“Ah, you never did like that gig anyway.” He says it with too much leftover familiarity in his voice. It annoys me, and I don’t even know him.
The longer this conversation goes on, the more Leo tenses up. Whatever broke them must’ve really wounded Leo.
Why wouldn’t he share that with me? He knows nearly every detail about me and Buckley.
Maybe he doesn’t think I’m important enough to tell.
A nagging voice in the back of my mind reminds me that Leo’s arm linked in mine is for show.Madcap Market—a show that celebrates joy and laughs—isn’t going to chip away at our heartbreak for ratings. Save that forThe Bachelor. “What are you doing now?” Carter asks Leo, pulling me from my swirling thoughts.
“Keeping my options open.” Leo’s voice is pointed. I wonder if Carter has said those exact words to him before in a different context. There’s still so much about Leo that I don’t know.
Carter purses his lips, runs a hand across his jaw. That’s when I notice it. A wedding ring. It’s black, simple, shiny.
“Well,” Carter says abruptly. “It was nice to see you. Nice to meet you, Holden. I’ll be sure to cheer you on from my couch later this week. Good luck.” With that, he’s off, leaving Leo and me in a cone of confusion.
Neither of us says anything for a long bout. We just stare at dead fish, their lifeless eyes boring through us. I can’t grasp on any words, let alone the right ones, to say, so I follow Leo as he leaves behind the seafood and wanders back toward the registers.
“Aren’t we—”
“You can make it without.”
I zip my lips.
It’s not until we’re in the car on the way home, having said a quick goodbye to Mr. Park at checkout, that Leo seems to return to his usual self. After a few minutes, he pulls off to the side of the road, lowers the music and says, “Sorry I got so cagey back there.”
“It’s okay. If I ran into Buckley unexpectedly, I think I’d react the exact same way.” I puzzle over this. “Actually, I probably would’ve handled it much worse. You had a lot of grace. You deserve a lot of credit for that.”
“Yeah, well, he’s so put together. The last thing I need is him thinking I’m a mess. I already played the crying-into-the-phone thing over him once.” In Leo’s eyes, I notice a kinship I hadn’t seen before. It clicks that perhaps he came up to see me the night of the “All Too Well” drink-a-thon because he recognized my acute heartbreak. He brought the game and the pizza because he wished it was what someone had done for him when he and Carter collapsed. “I don’t need him holding this false idea that I’m not over him.”
“Are you over him or just pretending to be over him? It’s okay to tell me the truth.” I can’t pretend the pretenses of our arrangement aren’t clear, even if our sex knocked something loose inside my heart. Even if part of me could clearly imaginemorebetween us.
“Like I told you on our hike, I’ve never been someone’s boyfriend or partner. That was the truth. Carter was the closest I got to that before it blew up, so I don’t know if I’d even be able to identify what ‘over it’ really means,” he says, sadness impinging on his words.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” I ask. “It’s okay if you don’t.”
Leo hasn’t removed his hands from the steering wheel. They remain gripped there. Knuckles red. Until he starts speaking and, word by word, the grip grows looser. “We met at one of the hotels I was working in. He flirted with me at first, but then I clocked the ring, and I backed off. Then, a week later, I get an Instagram DM from him saying he was sorry if he made things awkward but that he was in an open marriage and didn’t want me to think he was doing anything wrong.”
“Sounds suspicious,” I say, adding my two cents.
“From what I’d glimpsed at work, he ran that hotel with such efficiency and earnestness. I had no reason not to believe him, so I continued to message him and flirt with him and when he asked me out, he assured me multiple times that it was okay, that his wife knew where he was going, but I guess I should’ve confirmed that.” His eyebrows knit together.
I place a hand on his forearm. “Why would you do that? You trusted him. You took his word.”
“That turned out to be a mistake because while it was true that he’d come out as bisexual to his wife and it was true that they’d discussed opening their relationship, what he lied about was that she had already agreed to it, so when she inevitably came to the hotel because he forgot his lunch, I went to introduce myself.” His face gets overtaken with a distorted frown, like he’s blaming himself for the entire situation, when a relationship consists of two people putting in the work. Not one person reading the other’s mind. “I crossed a line and that night he sent me a text breaking it off and then I mysteriously was never scheduled at that hotel again, which could be a coincidence but...”
“Christ, he met your mom!” I shout. “You had every reason to believe she knew and he was invested in your relationship. Things like that make it real.”
“You met my mom,” Leo says. “And this isn’t real.” He warily gestures between us, and my heart kerplunks.
“But doesn’t it sort of...feel real?” I ask, emotions stacked up high in my throat. My eyes scan over to the windshield, so I don’t have to see Leo preparing to let me down easy. Because that’s inevitably what’s coming.
Holding on for the worst, I don’t entirely react when he says, “Yeah, it sort of does feel real.”
There, on the side of the road in the middle of Los Angeles with cars whizzing by at dizzying speeds, I wonder if this conversation could be the start of something more than a fake situationship.
Eighteen
“We have a rehearsal at the studio tomorrow at 10:00 a.m.” I’m reading from the email sent by the production assistant only an hour ago.
