“Arctic Protein?” I say. “Yeah, that’s my family.”
“No way.” Kris’s eyes widen. “Jack and James?”
“My brothers,” I say with a nod.
Kris laughs, covering his hand with his mouth. Then he shakes his head. “Well, you are a much better looking version of them. But the way you smiled just now, it totally reminded me of those guys. I can see the family resemblance.”
“How do you know my brothers?” I ask, just to make conversation. I really wish I could find a way to circle the topic back to the gala and our lack of dates. Or maybe to the fact that he just called me good looking.
“We went to school together,” Kris says, still shaking his head as if he’s recalling the memories. “They’re not exactly my biggest fans.”
“Oh?” I give him a curious look. “Do tell.”
“Eh… you’re their sister… I don’t really want to—”
“Tell!” I say, interrupting him. “Whatever juicy gossip you have about my brothers, I want to hear it, trust me. I love them and all, but they drive me crazy.”
Kris grins. “We just didn’t exactly get along well. We kind of butted heads, to put it politely.”
“Hmm,” I say, pressing my lips together. “Is it safe to say they don’t like you?”
He snorts. “I can’t think of anything safer to say.”
I can’t believe I’m thinking this, but I am. And now I really can’t believe I’m going to say it out loud like some kind of bold, confident woman who doesn’t care what people think of her. Back in my car, the lawyer high heels I traded out for flats are probably very proud of me.
“You should be my date to the gala.” There, I said it. I feel amazing, too. And now I can’t stop talking. “My brothers are extremely overprotective and they hate the idea of me dating. And if they don’t like you, well you should be my date and it’ll just really annoy them.”
Kris grins. “That sounds fun. I’m not sure if I should start drama at a charity event though…”
I shake my head. “They won’t start drama, not publicly at least. It could just be one night. I’ll act like I have this huge crush on you, and you should be like, the worst date ever. Don’t hold open doors, flirt with other women… that kind of thing. It’ll really annoy them.”
He cocks an eyebrow. “I’m all for annoying your brothers but I can’t treat you like crap. That goes against everything I stand for.”
Wow. This guy just gets hotter and hotter. I chew on my bottom lip. “Well… I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, I just… I’ve been wanting to pretend date some jerk just to annoy my brothers and get them to back off and let me live my life.”
“What if I act like a partial jerk?” he says. His tongue flicks over his bottom lip for just a second, but that’s all it takes to send a shiver down my spine.
“I won’t be a complete A-hole, but I’ll be… just an inattentive guy who isn’t really a good date.”
I nod. I’d rather him be a terrible date, but I’m not going to turn down this opportunity. “Sounds great to me. And when you pick me up for the date don’t come up to the door, just honk. My brothers live in the house next door to me. They’ll definitely see it.”
“I can do one even better,” Kris says. “I have a motorcycle.”
My eyes widen. “Perfect.”
He looks taken aback. “Really? You’d ride on a motorcycle?”
I shrug. “Why not? It’ll be fun.”
I don’t know why, but he seems impressed. It makes my heart flutter even faster. Kris holds out his hand. “You have yourself a fake date agreement, Lanie.”
I shake his hand. I like when he says my name. I like everything he does, actually. And that’s probably a little too much to like some random guy you’re going on a fake date with, but whatever. I tell him goodbye and I walk out to my car feeling just as giddy as if I’d just been asked on a real date.
“Lanie!” Kris calls out. I stop and see him jogging toward me. My first thought is that maybe he’ll say never mind, he doesn’t want a fake date. He wants a real date. Then he holds up his phone. “I need your number so I can take you on this fake date.”
I smile even though I’m disappointed. I give him my number and he saves it into his phone. Then he waves at me and goes back into the gym.
And here I am, feeling ten kinds of emotions all at once. I’m glad I found a bad boy to go on a date with just to annoy Jack and James. But at the same time… I wish it wasn’t like that. I wish I had actually met Kris in a normal way and he was so infatuated with me that he asked me on a real date.
I shrug off the thoughts. A guy that smoking hot would never like a clean cut good girl like me anyway.
7
Kris
I walk back into the gym after getting Lanie’s phone number and Tasha is standing there waiting on me. She’s completely abandoned her task of cleaning the machines.
“What?” I say, because it’s impossible to ignore the look she’s giving me.
She wiggles her eyebrows. “That was an interesting conversation.”
“What conversation? The one I had privately without you?”
She rolls her eyes. “You know I overheard it. You totally got a date.”
“A fake date.”
She rolls her eyes yet again and shakes her head a bit. “So what? She was cute, and you’re cute. You should go out for real.”
Tasha and I have become fairly close coworkers over the past few months of working night shift together, but we’re not exactly close enough to discuss my dating life. At least not in any way that makes me embarrassed.
I grab a microfiber cleaning cloth from the clean laundry basket in the corner.
“I’ll help clean,” I say, walking toward the ab machines.
“No! You’ll mess up my flow!” Tasha snatches the cloth from my hand and tucks it under her arm. “Why are you changing the subject?”
“Because I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why?” she says, refusing to drop the subject. “She was really pretty.”
