“The problem with fake dating is when your body stops pretending and your heart doesn’t get the memo.”
Holly walked out alone. Barefoot. Barely breathing.
She’d already started moving by the time the opening notes ofI’m With Youby Avril Lavigne slipped out, soft and searching. Gentle guitar, mournful strings, playing like the soundtrack to a question she didn’t know how to answer yet. The stage lights were low, bathing her in a moody glow as she walked like she was hitch-hiking along a highway to nowhere, arms wrapped around herself to ward off an imaginary chill.
In this light, the ice-blue crushed velvet dress the costume department had picked for her looked ethereal, shimmering like moonlight on water. Her hair fluttered around her shoulders as she let herself sway slightly in time to the rhythm. No ballroom heels now. No armor. But as soon as the first verse of the song hit, Holly stepped into the fire anyway and began todance.
She didn’t look at the judges or the audience. Instead she let herself focus on the floor because it was the only thing in her life not asking her to give it all away. The choreography was muscle memory by now, but her body felt foreign. Too soft, too quiet,too open. Every step forward made her feel less like a dancer and more like a confession in motion.
Out there in the shadows, she knew he was waiting.Nate.Solid and steady and still holding all the pieces she’d handed him in a moment of terrifying trust. The audience couldn’t see him yet, but she could feel him. And God help her, shewantedto run to him. So when the pre-chorus hit…
She did.
Holly spun, then pivoted in his direction and ran across the stage with the spotlight chasing her. She launched herself into the dark expanse toward the back of the stage, earning a loud collective gasp from the audience. But he was there, and not just because she’d choreographed it. She landedhard, her chest thumping against his, her arms spread wide like wings waiting to take flight.
In an instant Nate’s arms banded around her like a promise, cradling her to him. The applause was so loud it almost drowned out the song. Not because it was a perfect lift. Not because the timing hit like a cinematic beat drop. Even the people in the audience could tell that what they were watching right now actuallymeant something.
Even if Holly wasn’t ready to admit it out loud.
The choreography didn’t rush them. It let them orbit, collide, retreat, and return again like a tide. Holly had built the routine with such careful intent that it should have felt calculated, but under the white-blue lights it looked like emotion wearingchoreography as a disguise. Every time she pushed away, her body betrayed her by reaching back for him a beat later. Every time she fell, she felltowardhim. Every time the music swelled, she let him pull her in as if she’d fought herself and lost.
As though all of it was just her fighting something inevitable.
It was the first throes of reluctant love, the part nobody admits to because it’s humiliating and tender and terrifying, the moment it goes fromI can handle thistoI’m going to ruin my life for you. It was desire sharpened into longing. It was her trying to convince the world she was selling the fake dating angle while her subconscious wrote a different story entirely. And holy shit, Nate was watching her like he fuckingknew.
Not to mention he looked incredible. After ShirtGate, he’d told her that he’d just ‘wear something from home’, which had her low-key spiraling because shoulder pads and a hockey helmet weren’t exactly the vibe they were going for. But when her gaze had landed on him waiting for her backstage wearing simple black pants and a soft black linen button-down open at the neck with the sleeves rolled to the elbows to show off his ink, she’d had to force herself to breathe.
And he was still watching her with that intensity he’d recently acquired. She didn’t know how he could look at her as if she was something breakable and holy all at once. As though he was dancing with a miracle instead of a girl who’d been falling apart backstage less than five minutes ago. Every step they took was a confession she hadn’t meant to make, and Nate wore it on his face like it wasgospel.
He didn’t just hold her. Heheld her, scared she'd vanish if he blinked too hard, like she was a secret he’d never be braveenough to say out loud. And as the music swelled, grief and longing wrapped in melody, she let herself lean in for a moment. Long enough to pretend he was really hers. To believe he meant it. And for one suspended breath under the lights, it didn’t feel like choreography. It was simply the truth.
As the song wound down into its last aching notes, they sank to their knees together, as if the weight of it all had finally caught up to them. Hope, hurt,whatever this was. Her forehead brushed his for half a breath, and neither of them moved. No ending or fancy pose. Just two people who’d given themselves away by accident and didn’t know how to take it all back.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Holly and Nate!”
The stage shook with the force of the applause, but Holly barely heard it. Everything inside her was too loud already, her chest tight, her limbs trembling. The world had somehow shifted beneath her, and she felt like she was having an out-of-body experience as Nate helped her up off the floor.
Holly leaned ever so slightly into the steadiness of him. She didn’t dare look up at him, but she could feel him. Warm, solid, humming with something that felt way too big to be labeled. Her lungs stuttered on the next inhale because she was exposed now. She'd left something vital in the shape of that dance, and was fucked if she knew how to get it back.
Indie was already storming toward them like a glitter bomb with legs, eyes wide and misted over, clutching the mic like it was a holy relic.
“I can’t even,” she said, breathless and starstruck. “Holly. Nate.What the actual hell was that?”
Holly’s heart was still thudding against her ribs like it had something to prove as she curled her fingers tighter around Nate’s without thinking.
“That was insane,” Indie continued, shoving the mic at them with reverence and zero chill. “Barefoot? Barefoot? I’m gonna need a full debrief and possibly a tissue. You’ve never danced barefoot on the show before, Holly! How did it feel?”
Holly lifted her chin, knowing full well that whoever did that to her shoes would be shitting their pants right about now. “Liberating.”
“And Nate, wow. Not a single person on this planet right now would believe you’ve only been dancing for three weeks!”
Nate, of course, was already recovering like the soft-hearted pit bull he was. “All Holly,” he said hoarsely, flashing Indie a lopsided smile that should’ve been illegal. “Her vision. Her story. I just… kept up.”
Holly rolled her eyes at that, but it was soft and reluctant as she looped her arm through his and leaned into thefake coupleangle. “It wasus.”
Indie clutched her heart like they’d personally wounded her. “Jesus Christ, I love you two. Alright, I’m not emotionally stable enough to keep this going. Judges, please save me before I adopt them on live television. Let’s hear from Muffy Duncan!”
Muffy was clutching her chest like she’d been personally assaulted. “I don’t even know what tosay,” she said breathlessly. “That wasn’t a dance, that was aconfession. I felt it in mybones. Nine.”
