by Noelle Adams
Brent didn’t mind at all. He liked to help Chloe, and he liked Mima too. He wasn’t much of a tea drinker, but that didn’t matter. He did enjoy the cookies.
For the first half hour, they talked about Chloe’s work and her degree and what she wanted to do with her life. She told Mima about Brent’s idea about putting together a proposal for a position. If Patrick didn’t want her, she could try some other tech companies.
Mima didn’t understand a lot of the context, but she listened and asked questions and seemed genuinely interested in Chloe and proud of her accomplishments. That alone would endear her to Brent.
He wished her mother treated her the same way.
But eventually the conversation turned to their relationship and upcoming “marriage,” and that was where things became tricky. Brent tried to answer direct questions with short answers that didn’t give much away, but Mima wasn’t an easy person to reroute.
“Now,” she said with a warm smile, “what I really want to know is what made you fall in love with Chloe.”
Brent sat perfectly still, imprisoned by the question.
“Mima,” Chloe said, jumping to his defense. “That’s not really a fair question.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s personal. Brent might not want to—”
“Well, he loves you, doesn’t he? He wants to marry you? Why wouldn’t he want to tell me what he loves about you?”
Chloe gave Brent a helpless look that he had to respond to. He reached to pat her forearm. “It’s fine. I’ll answer.” He shifted in his seat. Cleared his throat. Stared down at the table. “I guess the first thing I noticed about Chloe, other than how pretty she is, is how she throws herself all the way into everything she does. The first time I met her, those bookcases in her dad’s office had all fallen down, and I came over with the others to help. She was so worried about her dad and so grateful to us for helping, and then she took us out to dinner to thank us, and she laughed and laughed about how grouchy our server was. It was that... that ability to feel things so deeply—and not be afraid to express those feelings—that I first saw and... and wanted.”
Once he’d started talking, he couldn’t seem to stop. He knew Chloe was staring at him, but he focused on Mima, whose face had twisted with emotion at what he’d said. “Yes. That’s exactly Chloe. Tell me more.”
Brent’s eyes moved between Mima and Chloe, and then he stared down at the table again. “And there’s something about the way she sees the world. Like it’s... better than other people see it. It’s like she sees color in a black-and-white movie. Little details that other people don’t see. It makes her notice people who other people don’t notice. She noticed me. She went out of her way to get to know me. When no one else really did. She’s not afraid of what she feels. And she’s not afraid of saying what she thinks. She’s not always holding back the way I am. She’s... free. I love that. And I love her laugh and the way she tears up when she’s feeling vulnerable and the way she goes after what she wants. She’s so brave. Even though not everyone sees and appreciates who she is, she still stays true to herself. She’s completely genuine. She has such a big heart. I love that about her the most.”
He was saying too much. He knew he was. The words were blurting out the way they always did when the dam in his throat finally burst.
Chloe was going to know he meant it.
She was going to know everything.
He was completely exposed.
Why the hell hadn’t he just held his tongue?
He burned with self-consciousness and anxiety as Mima gushed about how lovely and sweet and romantic he was.
“I’m so glad Chloe found you,” Mima said, her eyes tender the way Chloe’s sometimes were. “She needs someone like you. You balance each other out perfectly.”
Brent knew she was right. He and Chloe were perfect for each other.
But that didn’t mean Chloe would want him.
She was probably horrified to discover how stupid he’d been with his feelings and was trying to think of a way to kindly let him know there was no hope of anything serious between them.
She was sitting perfectly still, staring at him like he’d grown a second head.
Mima turned to Chloe. “Well, Chloe, you don’t have to tell me what you love about Brent because I know it already. He’s so thoughtful and attentive and sweet with you. He listens when you talk, and he thinks about you all the time. Not many men are like that, in my experience, so don’t you dare let him get away.”
Chloe’s voice sounded slightly choked as she said, “I won’t.”
Brent knew she was just playing a role for her grandmother, but he wished with every cell in his body that what she said was true.
Nine
BRENT WAS QUIET ON the drive back to the apartment.
Chloe was quiet too.
She wasn’t normally the kind of person who could let stretches of silence go on too long. She always felt the impulse to fill them. She wanted to now. The need to speak—to say something, anything—roiled inside her, making her tense, stealing her breath.
But she couldn’t figure out the right thing to say.
What she really wanted to ask was whether or not Brent had meant what he’d told her grandmother a little while ago. It had sounded so much like he was telling the truth. What he’d said had felt real to her. It had been her he was describing. It had made her feel like she was someone to be loved.
But how could she just ask that? It wasn’t like the conversation Brent had overheard with her mother. She’d had no reason to lie to her mother then. He had every reason to ask whether she meant it.
Brent had had a reason to lie. He was supposed to lie to Mima.
And asking if the lie he’d told her had actually been the truth would be silly. Desperate. She’d put him on the spot. Make him feel bad if he had to tell her that he was lying the way he’d been expected to.
She couldn’t do that to him, no matter how much she needed the confirmation.
