I cleared my throat. “How are you feeling about this?”
She tilted her head, catching my gaze. “The gala?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m fine. Great. I’ve done stuff like this a thousand times. I’m used to it.”
“But not with me,” I said, attempting to shake off all the tension.
She smirked, slow and teasing, but there was something softer beneath it. “No, that part is new.”
I stepped back and swept into a dramatic little bow. “Then allow me to make my gala debut as your boyfriend.”
She rolled her eyes, but her lips curved. “Fake boyfriend. You forgot the fake part.”
“Did I?”
THIRTY-ONE
Ellie
We hadn’t saida word since we left the house—not because there was nothing to say, but because there was too much. Too many words I wasn’t sure I was ready to face yet, feelings I didn’t trust myself to name.
I kept my eyes on the blur of city lights outside the car window, doing everything I could to ignore how aware I was of him beside me. He hadn’t touched me since we left his place, but his presence didn’t ask for permission. It filled the space anyway.
Downtown San Francisco pulsed with energy. People in sequins and tuxedos flooded the sidewalks. Some fireworks went off in the distance, too early for midnight but loud enough to crack the silence between us.
Having a week to stew over everything that happened at Christmas hadn’t helped like I thought it would. If anything, it felt like being caught in a shifting maze with no map, no markers—just walls that moved when I wasn’t looking and paths that led nowhere but back to the same questions I’d already asked.
I had no distractions. The tour was on pause for the holidays, so there were no late-night flights, no screaming crowds, no rush of adrenaline to keep me busy.
There was only stillness that pointed back to Sawyer and the way he looked at me like he saw through all my careful armor and didn’t mind the mess underneath.
To distract myself, I’d buried my head in research most days—anything I could find about Sawyer’s house and the journal. Every lead had come up empty. There was still no sign of who the mystery man could be, and even that distraction couldn’t hold my attention the way it had before Christmas.
I was stuck in a blurry, weightless space between faux labels and rules, and it was driving me insane. I hadn’t told Rachel what happened—not because I was ashamed or afraid of her unfiltered advice, which I probably needed. I wasn’t ready to hear what it meant. Not from her and definitely not from myself.
From the start, nothing about Sawyer had felt fake. Not the smiles for the cameras, not the staged moments or interviews. Even when we leaned into the act, it felt real, trying to breathe under the mask of a lie.
We wrapped it in flirtation and called it harmless, tucked behind the safety net of an expiration date. That was the contract—easy out, no strings attached, no risk of wanting too much.
But we crossed the line, and there was no script to follow, no clean exit waiting at the end. I didn’t know what we were anymore, only what we couldn’t be.
We were never built for the long haul. His future was rooted in Woodstone, in something steady, and mine was already mapped out on the road—another album to finish, another tour to chase. I’d keep moving, keep trying to prove I deserved the life I’d built, while he’d go back home and settle down.
There we were, headed to a fancy-ass venue, surrounded by flashing cameras and enough velvet ropes to make it feel like acelebrity zoo—except this one would probably have champagne towers, countdown clocks, and a dance floor that would, in a few hours, become a sea of strangers kissing at midnight.
Sawyer let out a slow breath beside me. “So...about tonight.”
I cut him off with a smirk, deflecting all the messy feelings with the flirtatious humor we both knew too well. “What about it?”
“Everyone thinks we are together.”
“Well aware. Are you worried I can’t act the part anymore?” I tilted my head, making sure to slip myI’m fine, everything’s finemask into place.
“No, no. Not at all. I’m just… Fuck, Ellie. We haven’t talked about anything that happened.”
“Don’t worry,” I murmured, a smile teasing the corner of my mouth. “If anything, knowing what you look like when you come probably makes me more qualified to be your fake girlfriend.”
