, but three years of articles, I have no way of knowing if they’re all there. Sometimes, I’d upload straight to the work cloud.

  Before I can really get a hold of one thing, another thought pops up, and before I know it, I have about fifteen tabs open with no real direction.

  Welcome to the life of being a reporter.

  I slump back on my bed and take a deep breath. The sheets still smell like sex, reminding me I’m gonna have to apologize pretty fucking hard after dismissing Ollie the way I did.

  Realistically, though, where can we go from here?

  Ollie’s out now. He can date and have a boyfriend. But that boyfriend can’t be me. I’ll never work as a sports journalist again, and it’s all I’ve known.

  Then again, aren’t we making our own rules? Soren coming out, Ollie standing behind him … this is uncharted territory, and we could pave the way for gay men in sports, which has been my goal ever since becoming a journalist.

  I grab my phone and send off a text.

  Me: Soren still with you?

  Damon: Yeah, why?

  Me: I have an idea for a story …

  Within seconds, my phone vibrates with Damon’s name flashing on the screen.

  “Hey,” I say into the phone.

  “What’s the story?” Damon asks. “Soren’s here on speaker.”

  “I want to do Soren’s coming out story.”

  I’m met with silence.

  “Hear me out. You guys know people will be pushing for this, but I’m the only reporter who’ll do it fairly without trying to use gimmicks and without stereotyping.”

  “Uh,” Soren says, his voice hesitant. “I don’t really want to do a favor to the magazine that was going to out me.”

  “Oh, right. Probably should’ve led with they fired me, and I’d be shopping this around to other magazines. I have a contact at Sports Illustrated after writing that article about Damon about a year ago.”

  “They fired you?” Damon asks.

  “Yep.”

  “I’ll do it,” Soren says.

  “Really? I didn’t think it’d be that easy. Do you need to ask your agent?”

  “His soon-to-be agent is right here, and he approves,” Damon says.

  Soren’s chuckle comes through the phone. “Lennon, how long have you known Ollie’s gay?”

  “About eight months.”

  “The fact he only just came out means I can trust you.”

  “Umm, I should say upfront I don’t have any money to give you. Other places would offer you compensation.”

  “Dude,” Damon says, “you’d sold him already. Don’t back down.”

  Soren laughs again. “I’d rather have the story I want out there instead of more money I don’t need.”

  The stress over my career eases with the promise of Soren’s story, but my work is far from done.

  And now with some semblance of a plan, my head breaks out of reporter mode and back into boyfriend mode.

  Oh, fuck. I need to grovel.

  As if sensing my readiness, there’s a knock on the door, and Ollie steps through.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  Tension in his shoulders relaxes.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  Ollie smiles. “It’s okay.”

  “No, I was a dick.”

  “You were scared.”

  “Doesn’t mean I should’ve said all the shit I did. I freaked out. I don’t regret standing by you yesterday. Not at all.”

  As Ollie approaches the bed, I close my laptop and shove it on my nightstand. He climbs on top of me and lowers his head to kiss my mouth.

  “Is this your way of forgiving me?” I ask against his lips.

  “If our fight has proved anything, it’s that I don’t want you to walk away. I want to find a way to make us work.”

  “I want that too.”

  Ollie kisses me the same way he did back in the cold corridors of the Dragons’ stadium when he was convincing me that we can be together.

  My tongue sweeps into Ollie’s mouth, and his whole body relaxes on top of me. We make out a little but don’t make a move to go any further. I can’t help being self-conscious about getting it on in a house full of people again.

  When we finally come up for air, I land soft kisses along his jaw and neck before rolling him off me so we’re side by side.

  “Did you come up with a job solution?” He braces himself, almost like he’s expecting to be yelled at again.

  I run a hand down his arm. “I thought of going to the game tomorrow anyway and writing about the first NHL game with an openly gay player on the ice and then trying to shop it around. But there’ll be a million other articles published on the exact same thing, so I asked Soren if I could interview him instead.”

  “Soren …” Ollie says. “Is there a reason you asked him and not me?”

  I hesitate. “Honestly? It didn’t cross my mind.”

  Ollie tenses under my hands.

  “But not because I don’t want to,” I rush on. “Hell no. It’s more an ethical problem. We’re sleeping together. The article would be biased.”

  “You’ve already proved you can be brutal if you need to be. I must be a sloppy kisser for you to have written those articles about me back then.”

  A small laugh escapes. “You’re a really sloppy kisser. Like, I think you might need to practice.” I bring my finger up to tap my lips.

  “Just for that, I think I’m gonna hold
out.”

  I lean in, bringing my mouth so close to his. “Let’s see how long that lasts.”

  Ollie groans and whispers, “I hate you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Okay, no, I don’t. But everyone else will when they find out you’re the thing coming between me and Soren. The media is totally pushing for Sorenberg.”

  “Sorenberg? That’s terrible.”

  Ollie laughs. “That doesn’t make you mad? Me being ’shipped with Soren?”

  “About a stupid celebrity couple name? No. If anything, I’m glad Kevin didn’t figure us out and thrust me into the spotlight.”

  He pulls back. “You don’t want people to know we’re … uh, together or whatever? Even if you’re not going to write the article about me?”

  “I don’t want other publications to see tabloid opportunities if I’m with an athlete.”

  “Makes sense.”

  But fuck, I hate the hurt in his eyes. “Is … is that okay?”

  Ollie nods. “Just major role reversal here. We were worried about my career and my secret, and now you’re in the exact same position, and I’m the one thinking it sucks.”

  “If it comes out, it comes out. It’s not like I want to hide it, but if Soren’s providing a good distraction, I’m okay with that.”

  “So, what now?” Ollie asks and moves in closer.

  “I have the best idea.” I roll Ollie onto his back and climb on top of him.

  He tries to kiss me, but I pull away and reach for my laptop.

  “I look for a job.”

  Ollie slumps back on the pillows. “I hate you again, Blue.”

  As soon as Soren and I get approval to do the article, I follow him around like a puppy for the rest of the playoffs and query publications that’ll most likely pick the story.

  Offers pour in, but there’s only one I’m interested in. That’s how I’ve ended up here, sitting at Sports Illustrated headquarters in New York. I’m so nervous I’m fairly certain I’d have pit stains in my shirt, so I make a mental note not to take off my jacket, even if it’s ninety degrees in here. Every time I shift in my seat, the leather beneath my ass squeaks, so I try to sit as still as possible as Greg Follett makes my lifelong dream come true.