Well, I probably wasn’t going to get a better opening than that.
I wiped my palms on my shorts, heartbeat picking up. “So… about that.”
All three of them stopped what they were doing—even Bear, who never stopped mid-set for anything—looked over with varying degrees of shock on their faces.
“We did kiss,” I said. Mako’s water bottle slipped from his fingers, hitting the floor with a loud thud and rolling away. He didn’t even glance down. “Not in the store! But today. We kissed. Well—fake kissed.”
“What the heck is a fake kiss?” Crossy asked. “Like you didn’t actually kiss her? Just pretended to?”
“That makes no sense,” Bear said.
“It makes more sense than Lilah agreeing to kiss him,” Mako disagreed.
I grabbed my phone and shoved it in my pocket then headed for the locker room door. I wasn’t going to stand around andlisten to them debate whether Lilah would ever be willing to kiss me when I knew what had happened. When they got over this and followed, I would explain the rest of it.
It took them a few minutes to notice—or to care—that I’d left and by the time they came into the locker room, I was already in the shower.
“Don’t think we’re done talking about this, Tino!” Mako yelled as he came in, his voice echoing on the locker room walls.
“I didn’t think we were!” I yelled back. I heard the other showers turn on, which was only going to make it that much harder for them to hear me, but I guess it was nicer to tell them this in a way where I couldn’t see their incredulous expressions. “Lilah and me, we’re… well we’re fake dating!”
Total silence. For at least a full minute, the only sound in the locker room was the running of the showers. And then:
“You’re what?”
The yell came from Crossy, though I was sure that the two other boys were probably thinking the same thing. Heck, if they’d told me they were in my situation, I would have thought they were out of their minds. But they hadn’t been looking into Lilah’s eyes as she looked so defeated about everyone’s treatment of her this week. They didn’t understand how much I wanted to find some solution for her—or what it would mean to me to get to try with her. As far as she was concerned, this would be a way for me to see how incompatible we were—but I was taking the chance for it to be the opposite. I wanted her to see just how well we actually could work together.
“We’re pretending to be together,” I repeated, keeping my voice as casual if I was just telling them the weather. I couldn’t deny that this plan was a little crazy but if I pretended I thought it was normal, maybe I could convince them I thought it was.
Mako laughed, loudly and for longer than I thought was necessary. “Oh my god, you actually did it. You actually found a way to date her without her having to like you.”
“That’s not…” I trailed off with a sigh. Was he really so wrong? “Okay, yeah, kind of.”
“Tino,” Bear said in a voice that made it very clear he was done with me, “why would you agree to that?”
“I didn’t agree to it,” I said, maybe a little too haughtily. “I suggested it.”
The howls of laughter from the other stalls told me what the boys thought of that. But I didn’t want them to somehow convince themselves that Lilah had tricked me into this and I was pathetic enough to go along with it because I loved her too much to give up this chance. I’d offered the idea up and I would own up to that.
“And I did it,” I said once there was a break in the laughter, “because everyone is already convinced we’re dating anyway. They’ve been harassing us and nobody will listen when we say it’s not true so we figured it would be easier if we just… go along with it.”
The explanation wasn’t met with even more rounds of laughter, which I took as a win. I knew they would probably never really understand since they would never be in this situation, but I hoped I could at least get them to not look at me like I’d completely lost my mind once we stepped out of here.
“Define easier,” Bear said.
“Well, it’s…” I really should have rehearsed my explanation. I knew they would make fun of me and laugh until they were blue in the face, and I knew that I would have to list millions of reasons on why this made sense. “It means we don’t have to keep denying it every five seconds, people can stop speculating why we’re hiding it, and everyone will get bored of it within a coupleof weeks because it’s less fun to just know that people are dating than to try to prove it.”
“That is the dumbest plan I’ve ever heard,” Bear said flatly.
“You only got with Poppy because she made a bet about being the first girl you would ever ask on a date,” I snapped back. “I’m not sure you have any right to judge what Lilah and I are doing.”
“Aha!” Mako called. “So you admit it—you think you’ll end up with her at the end of this!”
Yes.
“I didn’t say that!”
“You’ve been trying to get her to say yes for two years, and the only way you finally ‘got’ her is by pretending.”