“She was pretty. But that doesn’t matter.”
“Why doesn’t it matter? Was she weird or something?”
Tasha is looking at me with excited eyes, eager for some gossip. “She’s not weird,” I say, feeling my cheeks warm. I hope I’m not blushing in a noticeable way. I am entirely too manly to be blushing. “She’s just… out of my league.”
“What? No she’s not!”
I try walking up to the front counter but Tasha follows me because she’s extremely annoying when she gets on topics like these. She follows me all the way up to the front counter where she takes a seat at the barstool next to mine. She’s like a puppy and my internal thoughts about girls are a treat she’s dying to get.
She starts straightening the brochures on the counter. “If you like her, you should tell her you want to go on a real date.”
“I don’t like her,” I say, busying myself by clicking through the gym’s email account on the computer at the front desk. Replying to email is really more of Noah’s thing, but right now I’m pretending it’s mine. “I don’t even know her.”
“But yet you’re going on a fake date with her?” Tasha asks, giving me the side eye. “Clearly you know enough about her to go on a fake date.”
“You don’t need to know much about someone to fake date them. That’s kind of the whole point.”
Tasha heaves a big dramatic sigh and grabs my arm. “Kris… why are you like this? Why do you have to be all casual about stuff when I know for a fact that you want a real girlfriend and a real date?”
My heart stops for a second but then I realize she doesn’t know anything. Especially not about me. It’s not like I keep a diary of my innermost thoughts that she could have found and read. Nope. All these thoughts about wanting a girlfriend stay just in my own head.
“You don’t know anything,” I say softly. “Look, I’m not trying to be rude. You’re one of my good f
riends, Tash, seriously, I just don’t want to talk about my dating life.”
She frowns and then pats my arm. “Okay… fine… but I’m here if you ever want to open up and talk. Talking is good for you, you know.”
We sit in silence for a few minutes. Now that she’s gone and brought up things, I can’t stop thinking about them. Like how yeah, it was fun meeting Lanie tonight. I know we agreed on a fake date to annoy her brothers, and normally that kind of thing would be hilarious to me. Especially because of who her brothers are. We did not get along in high school. We were always competing for the same girls. Competing for everything, really. So pretending to date their little sister just to make them mad should be the highlight of my day.
Instead, I feel almost sad about it.
Maybe because this girl isn’t just one of the random faces on my dating app. She’s real, and she’s gorgeous, and she walked in here and made my heart beat faster than it does after an hour of cardio.
“Kris?” Tasha says, her voice so faint it’s almost a whisper.
I look over at her, having completely forgotten she was even here sitting next to me.
“What’s on your mind?” she asks, tilting her head. “You look deep in thought.”
I shrug, thinking about how she said talking was a good thing. Would it really kill me to open up to Tasha? She’s my friend, after all. And she’s Noah’s girlfriend and he trusts her, so I can trust her, too. “Maybe you’re right… about the Lanie thing.”
I can tell she’s eager to dive back into these topics, and maybe I am too. Maybe I can pull down my walls just this once and talk to Tasha like the friend that she is. I take a deep breath and run a hand through my hair. I stare at the counter as I talk, because even though I’m opening up, I’m still not ready to fully look her in the eyes as I do it.
“I am so tired of going on random dates from a random dating app.”
“It sounds exhausting,” she says. “Just trying to find someone to date in general is exhausting.”
I nod. “I work nights. I’m not sure how else to meet women. And even though I’m giving this dating app thing a try, it just feels so…”
“Non-romantic?” Tasha supplies.
“Yeah. That. I know I’m a man and I’m not supposed to be sappy or whatever, but I just hate the idea of one day marrying some woman and saying I found her on a dating site.”
“You want a meet-cute,” Tasha says, resting her chin in her palm while she leans over the counter.
“A what?”
Now I’m really regretting opening up to her.
“A meet-cute! It’s what they call it when you meet someone in this adorable way. Like in the movies and stuff.”
I give her a look and she laughs. “Hey, I didn’t invent the term.”
“But you’re still using the term.”
She shakes her head. “Call it what you want, but that’s what you are wishing you had. To meet someone in this cute romantic way.”
“I just want to meet someone in real life, not on the internet.”
She nods. “Well you did meet this Lanie girl in real life.”
“And then I agreed on a fake date. So it’s like I finally meet a beautiful girl in real life and I screw it up by not asking her on a real date.”
“You can still ask her on a real date.”
“I don’t think she likes me like that.”
“You barely know her!” Tasha says, smacking my arm. “You don’t know what she likes and doesn’t like.”
“She specifically asked me to go on a fake date with her to piss off her brothers. I think that means she doesn’t see me as the type of guy she would want to date.”
Tasha picks up another stack of brochures and taps them on the table, making them neat and orderly. “Once she gets to know you, she’ll like you. You’re a good guy.”
“We’ll see.”
I am not convinced, and I only say it to put an end to this conversation. Deep down I know that Lanie won’t like me in the way I want to like her. She specifically chose me because of my whole personality and how her brothers hate me. That’s not exactly the start to a fun new relationship, now is it?
