After our date,in the interest of keeping things transparent, I decided to tell Rex about my scene. I’d mulled it over, trying to decide if a fake boyfriend rated high enough to be privy to my shooting schedule. In the end, it seemed like the right thing to do.
I didn’t want to spring it on him over a text message, though, so I did what any fake boyfriend would do—I surprised him at his job during lunch. Blue was there that day and he greeted me with a bright smile.
“Rex doesn’t usually take a lunch,” Blue explained to me when I told him I was there to surprise him with food. I’d stopped at Bennett’s on the way and grabbed a couple of burgers and fries.
“I should have brought Gumball instead of food then and upped my chances.”
“No, you misunderstand me,” Blue said. “He doesn’t usually take a lunch even though half the time we try to make him. Rexis dedicated to his job, which is admirable, but he could stand to be a little less dedicated sometimes.”
Blue walked around the counter and motioned for me to follow him. He took me to Rex’s office and told me to wait there and he’d send Rex along in a minute.
Rex’s office wasn’t anything special in that it revealed nothing personal about him. It was a small space with a small desk that had room for a computer and a messy array of paperwork. It sat in the middle of the room, and the walls were lined with shelves and a filing cabinet. The shelves had textbooks on them. I rounded the desk for a better look.
“They’re mostly for show, but once in a while they come in handy,” Rex said from the doorway.
“I brought lunch.” I lifted the bag in my hand. “I’m not sure where to put it.”
He swept the paperwork up off his desk, first stacking it into a neat pile before depositing it on top of the filing cabinet. “Here is fine,” Rex said. “I wasn’t expecting company today.”
“It was a last-minute decision. I wanted to run something by you, and it seemed better to have the conversation in person.” Plus, it gave me an excuse to see him. Rex had been on my mind ever since our date. I’d put the flowers in a vase at home, and I loved looking at them. I took so many pictures of them that Gumball got jealous.
I set the food out on the desk and plopped down into the spare chair on the other side of Rex’s desk. He took his own chair and cracked open one of the containers.
“I am all yours for the next thirty minutes,” Rex told me, grabbing a fry and biting it in half. “Blue tried to talk me up to an hour, but we compromised.”
“I’m sorry for interrupting your day?—”
Rex put up his hand to stop me. “Don’t apologize. I’m glad you stopped by. Whatever the reason.”
“Right. The reason.” I hadn’t been nervous about a shoot in years, but my jitters about the one I had lined up had nothing to do with the work itself and everything to do with Rex. It had been a long time since I had to care about someone else’s opinion and logically I knew that our date was fake and that Rex was my boyfriend in name only. But logic was apparently meaningless to my nervous system.
“I have a shoot tomorrow, and I wanted to tell you. I know we’re not actually involved, but I couldn’t go through with it if I felt like I was keeping something from you.”
Rex nodded and bit into his burger. I picked at my fries while I waited for him to chew and swallow.
“Can you tell me about the shoot? I mean, of course I don’t mind. Work is work. I deal with pet snakes and you handle trouser snakes.”
I almost choked on a fry. “Wow, Rex. Really? Trouser snakes?”
He shrugged and kept eating.
I could tell him about the shoot. There was nothing stopping me. And he’d asked, so after eating a few bites of my burger in relative silence, I decided to tell him.
“The scene is with a guy I’ve worked with before. We don’t really have a script most of the time; we just get in there and have fun.”
“Define fun.”
I leaned back in the chair and met Rex’s gaze. Heat crawled up my skin, starting at my core and flowing outward through the rest of my body. “Rex, are you fishing for details?”
“That depends on if you’re going to tell me anything. If you are, then yes, I absolutely am. If no, then I definitely was not asking that.”
“His name is Quinn, and I’ve worked with him a few times, but not recently.” I pulled my phone out and brought up a picture of him, a fully clothed one, and showed Rex.
He whistled. “Damn, my boyfriend gets to have sex with that? Lucky. He’s like a Temu Alexander Skaarsgard, and that’s not even an insult.”
“Oh fuck, I’m so telling him that.” I laughed and tucked my phone away.
“What do the two of you usually get up to? I mean, like…” Rex’s face turned an impressive shade of tomato.
