Page 13 of Winging It with You

Jo, whose expression gets more and more pained at our back-and-forth, clears her throat. “Are you quite finished?” she snaps, stowing the binder she’d been flipping through back inher canvas tote with a huff. “We need a picture of the two of you.”

“What kind of picture?” I ask, turning the phone over in my hand.

But a rather bored-looking hotel concierge finally makes an appearance behind the check-in counter, pulling Jo’s attention from us to making sure our rooms are ready.

“Nothing complicated, boys,” Arthur says from his seat. He’d pulled out a rather worn-looking sudoku booklet the second we sat down and seemed to find it incredibly easy to tune us all out. “Just a photo Jo can post introducing you to our viewers.”

“Will a selfie work?” Theo asks, and Arthur nods in approval. “Alright, how do you want to do this?” he asks, turning to face me.

I slide open the phone’s camera, making sure it’s on selfie mode. “Here, come stand next to me.”

He shuffles over so we’re now standing shoulder to shoulder. “Three, two, one…” I say, taking a burst of photos.

Before I can even open the camera roll to review them, Jo’s attention returns to us. “Oh, look, Arthur—Mr. Grumpy Pants is posing with his brother,” she says sarcastically. “Or better yet, his roommate.”

Theo chuckles, but scrolling through the string of photos I’ve just taken, I am horrified to see that she’s not wrong.

If someone told me we were supposed tolike—not to mentionlove—each other based on this photo, I would have laughed in their face. I have a grimace pretending to be a smile plastered across my pained face. A perfect mix of awkward terror and unexpected constipation disguised as some botched attempt at happiness. But by comparison, Theo’s smile is wild and genuine. There’s a hint of excitement in his eyes, and thedimple I noticed earlier makes a timely appearance. I fight the urge to run my finger over it on the screen.

“Here,” Theo says, offering his hand. “Let me try.”

I hand him the phone, glad to be free of photographer duty.

“Is it okay if I put my arm around you?” he asks, his voice calm but direct. I nod.

Theo takes a measured step closer, closing the polite distance we naturally placed between us, and lifts one arm around my shoulder, outstretching the other to take a picture. But he doesn’t just drape his arm around me—he pulls me flush against the length of him, our bodies all but fused together.

The sudden closeness to Theo sends electricity down my spine. It’s the first time we’vereallytouched each other. There’s a sudden intimacy to how we’re now positioned, something typically reserved for just Clint, but based on how Theo’s body practically swallows mine—there’s no comparison.

“Nothing complicated, remember,” he whispers just for me, and I force a swallow. I almost bust out in a fit of nervous laughter, because there’s nothingnotcomplicated about any of this. He must have taken a photo because from one second to the next, he frees me from his grip, and the warmth of his large body against mine slowly seeps away from me.

Theo shows me the phone’s screen, revealing a moment of candid intimacy between the two of us that feels both nothing like me and yet not at all forced.

“Hmm” is all I can say, and Theo takes that as some sort of approval, because he has already passed the phone back to Jo.

A small smile spreads across her face as she reviews it. “That’ll work,” she says, pocketing the phone and reopening her binder. “Here is your room key.”

Room key.

Singular.

“There’s only one room?” I ask, hoping the twinge of unease in my voice isn’t as obvious to them as it is to me. Sharing a room with Theo is yet another detail to this whole charade that I hadn’t quite thought about.

“Obviously there’s only one room,” she says dismissively, still flipping through her binder. “One room for our happy littlecouple. Do I have to remind you boys about the whole disgustingly in love thing we talked about earlier?” Neither Theo nor I say anything. “Look. I don’t care what the two of you do behind closed doors—be friends or don’t. Fuck, if it floats your boat. Itrulycould not care less. But here? On my turf and when filming is concerned? I’m going to need you both to hold up your end of the bargain and convince me you have what it takes to pull this off. Got it?” She crosses her arms, waiting for some sort of acknowledgment from us.

I’m pretty sure if I make eye contact with Theo at this very moment, I will melt into the marbled hotel lobby floor.

We both nod, a nonverbal agreement to her frightening terms, and I reach forward to grab the room key from her outstretched hand.

Ourroom key.

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Lying next to a completestranger in bed is just as awkward as I’d feared it would be.

Even more so considering I’m wrapped up in the thick white duvet like a sad little burrito, afraid to move a single inch, while Theo couldn’t appear to be less bothered, sprawled out next to me in his briefs.

Onlyhis briefs.

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