And maybe I just need to suck it up and move on with my life and not dwell on the fact that I met this beautiful woman in real life—like how I’ve wanted to do for so long—and yet, I can’t have her.
Nope, I won’t dwell on that at all.
I pull up eBay on the work computer and once again start looking for motorcycle parts to distract me. Two clients walk in and Tasha greets them. Now that we aren’t the only two people in the gym anymore, I know she won’t bring up my personal life, but I’m not quite ready to drop the subject just yet.
“Hey, Tash?” I say.
“Yeah, boss?”
“This whole…” I move my finger around to signify the chat we just had. “Thing? Can we keep it between ourselves?”
“Of course,” she says with a nod.
“I’d prefer it if Noah doesn’t know.”
I know I can’t ask Tasha to keep secrets from her boyfriend. I know that. He probably knows every single thing that goes on at the gym when he’s not there because Tasha and Noah are really close. But she’s also my friend, and I hope she won’t make me sound too pathetic when she tells my best friend about my love life.
She gives me a soft, almost pitying smile. “What we talk about in the gym stays in the gym,” she says.
I grin. “Thanks.”
8
Lanie
The most boring music is playing over the speakers at this formalwear store. It’s as if someone took the most boring classical music and somehow made it slower, sadder, and less interesting. I suppress a yawn and take another sip of my iced coffee, hoping it’ll help wake me up. Or at least pull me out of this boring mood. I’ve been sitting here in the waiting area of the fitting rooms for over an hour. I told myself it would be more fun to help my brothers pick out tuxedos for the gala than to be at work today, but now I am regretting my decision. These guys take forever to decide anything.
The narrow door of a fitting room on the right opens and Jack steps out wearing a solid black tux. Even the shirt underneath and the tie and everything is black.
He strides up to the three-way mirror and steps up on the little podium in front of it to admire himself.
His eyes meet mine in the reflection of the mirror. “What do you think, little sis?”
“That’s the best one you’ve tried on so far.”
“You think?” He nods, looking back at himself in the mirror. “I think so, too. I feel like Keanu Reeves with this all-black suit on.”
Another fitting room door opens and James walks out wearing the exact same tux. “What the?” he says, throwing his arms up when he sees his twin brother. “That’s my tux!”
“No, it’s my tux,” Jack says. “I’m wearing it.”
“Well, I’m wearing this one.”
“How did you both get the same tux and not realize it?” I say, already annoyed with their antics. They’ve each tried on about twenty different tuxedos since we got here and they haven’t made this mistake yet.
My brothers glare at each other. “It looks better on me,” Jack says.
James steps up on the podium and they both look at themselves in the mirror. “It looks identical on us, you idiot. We’re twins.”
Jack shakes his head. “Nah, it looks better on me.”
“You guys are children,” I say, standing up and sucking down the last few sips of my iced coffee. “I’m going to go try on dresses.”
“I thought you weren’t buying one from here?” James says.
Jack has to throw in his two cents as well by saying, “Yeah, I thought you had some internet dress you were ordering.”
“I do,” I say, tossing my empty coffee cup into a nearby trashcan. “But you’re too annoying to be around and I don’t have my car since I rode here with you guys, so you can fight amongst yourselves and just come get me
when you’re ready.”
“Nooooo,” they both say in unison.
“Lanie!” Jack calls my name. “We need you to help us choose!”
“Choose on your own,” I say, walking away from them. For being older than I am, my brothers are so incredibly immature. And because they’re twins, they hate dressing the same. My mom used to put them in matching outfits but they refused to go along with it once they turned six. They’ve never dressed alike since then.
I wander through the formalwear store looking at the sparkly, shiny, extremely expensive dresses. They have everything from wedding dresses, prom gowns, and cocktail dresses here. Any color or style you could imagine is probably hanging on the racks somewhere in this store. It’s so expensive, though.
I run my fingers down a chiffon A-line dress with little rhinestones sewn into the bodice. It’s beautiful, but the price tag is almost eight hundred dollars. No thanks. I’ll be buying my dress from an Etsy seller for only two hundred dollars. And it’s pretty enough to wear to the gala and then keep in my closet for future occasions. Like maybe if I get a romantic boyfriend who whisks me off to some beautiful weekend getaway with a fancy dinner at one of those places that require reservations.
Hey, a girl can dream.
And dreaming is about all I have because a few days ago, I thought I had at least a fake date to count on. But it’s been three whole days, and Kris hasn’t texted me once. I keep playing that night over in my head. He walked out to see me in the parking lot, gave me his phone, and I typed in my number. I double checked it. I know I typed it in correctly.
After that, when I got in my car to leave, I was just positive that at any second my phone would light up with a text from him. That’s what people do, right? You get someone’s number and you call or text them immediately so they have your number in return.
But Kris didn’t do that.
And now it’s been three days and I’m all worried that either I gave him the wrong number on accident, or that he was just lying when he agreed to be my date and he has no intention of actually taking me to the gala. Both options suck.
Flirting with the bad boy: A love at the Gym Novel Page 4