Firstly, there were our housemates. Jonah thought they knew us too well for us to lie to them. ‘Maybe not all of them, but we’ve lived with Van and Annie for eight years!’ he protested, sitting on my bed, the soft glow of my lamp catching the few strands of grey in his dark hair and turning them silver, the fairy lights above him giving him a starry crown.
‘Do you know how many times they’ve asked me when you and I are going to bang it out?’ I demanded.
He immediately turned bright red.
‘It’ll be easy,’ I said. ‘We’ll just be like, “Oh no, the thought of being separated made us realise that we’ve actually been enemies-to-lovers all this time, and now we’re rushing to the altar so we never need to be apart again.”?’
He exhaled, pinching the bridge of his nose behind his glasses.
‘Plus,’ I said, unable to resist needling him, ‘what do you think theythinkwe’ve been doing in each other’s bedrooms recently?’
He gave me a withering look, as he turned even redder. ‘Cute, Shaw.’
‘I thought so.’
‘What about your friends?’
‘What about the Van and Annie plan did you not understand?’
‘Your other friends.’
‘Like our PhD cohort? They know what we’re like. The enemies-to-lovers line will totally work on them.’
‘No.’ Jonah ran his hand through his hair, the silver strands shifting and sparkling. In this kind of lighting, it was difficult not to notice that he really was quite a handsome man. ‘I mean – your other friends. Your non-university friends.’
‘Fisher,’ I said, jamming the pad of my thumb into the cubic zirconia spikes of my engagement ring, ‘we work about the same number of hours a week, right? Are you out there maintaining a whole host of non-uni friendships? Because if you are, I give you permission to lecture me about time management.’
Then there were our siblings. ‘If it’s all right with you, I’d like to let Fiona think we’re real,’ Jonah said, once we’d finished arguing about our non-existent friends.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked sceptically.
‘I’m going to tell Elias the truth, but Fi’s already carrying so much. The last thing I want to do is addmy baby brother is entering a loveless marriage just so he can move closer to meto the pile.’ Jonah took off his glasses and started polishing them. ‘Plus, she’s terrible at keeping secrets. She told her kids I was moving to Hobart before I’d even interviewed.’
Fuck me. No wonder he’d been such a nervous wreck that day.
‘When are you going to tell Chess?’ he asked. ‘I assume you’re going to tell her the truth.’
‘Obviously,’ I said. ‘I just need to find the right moment. But let’s talk about the biggest bridge we have to cross. How are we going to tell your dad?’
Jonah closed his eyes for a second, exhaling audibly. He hadn’t put his glasses back on yet, and for a moment he looked very young, and very scared.
‘It doesn’t need to bewe,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell him.’
‘I don’t suppose you could get your mum to… soften him up for you?’ Not that I could wrap my head around what a softer Professor Christian Fisher would look like.
‘My mum was one of his PhD students who dropped out to have his babies and be his unpaid research assistant.’ His tone was sharp. ‘Just how effective do you think that would be?’
I held my hands up. ‘Sorry.’
He sighed, putting his glasses back on. ‘No, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. It’s just…’
He didn’t need to finish the sentence. I was not in the habit of being particularly sympathetic towards Jonah Fisher, but it didn’t take much to imagine just how poorly his dad must have taken it when he lost the Lyons job to me – and how much worse he was going to take this.
‘What if we don’t tell him the whole story?’
‘Shaw, I plan on telling my dad that we’re the greatest pair of lovers since Heloise and Abelard. If he found out we were pulling a scam like this—’
‘Not that.’
