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Two best friends. Six weeks. One final shot at love. Since college, Maisie and August have been best friends -frustratingly, perfectly platonic best friends. For nine long years, Maisie ha...
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"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Maisie shuts the door and quickly twists to look at me across the roof of my car, her face scrunched up. "Maybe we should just tell them."
"I think it's a perfect time to practice, just like Andrea said," I say, rounding the car to join her. She stands there nervously, holding a bottle of wine in one hand and smoothing out her silky white button-up with the other, making sure it's properly tucked into the waist belt of her jeans.
"But this is your family," she says, lifting a leg to adjust the hem of her jeans so they fall correctly over her heeled boot. She teeters slightly, and I step forward to steady her by offering my forearm. "Lying to my fans is one thing, but lying to your parents? That feels like a step too far."
"They'll be fine. They'll be..." I tilt my head up to the fluffy white clouds floating by. My family adores Maisie. They always have. My sisters have even joked more than once about trading me for her. "Well, they'll be ecstatic about it."
"That's just it though. I don't—" She finds her footing again letting go of my arm. "I just don't want them to think of me differently, is all."
"What do you mean?"
"When we—" She glances past me at my parents' house. "At the end of all this, when we're no longer fake dating, I don't want things to change. With your family, I mean. They'll think we really broke up, and what if they... well what if they don't like me anymore after that?"
At the end of all of this. I haven't even thought that far ahead. I've been so fixated on the idea of dating her, of being with her the way I've dreamt about for so long—even if it is fake—that I've forgotten this has an expiration date: five weeks and four days, to be exact.
"Besides," she quickly adds, "I think they're going to know the moment we walk in anyway."
I shake my head and start heading toward the house. "They'll always love you no matter what and they're not going to know."
"Gus, the moment we walk through those doors, your mom," she says, pointing to the house as she falls in step beside me, "is going to take one look at us and know."
"No, she's not."
"Yes, she is. August, she's a—," Maisie lowers her voice to a whisper. "She's a sex therapist. Of course, she's going to know."
I stop in front of the door, turning to her. "She's a marriage and family therapist."
"Who specializes in intimacy therapy," she whisper-yells at me as if I'm not quite grasping the gravity of the situation. "In other words sex therapist. And she's going to know that we're not..."
I watch her pressing two fingers to the bridge of her nose, contemplating her next words. She wets her bottom lip with a flick of her tongue and shakes her head.
