Page 19 of Enchanted to Meet You

I ran my tongue over my teeth as I mulled over what to say. She wasn’t wrong about that, but the discussion then had been so hypothetical. Maybe I should have seen it as the end of all that, but the decision had been weighing on my mind ever since. Which is partially why I showed up at Justin’s house embarrassingly early for a party just to get the invitation out of my mind.

“I’m not sure I am going,” I said finally. “I guess I’m just… thinking about it.”

“Well, let’s think about it from the bikini store,” Clementine said cheerfully. She hooked one arm through mine, jostling both our shopping bags, then through Nora’s and started tugging us forward. I rolled my eyes but was secretly happy for the distraction.

We were only in the store for three minutes before Clementine was shoving Nora into a changing room with a handful of bikinis Clem had picked out for her, prattling on about how Nora needed to look cute this summer. She’d invited us all to go on a vacation to her boyfriend’s beach house in California—a fact that seemed incomprehensible given that her boyfriend was Will Valentine, one-third of the famous boyband the Valentine Brothers—at which point Nora had admitted she didn’t have a single cute swimsuit or any nice summer clothes at all. Clementine was so horrified that she’d immediately shoved us both in the car and driven us here.

“Try on the pink one with the white polka dots,” Clementine instructed Nora through the closed door. “It’ll make your boobs look amazing. Trust me.”

Nora’s response was muffled by the door, but it didn’t sound especially thrilled by the comment. I chuckled and started wandering down the aisle, looking at the swimsuits on the hangers and mannequins with passing interest.

“Oh look, it’s Reese!” Clementine’s whole face lit up as she waved wildly at someone over my shoulder.

I spun around so fast I nearly took out a display of sunhats. “Rhys? Where?”

“What?” Clementine blinked at me, looking confused by my reaction. A second later, her best friend—Reese Connors, a blonde girl who had been on the swim team with us but I didn’t know as well as Clementine—walked in the store, and my heart that had been thudding a mile a minute slowed down.

“Oh,” I said, trying to act normal even as my face heated up. “I thought you meant…”

I didn’t say it but she clued in easily, then burst out laughing so hard she had to grab the shelf next to her for support.

“You think I’m going to sic your brother’s mortal enemy on you at a swimwear store,” Clementine said, still laughing, wiping under what I hoped were pretend tears. “What would that even accomplish? ‘Surprise, here’s the boy who single-handedly ended Sebastian’s perfect season, please try on a bikini in front of him.’”

“I’d rather never see him again in my life, so, glad it’s not that.” The words weren’t even a lie, although they were missing quite a bit of context.

I felt the knot in my chest ease in a way that said a lot about the current state of my nervous system. Because if it had actually been him—if I’d turned around and found Rhys standing there instead, in the middle of a swimwear store, in front of Clementine and Nora and heaven knew who else—that would have been catastrophic. There was no universe in which I wanted those two worlds anywhere near each other. I hated him. That part, at least, wasn’t a lie I had to maintain for anyone’s benefit; it came pre-installed, the same way it had for Sebastian. The fact that I’d also agreed to fake-date him didn’t cancel that out. If anything it just made the hatred more complicated, more layered, more the kind of thing I couldn’t say out loud without an entire follow-up conversation I obviously never wanted to have.

“Hey,” Reese said, her Australian accent thick. She barely got her whole body into the store before Clementine was gripping her hand and yanking her toward a rack of new swimsuits on the back wall.

“You have to try this one-piece on. It has cutouts by the hips! It’ll look so good on you!” Clementine said over her shoulder as she dragged Reese through the store. Reese gave me a shrug as if to say “typical Clementine” before they wove through racks and around mannequins to get to the back wall.

I spun back around, running my fingers over swimsuits and coverups until movement in my peripheral had me freezing. For a second, I could have sworn I saw⁠—

But no, that couldn’t be right. He wasn’t here. It was just the stress of the whole Rhys/Reese confusion from earlier causing my mind to play tricks on me. I was safe. Totally safe from⁠—

“That’s a cute one,” a deep voice said from behind me. I nearly screamed, but at the very last second caught myself and clamped my mouth shut so hard that it hurt my jaw.

At least I didn’t almost punch him this time.

I spun around, immediately getting a face full of a muscular chest that I was unfortunately becoming well acquainted with. I automatically took a step back as I realized how close Rhys was to me—both because I wanted some space from him and also because if my friends came around the corner and saw us pressed up like that, I didn’t even want to imagine what their reactions would be—bumping my back against the hangers of bright swimsuits in the process.

“What are you doing here?” I hissed, my eyes darting around in search of my friends. If they saw him here, this close to me like a boyfriend, I was dead.

Even if he was just my fake boyfriend, I didn’t want to have to explain that away. It was only last night that we’d agreed to our fake relationship, but it already felt like it had been happening for a lifetime. We’d hammered out the actual terms of the whole arrangement over text this morning because he didn’t trust that I would remember everything we’d talked about and I didn’t trust that he would stick to an agreement that wasn’t in writing.

His messages had come in short and unbothered, the text equivalent of him leaning against a doorframe with his arms crossed: Don’t tell your brother. Don’t tell Landon it’s fake. Don’t get weird about the PDA in front of Kelcey, it has to look real or this doesn’t work.

I’d included a few rules of my own, including a timeline—we were not continuing this into summer break—and a promise from him that he would do his very best to make sure there would be no far-reaching consequences of this down the line. I didn’t want this to be something that haunted me a few months later. I was pretty sure his agreement to that had been fairly sarcastic, but I was taking it at face value. Now that he had followed me into a store where any number of people could see us and ask questions, I had to wonder just how much he cared about my stipulations of not letting anyone from my world know about this.

“I just happened to be in the mall and saw you when I was walking past.” He shrugged nonchalantly like he wasn’t testing fate by being here right now. “Figured I’d say hi.”

“Bye,” I snapped, then pushed myself away from him, walking as quickly as I could toward anywhere else in the store to get away from him. His footfalls echoed on the linoleum floor behind me and I ground my teeth together.

I turned at the end of the aisle, heading for the dressing rooms, even though I didn’t have anything to try on. I figured it would be the one place he wouldn’t dare follow me to, but the echoing footsteps—could footsteps be cocky? His certainly sounded like it—continued behind me.

“Stop following me,” I stage-whispered to him over my shoulder. He was only two paces behind, a smug grin on his lips like he knew exactly what he was doing to my stress levels right now.

“I’m just⁠—”