The last time she’d asked him to share his feelings, she’d ended up crushed.
Was she really ready to do that again?
So she didn’t say anything on the drive back home. She sat with her arms wrapped around her belly, hugging herself tightly to hold all her feelings inside.
And she didn’t say anything at all.
Neither did Brent.
When he parked in the small private lot behind their building, they got out and walked up to the apartment together. Chloe unlocked the door, and they stared at each other in the hallway for a long moment before she opened the door.
Brent looked full of something. Exactly as she felt.
Steve and Michelle were kissing on the couch, but they broke apart when Chloe and Brent walked in.
“How did it go?” Michelle asked, keeping one hand on Steve’s belly. Just resting it there.
Chloe smiled, trying to look normal and natural. “It went good. Mima really loves Brent, and he’s a great fake fiancé.” For some reason she kept looking at Michelle’s hand on Steve’s stomach. It wasn’t moving. She wasn’t rubbing or caressing him. She was simply putting her hand on his body like it belonged there.
Like he belonged to her.
And for just a moment Chloe wanted the same thing with Brent so badly that her whole body shook.
She wanted to be able to touch him outside the bedroom. She wanted the whole world to know that they were together, that he was hers.
She wanted him to really be that person for her, and he wasn’t.
He’d only wanted sex from her.
He hadn’t wanted all of her.
And if less than an hour ago, he’d said the nicest things anyone had ever said about her—listed reason after reason why she should be loved—he’d only done it because he was pretending.
She felt Brent’s eyes on her face, so she used every ounce of her willpower to pull herself together. “What are y’all up to?”
“We just
ordered pizza,” Steve said. “We got two since they had a deal going on, so there’s enough for you if you want some.”
Brent was watching her. She wasn’t looking in his direction, but she could feel his eyes. It was like he was waiting for something.
She was too scared to process what that thing might be.
Instead, Chloe gave her friends a wide smile and sat down on an oversized chair. “Pizza sounds good to me. What are we watching?”
THE FOUR OF THEM HUNG out that evening. After the pizza came, Steve convinced them to play his favorite silly party game, and they ended up having a good time.
Chloe enjoyed herself even though she was experiencing an undercurrent of tension about Brent the whole time.
It was after eleven when the game ended and they went their separate ways. Chloe wasn’t sure what Brent was planning for the night, and she couldn’t ask him about it with Steve and Michelle around, so she left her bedroom door halfway open and sat on the edge of her bed, fiddling with her phone until Steve and Michelle went into their bedroom for the night.
After just a minute, Brent was standing in her doorway.
She gestured him in, going over to plug her phone into the charger.
When she turned back around, Brent was standing stiffly in the middle of the floor. She went over to stand right in front of him.
She opened her mouth to ask him something. She wasn’t even sure what.
No words came out.
They were trapped.
She almost never felt that way, but she did now. Like she was incapable of saying anything.
Brent’s face twisted slightly. His eyes were deep, intense, filled with words he wasn’t saying.
She lost her breath. Her pulse raced. She reached out to hold on to his shirt for fear her knees might buckle.
Brent made a rough sound in his throat and pulled her up into a kiss.
It was like a river had been unleashed through a dam, like all the coiled urgency inside her was suddenly set free. She surged into him, clawing at his shoulders and trying to get her body up higher so she could kiss him more easily.
He gathered her up until he was carrying her, her legs twined around his waist, and he brought her to the bed and laid her down.
He lost his balance at the last moment and fell on top of her.
She gasped and giggled at the brief tangle of limbs they made, but it only took a minute to sort themselves out. Then he was above her, straddling one of her legs and holding himself up on his forearms.
And he was kissing and kissing her. Like he was never going to stop.
She didn’t want him to. She opened to him eagerly and held him down on top of her, bringing up the leg he wasn’t straddling so she could wrap it around his ass.
His lips and tongue moved almost frantically. His beard scratched up her face. His body was hot and smelled like a day’s worth of effort. And she loved it. She loved the way he filled her senses. She wanted even more.
As they kissed, they gradually got rid of their clothes. It was a clumsy, fumbled kind of stripping, since they didn’t want to break their mouths apart, but eventually they were both naked, tangled together and rocking against each other. His erection was trapped between their bodies, and one of her legs wrapped so high around him that her heel pushed into the middle of his back.
“Chloe,” he said against her neck, rubbing her sensitive skin with his beard.
“Please, Brent. Please. I need... I need you so much.”
“You have me. Anything you want. Anything you need. You have me.” The words were mumbled, almost muffled by his kisses. But she was sure she heard him correctly.
“I need you... inside me.” She wanted more than his body inside her. She wanted him in her heart to stay. But she didn’t know how to ask for that, and sex was so much easier. Simpler.
So much less of a risk.
Brent levered up on straightened arms. “You have more condoms?” He was panting, flushed, gazing down at her hotly.
“Yeah.” It actually helped her state of mind to reach into the nightstand drawer for a condom packet and then tear it open and roll it on for him. It gave her something practical to think about rather than the storm of feeling in her heart.
