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- 11. macey -

It was the last day that Ron and I would be driving to New Jersey. Over the past week, we've sort of fallen into our own system. He would drive, I would direct while reading my speech over to him. He never once allowed me to drive his precious truck, yup, he's one of those guys. The ones who won't let girl drive their cars.

He's been acting different since the night he saw me shirtless. He rarely looked me in the eye and I always had to start up a conversation. Whenever we stopped and before we started driving again, he'd always call Will back at base. Ron also would never allow me to hear their conversations, saying it was top secret military conversation. I've only talked to Will one day out of this whole week. And like Ron, I was the one who had to start the conversation. I haven't heard from Optimus at all. It felt as if they were keeping something from me.

Ron made sure that every time we checked into a new motel for the night, he stressed the fact about having two beds. When we get into Jersey, we won't have to go to a motel and sleep there, we were staying at my old house.

After everything with my mother and father, I was given the legal rights to the house. That was a week before I left for the base. My brother was living up in Boston, so he had no use for the house. I ended up allowing my cousin and her husband rent the house out, it was just the two of them. They had only been married for six months and didn't have any children, so I allowed for them to use it. Lucky, they were both on a business trip to Washington D.C at the same time Ron and I would be there.

"Um, Ron, can we talk?" I needed to warn him about the people we'd be meeting at the banquet. It was the people from my old show team, they were basically family. They could be a bit, how do I put this, over protective. Take Will, multiply it by one hundred, add tough female, and add intimidating males, who have endless questions and that's my group of people.

After I said this, Ron visibility tensed up, probably thinking the worse.

"What is it, Exner," he said stiffly, looking at me from the corner of his eye.

"Well, I don't know how to put this, but, for your sake, we're going to need to pretend to be together," I finished, looking down at my hands. I could feel the truck under me swerve, but I never saw Ron's hands actually move.

"We need to do what?! Why would we ever need to do that?"

"The people were you're going to meet, my Jersey friends, can be a bit overprotective-"

"And what, Lennox isn't," he let out a small laugh, something I hadn't heard him do in few days.

"Not even close, think of one hundred Will's and you have just one of my friends, and there's about ten of them."

"So, we have to fake being in a relationship because of them? Exner, that just doesn't make sense," he glanced over to me, looking anywhere but my eyes once again.

"Yes, the guys will tear you apart if they learned we were traveling together, alone, and not in a relationship. It's be even worse if they were to find out we've never met before last week. That's just how they all are," I could see Ron puffing his chest out with a smug look on his face.

"I could hold my own against them."

"I'm sure you could, Ron, but please just agree to this. It's only for one night, then we can act like it never happened, okay? If you don't want to, we won't even have to tell Will," it was true. In all honesty, I'd rather Will not find out, he'd either have a heart attack or would fly over here and bash mine and Ron's heads together.