“I mean, it was a really good burrito,” I muttered, not even convincing myself.
She kept scrolling. “Oh, there’re memes. One says, ‘Me pretending I don’t love my girlfriend.’ Another says, ‘Enemies to Lovers: Episode One.’”
I let out a long, suffering sigh. “Remind me why I agreed to this?”
"Agreed to what?"
I bit my lip. "I'll tell you, but you can't tell anyone."
"Faking it for the cameras?" she asked.
"How did you?—"
“Because you’re a people pleaser with unresolved daddy issues.”
“Too early, Nora.”
She laughed again, but it was softer this time. “Honestly? You didn’t look miserable. I’ve seen you on real dates look more like you wanted to light yourself on fire.”
“I didn’t hate it,” I admitted, tracing a chip in the ceramic mug. “Which is the problem.”
“You mean the part where your fake soccer boyfriend is a six-foot-six storm cloud with secrets and tragic eyebrows?”
“Yes. That part.”
There was a pause. I could practically hear Nora’s smirk through the phone. “Do you… like him?”
“No,” I said too quickly. “I mean. No. Of course not.” A beat. "He's Kieren freaking Walker."
“Wow. You are such a bad liar.”
“I don’t like him,” I insisted. “He’s rude. And broody. And emotionally unavailable.”
Nora snorted. “You’re literally describing every fictional man you’ve ever swooned over. He’s a checklist.”
“I need new checklists.”
“No, you need to accept that the Lana Del Rey edit is now canon, and your fake relationship is trending in five countries.”
I blinked. “Wait—what?”
“Oh yeah,” Nora said, satisfied. “Hashtag StormWalker has international legs. Buckle up, bestie. The shippers are feral.”
"I'm going now."
"Kiss him for me!"
I hung up without a response.
I should have known better than to open Twitter before my second cup of coffee, but habit and curiosity are terrible bedfellows. I tapped the app and immediately felt the familiar churn—the public moving like a tide and I, irritatingly, was the rock in it.
The top feed was a carousel of edited clips from yesterday’s lunch, slowed-down loops, reaction videos, and more speculative essays than I’d expect at a daytime book club. My mentions were a circus: supportive threads, death threats, think pieces, and a baffling number of wedding-ring GIFs.
Someone had already stitched a montage of his hand brushing mine next to a clip of me coughing from spicy salsa and titled it “Protective Boyfriend Era.” I felt my face heat up despite the late-morning light cutting through my blinds.
I scrolled until my thumb hurt and then saw three comments that should’ve landed in a trash folder but didn’t.
“Kieren Walker is the standard. Do you see the way he looks at her??”