She opened her legs for him and helped him get into position. Then he was edging himself inside her, and she was rolling her hips against the penetration and wrapping her legs around him.
They were both moaning uninhibitedly as he started to pump his hips. He leaned down to kiss her, and it was almost too much. Too much of the feel of his hard flesh so deep inside. Too much of his tongue sliding into her mouth, moving with the same rhythm as his hips. Too much of his heat, his weight, the texture of his beard, the strength of the big hand he was using to hold on to her thigh.
It was too much. Chloe wasn’t sure she could handle it. She whimpered and gasped into his mouth and ground herself shamelessly against him and squeezed her legs like she’d never let him go.
She had to break out of the kiss eventually because it felt like she might drown in him. Her body was starting to clench all around him, and she cried out helplessly as the sensations tightened down.
He was grunting like an animal, sometimes gritting out her name. He wasn’t going to last very long. She could feel him falling over the edge, unable to hold himself back. He pushed into her hard as she came in messy waves of hot pleasure that shook her body and burst out of her throat in loud sobs.
Brent was with her, shaking and jerking and bellowing out his release just as loudly as she had.
She held him down on top of her for a minute until she felt his body begin to soften. Then she had to let him go.
He fumbled with the condom until he’d removed it and tied it off. Then he went to throw it away, pulling on his boxers as he came back to bed. She found her panties and snagged a clean T-shirt out of the laundry basket in the middle of the floor. She went to the bathroom to pee and brush her teeth. Then she turned off the lights and rejoined him under the covers.
He wrapped both arms around her, and they hugged in the dark for a long time.
His body was relaxing, but his breathing was still labored. “Do you...”
She waited for him to finish his question.
“Do you think...” He shifted restlessly, and she knew he was working himself up to articulate whatever he was trying to ask. “Do you think we can keep... doing this? Even though...”
She understood what he was asking now. He didn’t want to stop having sex with her even though he wasn’t a virgin anymore and didn’t still need her help. Even though he was almost through playing her fake fiancé.
“You want to?” She asked the question mostly as a way to stall since her mind was racing frantically, trying to figure out what was happening here.
“Of course I want to. Do you... do you want to?”
She had to tell him the truth. “Y-yeah. Yeah, I do.”
She heard and felt his deep exhale. His arms tightened around her. “Good. Me too.”
She waited to see if he’d say anything else, and he didn’t.
She was tempted to just let it go, to let her worries go unspoken. But she knew herself well enough to know that they’d continued to eat at her, getting in the way of her enjoyment of what she had with Brent, so she heard herself beginning softly, “What you said to Mima... earlier...”
She felt Brent’s body stiffening, and it wasn’t an encouraging sign.
“When she asked you... about me.” Chloe took a ragged breath and forced the words out. “You didn’t... I mean, did you mean... Were you just... pretending?”
Brent didn’t answer immediately. Her heart felt like it would pound its way right up her throat. Finally he said, “I thought... I thought you wanted me to pretend.”
Of course she had.
Of course that was what he was doing.
No one would ever really feel about her the way Brent had described.
This whole thing between them wasn’t
real.
It was only body deep.
It didn’t go as deep as their hearts.
Realizing he was waiting for a reply, she managed to say, “I did.”
“Okay.” He pressed a clumsy kiss against her hair. “Anything you want, Chloe. I’m okay with it. I’m okay.”
He might be okay, but she wasn’t.
She’d felt in control of things between them before, but she wasn’t in control of it now.
She hugged him until she felt his body softening, his muscles relaxing, his breathing evening out. He’d gone to sleep.
She was fighting back tears, and he’d just gone to sleep.
It wasn’t fair to resent him for it. He didn’t know how she was feeling. She’d hidden it from him. She waited a few minutes until she was sure he was fully asleep. Then she carefully rolled out of his arms and sat on the edge of the bed.
She breathed deeply, pulling herself together, trying to wrap her mind around the way she was feeling.
It wasn’t hard to figure out.
She had a broken heart.
The realization pushed her to her feet. She needed to get away. Escape from him. She couldn’t stay in this room and listen to him sleep, not when she could never have him the way she wanted.
She scrambled to put on her clothes and shoes, and then she walked out of the bedroom.
Her bedroom.
Brent was sleeping in her bed.
She didn’t even have her room to escape to.
She couldn’t go to his room. It would smell like him. Be full of him.
She hurried into the kitchen and was surprised to find Michelle working on her laptop at the counter in her pajamas. “I thought you and Steve had gone to bed.”
Michelle looked up. “I couldn’t sleep, and Steve was snoring.” Her voice was light, but her expression changed when she saw Chloe’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” The word was supposed to be calm, but it came out as a ragged sob. Chloe hugged herself and shook as she tried to control her emotion.
“Oh no!” Michelle stood up and came over to hug her. “What happened with Brent?”
“N-nothing.”
“I know that’s not true. The walls aren’t soundproofed, you know.”