Page 6 of Don't Go Faking My Heart

She laughs and swats my hand. “You do not. Why do you always let me talk so long about my weird dreams?"

"Because your dreams are hilarious, pal," I say, choking on the word the way I always do. But I have to call her things like “pal” or “bro” or “dude.” It reminds me of the role I play in her life: friend. Nothing more. "This one was almost as good as the one where you have to park your bike in between the third and fourth spot on the bike rack in order to enter that roller coaster ride that took you under the earth and into monster land."

"Man, I love that dream."

"Me too. Finding out your parents were werewolves was my favorite part."

"Such a good twist, right? Like, well done, brain." She shakes her head. "You're indulging me again! We need to focus!"

"If I really thought we needed to focus, I'd remind you,” I say. “But we've been over everything, and the presentation is good to go. As long as you refer to the color as 'peach' instead of 'peach fuzz.'"

She leans forward. "Rusty, so help me, if you try to make me change the colors on this presentation one more time, I'm going to pour this sweet tea over your head."

"I'm not trying to make you change colors, Ash," I tell her. "I'm sayin' it's all in the presentation. It doesn't matter if 'peach fuzz' is the color of the year. We're in the South. Peach isn't going anywhere, and settling on a classic will get more of the stodgy old men on the chamber of commerce to even consider urban planning or a code with standard color conventions."

Ash flops across the diner table like the very mention of town regulations is so exhausting, she physically can't keep herself upright. She accidentally bumps her sky blue glasses on the table, though, and she gives her nose a wiggle. It's so endearing, my heart clenches.

"You know how people say things like, 'his voice is so sexy, I could listen to him read the phone book’? They're lying. You have a great voice, and listening to you talk about zoning ordinances is enough to ruin it."

I duck my head and catalog the compliment. I don't know if she's aware of how often she compliments me, but I am.

"If you think this is boring, wait until we get in there," I tell her. "You haven't heard anything 'til you've heard them drone on about waste disposal. Buckle up."

She snaps her head up, and her curls bounce at the movement. I love her hair. It's the color of cinnamon but it smells like grapefruit, and it's so tightly curled that if you pull a lock down, it stretches from just below her shoulders to halfway down her back. Every six weeks, she dyes a single lock a new color, and it always matches her glasses. She coordinates outfits around that stripe. I hope she's still doing it when she's ninety.

Her current color is sky blue, and it makes the cornflower blue of her eyes all the more intense.

"We'll just call it peach but use the peach fuzz color. You've got to be the only person I've ever met who can spot the difference between 'peach' and 'peach fuzz,' anyway," she says. She's not as tired as I am—she has a superhuman ability to focus and maintain energy on a project—but her eyes are a bit heavier than they were last night.

How this woman talked me—a guy who’s up before the rooster crows—into abandoning my post and staying up all night is no mystery.

I'm madly in love with her.

"But for realsies, when we get to the data, I'm giving that all to you,” Ash says.

"You mean to tell me Figures McDataPants doesn’t want to talk numbers?"

Her laugh punctuates the air, and my insides warm. "Data. Pfft. I don't like it and I won't pretend to." She looks at me askance. "It? Them? Is 'data' plural? Whatever. I don't like data. Datum. Datums." She snickers, which makes me follow suit.

"Whatever helps the presentation be more persuasive," I say.

She stabs a fork into her eggs and holds it in front of her face. "We're talking about stuff like unified commercial schemes, color coding, and signage—stuff tourists eat up. Who wouldn't want that?" She takes a big bite.

"The old-timers don't want change."

"They want money."

"It'll cost them money," I say.

"In the short term. But you have to spend money to make money."

"True, but we're asking them to spend money in the short term on something they need to be convinced of in the long term. Plus, we're asking them to forego comfort and tradition."

"Ugh,” she says. “What's traditional about a sign in Comic Sans font?"

I cringe. I majored in graphic design and worked for an agency in Atlanta for a few years before my parents guilted me into moving back home. But you don't have to have a graphic design background to know Comic Sans is a big no-no.

I secretly like it. It's so much easier to read for my dyslexia, but I'll take that confession to my grave.

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