“Oh.” My voice came out quieter than I meant. “Yeah, you too.”
And then, because we were idiots, I reached up to brush some off his jaw at the exact same moment he leaned closer.
My fingers caught the edge of his skin—warm, smooth—and suddenly we weren’t laughing, weren’t teasing, weren’t faking anything.
We were just there. Inches apart. His breath hitched. My heart did something stupid and painful in my chest.
“Lilah,” he said again, softer this time. The words burrowed deep into my chest, making my heart pound so much faster. He was going to kiss me. Here, with no witnesses and no reason to fake any of this, Michael Valentine was going to kiss me. And I was going to let him.
I tilted my chin up, just a little. The world was quiet. And that’s when the smoke alarm screamed again.
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
I jerked back so fast I smacked my elbow on the counter. “Ow—what—why is it?—”
Tino groaned and threw his head back. “You have got to be kidding me!”
I fanned wildly at the air. “We didn’t even burn anything this time!”
He grabbed the towel again and started waving it under the sensor, yelling over the noise. “It’s fine! Nothing is on fire!”
But the alarm didn’t care. It just kept blaring on and on and nothing we did could end it. It was only on for a minute this time before the door banged open and I groaned as I saw my twenty-year-old dorm advisor, Julia, storm in. She looked extremely annoyed and I guessed it was only about ten percent because ofthe mess we’d made and ninety percent because we’d ruined her Sunday night.
Julia stared at us, eyes narrowing. “Do I even want to know?”
“Crepes,” Tino said immediately.
She blinked. “Crepes.”
“Experimental ones,” I added weakly.
“Experimental.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “You two need to evacuate right now. Everyone in the building has to go outside until facilities clears the alarm.”
My mouth dropped open. “Outside? It’s freezing!”
“You should’ve thought of that before you started a small-scale culinary disaster,” she said, already herding us toward the door. I groaned but walked out in shame, my mind spinning about things entirely unrelated to the possible fire we could have set and entirely about Tino’s lips and how much I wanted them on mine.
Maybe I should have been happy things were going so well between my fake boyfriend and me. But instead, I had only one thought:we need to end this as soon as possible before I start to fall in love with him for real.
CHAPTER 16
lilah
I’d been staringat the same paragraph for at least thirty seconds before realizing I hadn’t absorbed a single word. My eyes were on the page but my brain was sliding right off it, my thoughts circling the same useless track: maybe everyone will have stopped caring by now. Maybe we can quietly end the whole fake dating thing before lunch.
Yeah, somehow I had convinced myself—against all logic, against every scrap of evidence I’d collected in seventeen years of being around other human beings—that four and a half days was enough time for a rumor to die.
Idiot.
But still, some tiny, unreasonable part of me had hoped that maybe—just maybe—the entire school would’ve gotten bored of the idea of Lilah Turner and Michael Valentine by now. Maybe someone would’ve started a fire in the chem lab, or the headmaster’s golden retriever would have escaped and run loose around the campus, or literally anything more exciting than my accidental love life would’ve happened.
Wishful thinking. I knew better.
But it was easier to cling to this thought than to remember Sunday night in the kitchen. How Tino had stood pressed upagainst me, how he looked like he was going to kiss me, and how there had been some piece of me that wanted him to do it. I’d spent three years turning down his advances and then four days into a fake relationship, I’d almost folded. What was wrong with me?
I squeezed my eyes shut, leaned my forehead against the inside of my locker door, and muttered, “Come on, focus,” at the chapter heading on cellular respiration. I squinted at the diagrams on the page but no matter how hard I tried, my brain refused to focus on any topic other than the boy I was fake dating.
“You look like you’re trying to mind-meld with your textbook.”
