If this proposition had come from anyone else, I’d call Grace and ask her for a pep talk. But I’m not entirely sure she wouldn’t try to talk me out of whatever is about to happen with Dan—a good hang? A real date? Something more?—and I don’t want that. I know all the reasons why crossing the line with Dan could be a bad idea. He’s my best friend’s older brother; he’s my temporaryroommate; he’s going through some heavy shit that I still don’t understand.
But what about all the reasons it could be a great idea? He’s my best friend’s older brother, which means I know him. I know he’s not going to yammer on about bond markets or intermittent fasting or some questionable ideas about vaccinations. I know he’s not looking for anything serious, and I know that his time here has an expiration date.
Iknowhim.
And I trust him.
And I want to see where that little spark in his ice-blue eyes might take us.
I beat Dan home, thanks to my nervous lead foot, so I dart into the house and double-check that I didn’t spill anything down the front of my dress or sprout a new zit I need to cover up. I figure he’ll come in when he gets here, so the knock at my front door comes as a surprise.
“What are you doing?” I ask when I find him standing on the stoop.
“Showing you what a good date is like,” he says. “It doesn’t start with a man sitting in his car and honking his fucking horn.”
The way he glowers as he refers to Gabe makes my heart skip several beats. So many I damn near pass out on the stoop.
And then there’s the fact that he said this was a date. Not a real one, obviously. But still…a date.
“Such a gentleman,” I say. It’s very hard to keep the excited trill out of my voice.
It’s harder still when he doubles down, reaching for my hand and leading me down the front steps. He closes the door behind me and locks it. Then he trots past me so he can open the passenger door of his BMW. The buttery leather seats are as comfortable as I remember. The last time I was sitting here, I was too drunk to appreciate how fancy the car is, but now, as the engine purrs and we glide away from the curb, I can see that it’s a really fine piece of machinery.
And I’m deeply grateful that he doesn’t seem to want to tell me anything about it.
“If this were an actual date, I’d take you to a good restaurant, but you’ve already eaten, so instead we’ll just do dessert,” he says. “Sound good?”
My brain snags on the wordsactual date, a reminder that this is all just pretend. I seem to keep forgetting.
“Sounds great,” I say, hoping that my body will get the message that this is just a dry run—emphasis ondry.
CHAPTER 19
DAN
Ihave no idea what I’m doing. All I know is that when I took Carson’s hand to lead her away from that business school bro, I didn’t want to let go. I didn’t want her to walk away from me. I didn’t want to go back to the house and keep pretending to be just her roommate or just her friend.
Running that bit with her felt too good. If I’m going to pretend with her, I want it to be a different kind of pretending.
At the bare minimum, I want to show her what she deserves.
CHAPTER 20
CARSON
Dan settles into the driver’s seat, the engine purring as we pull away from the curb. He’s wearing aviator sunglasses, his wrist draped casually over the top of the steering wheel. If this were a real date, the sight of him would have me climbing over the center console to straddle him right now. He looks like how I used to fantasize my Ken dolls would look in the driver’s seat of my Barbie convertible if they were human. It’s too much, and I squeeze my thighs together to alleviate the ache between them.
It only takes about five minutes to get to the Dairy Barn, a walk-up ice cream stand on the outskirts of town that’s open in the summer. It’s an old wooden structure that’s been here for decades, built to look like a barn, but each wall is painted a different pastel color. There’s a copse of trees on one side and a cornfield on the other. It’s Friday night, so there’s a decent line of families and teenagers on dates. At the counter, haggard-looking teens scoop ice cream. I remember longing to be one of them in middle school, fantasizing about meeting the love of my life while scooping mint chocolate chip in the heat, but my mother always made me help out at the church during the summers.
I throw the passenger door open, but I’ve barely started toclimb out before Dan appears, towering over me, a hand out. My thumb brushes over the back of his warm, strong hand as I take it.
Fake date. Fake date. Not real. For research purposes.
“We used to come here every Sunday after church when I was kid,” I say, because Dan is doing his silent thing again, so of course I’ve come down with a major case the nervous chatters. “It was the only time my parents would let me have dessert. They were sort of granola heads, though my mom cared less about health and more about toxic diet culture. Classic almond mom shit. I always wanted to order the biggest, chocolatiest thing on the menu, but she would tell me that was too much sugar. A plain vanilla cone was it for me. When Grace and I started coming here by ourselves in high school, I embarked on a mission to try everything on the menu. Spoiler alert: my favorite thing wasn’t a plain vanilla cone.”
I finally pause my monologue of embarrassing childhood memories, taking a breath before I also tell him about the time I wet my pants riding the Scrambler at the county fair when I was in fifth grade.
Dan and I join the line behind a family of five, three wild little kids running in circles around their haggard parents. They’re loud, and Dan has to step out of the way before the littlest one crashes into his knees.
