“Tino?”
“Yeah?”
“Your side is squeaking.”
“It’s protesting your rule enforcement.”
She laughed quietly, and I smiled into the pillow.
Silence settled again. It should have been easy to drift off after such a long day but sleep refused to come. I was too aware of her. The tiny sounds she made when she moved. The brush of her knee under the blanket when she adjusted. The scent of her shampoo.
After a while, she sighed. “You still awake?”
“Yep.”
“I can’t sleep either.”
“Too many strawberries on your conscience?”
She let out a soft snort. “My brain’s just… loud.”
“Want to talk about it?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know. It’s not really a thing, just… everything’s been weird lately.”
“Because of the whole fake-dating circus?”
“It’s just strange, pretending all the time. Smiling when people look. Acting like we can’t keep our hands off each other. It’s just… exhausting, sometimes. But at the same time…” She trailed off.
“At the same time what?”
She hesitated. “At the same time, it’s kind of… nice.”
My chest tightened. “Nice how?”
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “Having someone there. Not feeling like I have to explain myself. Everyone just kind of… leaves me alone because I’m ‘taken.’” She made air quotes, I could tell by the sound of her fingers brushing the blanket. “It’s peaceful, weirdly enough.”
I swallowed, choosing my words carefully. “Yeah. I get that.”
“You do?”
“Yeah,” I said. “People treat me differently because of my brothers, you know? They either want something from me or they assume I’ve got the same golden ticket. But with you… it’s easy.”
There was a long pause. Then she whispered, “Same.”
Her fingers brushed against mine under the blanket—barely there, probably an accident—but my heart reacted like it was anything but.
She didn’t pull away, though. And I didn’t move either.
“I guess we’re getting pretty good at pretending,” she murmured.
“Yeah,” I said again, though the word felt heavier this time. “We really are.”
Silence again. Then, after a beat, she yawned. Something in me ached. I wanted to reach for her, to tell her it wasn’t fake for me anymore—but I didn’t.
She turned toward me in the dark. “Do you ever think about what happens when this ends?”
Her question hit like a body check, but I managed a small laugh. “You mean after our fake breakup? When the whole campus mourns for the relationship that was doomed from the start?”
