Mind stuck, all I get out is another, “Uh.”
If he’d turn his head slightly, if he’d put his ear to my chest, he’d hear the way my heart tattoos its pattern of unforeseen attraction into the underside of my skin. Maybe he even senses it from where he froze in his movement.
“Sorry,” he stammers, and then we finally manage to reconfigure. Once I take a step back, Lewis retrieves a tall takeaway cup from between his feet. “Brought you something.”
Grateful to have something to wrap my fidgety fingers around, I cradle the cup to my chest. I already had coffee at home, but after the short night and the tally of sleep deprivation I’ve collected over the past weeks, I’d probably need an IV drip of caffeine to feel properly awake.
I smile up at him. “Thanks.” The drink he’s brought me is toothachingly sweet and topped by a layer of froth. In short, delicious. “What is it?”
He shrugs. “I asked the barista for something that wouldn’t make you grimace like a regular cup of coffee does.”
The drink settles warmly in my chest. “Thank you.” I drain my cup at record speed as we trek up the hill to campus, if only to help me endure the heavy silence.
With Lewis’s brother’s graduation party coming up, we have no time to waste to get some more facts about each other down. Even if my academic integrity isn’t at risk tonight, I know next to nothing about Lewis’s family, or why he wants me to pose as his girlfriend. But the stakes must be pretty high, given that my company tonight was his main condition when he sealed the deal.
“So… Golf?”
He glances at me. “Yeah.”
“Econ?”
“Yeah.” He sighs again. When I don’t say anything for a moment, he spreads out his hands. “Come on. Let me have it.”
The air is finally fresh enough to not break into a sweat first thing in the morning, and the light is different after the rain, too. It glints in the puddles on the sidewalk, catching the golden strands of Lewis’s hair.
As I consider him through narrowed eyes, I thumb the plastic lid on my takeaway cup. “It explains why you dress like a prep school boy. But I’m more curious as to… why?”
A corner of his mouth strays sideways, pulling his face into a grimace. “If you’d met my family, it wouldn’t come as such a surprise.”
“About that,” I note. “What’s the deal with your family? I’d say you don’t have to tell me, but you kind of do. At least enough for me to get what’s going on at the party tonight.”
“Right.”
Lewis bites the inside of his cheek and blinks his eyes shut for a moment, as if he needs to steel himself. Then, when he opens them again, he says, “I’ll give you a rundown,” and something in him has changed, like he’s slipped into another version of himself.
I learn that Lewis has an older sister, Ada, short for Adeline, who works at his dad’s firm and has been married for eight years to John, who, according to Lewis, is a textbook himbo, but has all the emotional intelligence Lewis and Ada never learned from their dad. They have a daughter, Alice, who Lewis has only met three times in person but often video chats with. Then, there’s the youngest of the three siblings, Ben, short for Benjamin, whose graduation will be celebrated tonight, and their mother, “who can be nice if my father is not around.” Last, and very much least, there’s his father. From what Lewis says, I picture him as the quintessential money-hungry investment firm CEO shark. Lewis laughs when I tell him, and says grimly, “Not too far off.”
All morning, I keep pushing my luck, asking questions about his family and surprisingly, they don’t make Lewis shut down anymore. I suspect he welcomes my curiosity because it keeps us from getting into how we ended up with his lips on my finger last night. Whatever it is, I’m happy to finally learn more about him.
Between lectures, Lewis tells me how he grew up in a high-rise luxury apartment on the Upper East Side with a slew of au pairs, a meticulously planned-out week of extracurriculars, weekends in the Hamptons, and the persistent expectation to eventually take over his father’s real estate investment firm. He mentions a year when he was shipped off to boarding school somewhere in the South of France, summers in some second (or third?) home on the Mediterranean coast, and winters inthe Alps or the Rocky Mountains. His voice is offhanded, almost bored, and I notice how he sticks to a neutral retelling, sketching out a timeline and skirting over the details.
“Hey.” He nudges my side as we make our way to the front of the coffee line, huddled together to keep our voices from drifting. With his arm draped around me and fingers drumming a distracting rhythm into the dip of my waist, he’s so close that the plane of his chest shifts against my side whenever he breathes. Despite reminding myself that our embrace is only to keep up appearances, I find myself leaning deeper into it. I should be tired after the short night. But even now, as the double dose of caffeine is wearing off, my skin feels charged with the proximity of him. “This shouldn’t be a one-way street. I know you have a sister… who just got married…” With his free hand, he passes me a clean mug, then takes one for himself. “Karo?”
I stare at him for a beat longer and miss that the line has advanced ahead of us. I’m impressed that he remembers Karo’s name when I’ve only mentioned her once or twice.
“Yeah,” I murmur as Lewis nudges me forward and grabs a sachet of sugar for me. “She stayed in Berlin for her studies, has been dating the same musician since high school, now works in publishing, and, as you correctly remembered, got married last week.”
He lets go of me, and puts our coffee mugs under the dispenser, one after the other. “Is she older than you?”
“Younger. But she’s the one of us who’s better at the whole adulting thing.”
“How so?”
I shrug. “She’s just better. Her fiancé—no, husband— Lennart and her have it together. They have multi-seasonal plants on the balcony, and they get their picture frames custom-made. A few months ago, I helped her paint her living room wall.”
“Okay.” He narrows his eyebrows. “Sounds cozy?”
“It is,” I agree. “My point is, she’s settled. Stable. She knows she’ll be living there for the next however many years, so she can afford to paint the walls of a rental, drill holes, and hang up pictures, and, well, do all the stuff you do when you have your life figured out.”
