Page 2 of The Fine Art of Faking It
Eden tucked her hair behind her ear. “Do you think?” She needed a second opinion. All signs were pointing to Davis flirting with her. But there was always the possibility that her hormones were scrambling her brain. She’d had a front row seat to her sister’s high school hormonal parade.
“Totally.” Moon Beam’s sigh filled the emptying hallway with a cloud of longing. “I wish Beckett would look at me that way. So, when are you going to break the news to your parents that you are going to have ten thousand babies with Davis Gates, thereby destroying their souls?”
Eden had two excellent reasons for being attracted to Davis. The obvious: smart, sexy, funny, really, really, really good-looking.
But the bonus—the whipped cream, cherry, and sprinkles on top—was the fact that her parents enthusiastically detested his entire family. The Moodys and the Nuswings—now Gateses—had been feuding for approximately a million years over something stupid that none of them could remember correctly. Her parents took the feud so seriously, the only thing she’d ever been forbidden from doing was befriending Davis “Demon Spawn” Gates.
Her parents should have known better. Eden was a rebel starved for a cause. She now knew exactly how many seconds it would take her to climb from her bedroom window and shimmy down the birch tree to freedom despite the fact that she had no actual reasons for sneaking out… yet. But it couldn’t hurt to have a plan in place should an opportunity worth sneaking out ever present itself.
In Blue Moon, it was nearly impossible to rebel. Everyone was annoyingly accepting. Davis was the only forbidden fruit Eden had encountered. Her first recollection of him was their parents arguing over who got to the kindergarten registration table first. While her mother called his mother a sell-out yuppie and his father poked hers in the chest with an index finger, Eden had smiled shyly at Davis who, even at five, seemed immune to the drama.
“I have to get him to go out with me first. If I’m going to get in trouble, it’s going to be for something that I did, not justhopedto do,” Eden reminded Moon Beam.
“You’re so wise,” Moon Beam sighed.
“I’d better get to class.” Eden was in a hurry to slide into the seat next to Davis. When serendipity—and Ms. Charisma Champion—had assigned her to the stool at the beginning of the year, she knew it was a sign. Eden waved a cheerful good-bye to her cousin and clomped down the hallway, slipping through the classroom door a second before the chimes sounded.
Serendipity had not only put her on the stool next to Davis in Household Management and Partnerships it had magically paired them to be pretend life partners for a class project. Ms. Champion walked students through the boring everyday pieces and parts that made up an adult life in an attempt to teach teenagers how to navigate relationships. Unit chapters included: Developing a fifty-fifty division of household responsibilities, crafting budgets, strategizing conflict resolution scenarios, and creating “bucket filling” lists for both couples and the individual members of said couples.
It would have been a total snoozefest, except for the fact that she was in a fake domestic partnership with Davis Gates.
On paper, Eden and Davis were an unmarried—Eden approved the unconventional approach to a relationship—winemaker (Davis) and indie rock music marketing executive (Eden) who lived frugally, traveled extensively, and budgeted $65 a month for movie and concert dates. Eden liked that pretend grown-up partner Davis didn’t try to convince her to get a more realistic job or do the laundry. She felt it boded well for their future, real-life relationship.
Sure. Real life Eden would have preferred to find a smoky-eyed guitarist or a pierced-eyebrowed delinquent. But it was good-guy, do-right Davis who made her heart flip-flop in her chest.
Now, she just needed to convince him to ask her out.
2
“Now, if everyone will take a look at the scenario sheets I just handed out,” Ms. Champion droned from the front of the classroom. Her frizzy dark hair hung like the heavy velour parlor curtains in Aunt Nell’s dusty mansion on the outskirts of town.
Davis’s shoulder brushed Eden’s as he leaned in to read the handout. Eden’s body was already in overdrive, as was usual for the forty minutes they spent together in class. She could smell his deodorant, the yummy, store-bought kind.
“Hmm,” he said, skimming the paper. “It says here, we’re supposed to ‘enter into a conflict about one of us siding with their family and the other one holding grudges and refusing to communicate.’”
Eden wiggled a little closer to him at the lab table until her knee pressed against his.
“Sorry,” she said, pretending she’d invaded his space accidentally.
He looked at her, their faces so close she could have rubbed the tip of his nose with her own.
“It’s okay,” he said with that shy smile.
Eden cleared her throat. It wouldn’t be a good idea to throw herself into his arms and kiss the crap out of him in front of their entire class. Her parents would definitely hear about it and ship her off to Aunt Martha’s commune. “Uh, so which one of us is the grudge-holder and which one is the family pleaser?” Staring into those caramelly depths, she couldn’t imagine ever holding a grudge against Davis Gates, or choosing her family over him.
“Let’s flip for it,” he decided.
The quarter Davis fished out of his pocket determined that she was the grudge-holding poor communicator while he was the spineless mama’s boy.
They bickered and bantered, crafting their argument script—Ms. Champion was big on role-playing—and within thirty minutes Eden was satisfied that they’d created a believable argument.
“Sometimes I think freedom is wasted on adults.” Eden shook her head. “I mean, can you imagine us being together and actually having arguments like this instead of going to piano bars and taking spontaneous trips to the beach?” she scoffed.
Davis flipped his hair off his forehead. “If we were together, I doubt I’d be trying to convince you to not put up a fight when my mother refuses to let you be in the family Christmas picture.” His voice was husky and low.
Eden’s heart took flight in a triple axel in her chest. “And I definitely wouldn’t be giving you the silent treatment and slamming doors.”
Their bodies were aligned to each other, heads cocking, knees brushing, eye contact holding. She held her breath.
