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“I tried, but you were out like a light, so I just figured you’d be better off here.”

He wraps his arms around my neck from behind and then he gives me a squeeze and pulls back, moving to the other side of the island where he takes a bite of his eggs. His plate is piled full of food including the scramble, sausage, and fruit alongside a bowl of oatmeal. My skin still hums from his touch.

“So,” I tell Trey. “We were watching film last night …”

Trey cuts me off with his roar of laughter.

“Wait. Wait. Wait,” he says between gasps of breath. Then he turns to Marcus. “You had her here for a date and you watched film? Man. What is wrong with you?”

“I wanted to,” I say.

“It was her idea,” Marcus says, sheepishly.

“It was a great date,” I say.

Marcus looks at me and sends me a private smile that feels like a whisper between the two of us—as if I’m actually saying we had a date and it actually was great.

I know we’re acting. But I’m not lying about our evening. It was great, despite my duck-walk and pasta explosion.

We’re acting. We’re acting. We’re acting, I remind myself.

“Anyway,” I say, “We watched the last Panthers game. Every time you lined up in the slot, number twenty-six shaded inside. And you kept trying to beat him outside. He was protecting the middle. You could tell before the snap. You gave him exactly what he wanted.”

“So from your line of thinking, I should fake to the inside first?”

“Just read him,” I say. “He knows you’ve watched tape. He might be ready for you to recalibrate. But, yeah. I’d fake inside.”

Trey shakes his head. “Remind me to get a football-loving girl when I finally settle down.”

“You’re never going to settle down,” Marcus teases.

“That’s what I thought about you too, man. But look at you now,” Trey smiles widely and I flinch inwardly.

I love being here—being around the team. If I’m honest, I should have ended this charade by now. I wanted to at the studio, but then logic said wait till we’re not so heavily in the spotlight. Now is the ideal time, really. Yes, people still talk about us. The Jumbotron shows me in the box during home games. Fans post about us. But we’re not front-page news anymore. It’s time. I really do need to come clean, even though it means I won’t have an excuse to sit in Marcus’s kitchen sipping fresh-squeezed orange juice, talking football anymore.

I’ll lose him.

The truth is, I never really had him.

Chapter 27

Marcus

It was a terrible task to pretend indifference

when every nerve was alive to the truth.

~ Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

I turn and dish up a plate of fruit and some egg scramble. I added cream cheese and chipped beef and some seasonings to the eggs. It is good, there’s no reason I should pretend it isn’t.

It’s literally a power struggle to get Cass to stay and eat, which Trey watches like he’s at Wimbledon, coffee cup perched in his hand, his eyes volleying from me to Cass and back again.

“I should go,” she says, setting her half-drank glass of juice back on the counter. “I’ve got food at home.”

“I already cooked plenty.”

“You need four thousand calories a day. Eat mine.”