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I furrowed my brow, my forced smile sliding away. Here he was, doing his avoidance thing again. Trying to hide from his fears. Should I say something? Try to prod him toward what I thought was the right decision?

“Nonsense,” Benjamin said. Bev was looking at Freya with a sort of pained smile, as if the situation was too awkward for her tastes. “We have plenty of nights to have dinner together.” For just a moment, his eyes glinted with a sort of vicious glee. “Maybe I don’t understand humor, but I do understand how important it is to spend time with your friends.”

Shots fired. I coughed to cover up a smirk.

“See?” Freya said. She touched Seth’s upper arm, then, as if realizing they weren’t dating and shouldn’t be touching anymore, sharply pulled it away. “Everybody misses you. Come on. We’re going on an ugly sweater bar crawl to the Tree. You always had the ugliest sweaters. You can’t miss it.”

Seth glanced over at me, eyes helpless. “Abby?”

“I’ll need to borrow an ugly sweater,” I said, and that was that. Seth gave up.

“Okay. We’ll come.”

Freya’s smile was gleaming and pearl white. “Excellent.”

An hour later, Seth and I were emerging from the subway near Herald Square, both of us decked out in the ugliest sweaters I’d ever seen. When I’d heard “ugly sweater bar crawl to the Tree,” I’d of course pictured traditional ugly Christmas sweaters: blinking red lights adorning a deformed knitted Rudolph; leering elves circling an unintentionally demonic Santa.

So when Seth produced a collection of ugly Hanukkah sweaters from the back of his closet, I’d been pleasantly surprised. And immediately claimed the one with the light-up menorah on the front, leaving him with a blue-and-white monstrosity covered in dreidels. Both were itchy. I didn’t care.

“Is there anything else I should know before meeting all your friends?” I asked him as we pushed through crowds. We were getting some stares. Admiring ones, I chose to believe.

Seth shrugged. “I’ve already told you about them. They’re just normal people.”

“Where did you meet? Did you all go to school together?”

“No, not all of us,” Seth said. “I met some of them when I went to college up in Boston, then added Freya and some more after college when we were working up there. A bunch of us moved to New York over the next few years, including Freya and me, and we grew a little here. It’s more of an amorphous blob than a tight group.”

If they weren’t all tied to a specific place or point in time, maybe that left room for people to still join. Like me.

No. I almost laughed at the absurdity of thinking that. I’d probably never see them again after this. Unless I happened to be in New York and Seth invited me out. After all, we were friends now. It wouldn’t be absurd to become friends with a friend’s friends. “Are you feeling any better about seeing them? Any less nervous?” I asked. “Since Freya didn’t seem to be mad at you, and if anyone was going to be mad at you, you would think—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Seth snapped, then looked surprised at himself. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have bitten your head off like that.”

“No, it’s fine.” After all, I was just the fake girlfriend. An accessory. It wasn’t for me to ask personal questions, like how he was feeling or what was going on in his head. Even if our outing to the museum, the light touches of our hands, and the slip of vulnerability he showed in telling me he was nervous about seeing his friends had given me the illusion that maybe there was more to it than that.

Frigid bitch.

I shivered at the echo of Connor’s parting words. It wasn’t that I was frigid. I just knew my place. Besides, if I started asking Seth personal questions, he’d start thinking he could ask me personal questions in response. And I wasn’t having that.

The first bar in our bar crawl was a stereotypical Irish pub, all dark wood walls and sticky floors and torn green cushions. As we stepped inside, I was hit immediately by a wall of sound and beer smell. The place was packed. Almost by instinct, I reached for Seth’s arm so that we wouldn’t get separated as we pushed our way through.

And stopped myself just in time. So what if we got separated? I’d find him eventually. I didn’t want him thinking I was nervous to get stranded in this crowd or something.

“Hey.” Seth’s hand grabbed mine, wrapping it in warmth. I exhaled a deep breath that felt a little like relief. Good for him, keeping the ruse up and making sure we looked like a couple. Good for him.

Fortunately, his friends were clustered at a table by the window. I actually spotted them first, because, no joke, Freya was illuminated by a light from above that made her almost-white hair glow and the diamonds in her ears sparkle. She waved at us when she saw us coming, which made the rest of their group turn.

“Seth-man!” one of the guys bellowed. There were six of them in total, including Freya. “You made it! How long has it been?”

“Too long!” someone bellowed back, but nobody made it awkward beyond that. Between beery one-armed hugs and firm handshakes that made Seth let go of my hand, I was introduced to the four guys and two girls. Names were shouted at me over the noise, but, even after asking them to repeat themselves one or two or three times, I was left only reasonably certain that the guy with the scruffy brown hair was Dan and the girl who wasn’t Freya was named Kylie. The other three guys might have been named Mike.

I managed to settle myself on a rickety stool between Seth, Dan, and Kylie, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about names or having Freya twitch her finger and turn my heart into ice. I braced myself for answering a bunch of probing personal questions about where I grew up and what my hopes and dreams were, but nobody seemed particularly interested in that. They were more interested in our relationship. Well, our “relationship.” “So, Abby,” Dan hollered, blasting me in the face with a lungful of beer breath. “How did you and Seth meet?”

I glanced over at Seth, who was deep in conversation with one of the Mikes. No help there. Had he told them some fabricated romantic story about how I’d nearly slipped on an icy night and he’d caught me and noticed how the snowflakes sparkled in my eyelashes before making some crack about how he was falling for me, too? Or were we supposed to spin the same wacky water-crashing-through-my-ceiling tale we’d told Bev and Benjamin for the sake of consistency? Hopefully not. “He’s a frequent customer at the café I run,” I said. “Comes in every morning. We got to know each other like that. He’s very…cheerful early in the day.”

Dan laughed so wide I could see his molars. “You can say that again. We lived together in college and I swear I almost pushed the guy out a window a few times. It’s like he’s immune to hangovers.”

There it was: an immediate sense of kinship. I’d never particularly wanted to push Seth out a window before, but that was mainly because my café was on the first floor, so I hadn’t thought of it. “Clearly, you didn’t push him out a window, though.”