Darren rolled his eyes. “Of course he did.” Then, “Wait. What? What do you mean Vince told you about rule—”
“Oh yeah, they know all about this,” I said rather gleefully. “Apparently Charlie and Mike spilled the beans last night after your twink bid millions of dollars to try and sleep with you.”
“Nothing about that sentence is even remotely accurate.”
“The Mike and Charlie part is.”
Darren buried his face in his hands and groaned. “Of course they know.”
“Yeah, they came to my house this morning and staged an interrogation while role-playing Good Cop, Bad Cop, Corrupt Cop.”
“Role-playing what? I don’t even want to know what the fuck that—”
“And then they yelled at me for a while, because Paul thought I was stringing you along, but he didn’t know that you could give me a word boner. Hell, I didn’t know you could give me a word boner.”
“Seriously, stop saying word boner—”
&nb
sp; “But then Vince asked why we were fake dating, and I couldn’t really figure it out, because why were we fake dating again? And then I remembered you never would give me a reason. You said I couldn’t ask you. That it was your rule ten.”
He blushed furiously.
“Oh my god,” I said, voice slightly strangled. “How can you make blushing erotic? That’s unfair!”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “How the hell did we even get here? And what the hell was with the following me in Halloween costumes today?”
“Halloween costumes?” I said, scandalized. “Those were motherfucking disguises that were well thought out and appropriate for the situation.”
He arched an eyebrow at me.
“Okay. Maybe not completely appropriate,” I said. “But who am I to say no when Vince wanted a mustache and Corey wanted to wear a peach-colored suit?”
“And Paul?”
I snickered. “Yeah, that was pretty funny. He’s going to be mad at me for at least a week. Totally worth it.”
“And you followed me because you were jealous.”
“Right,” I said. “I was completely—oh no. No, no, no. You don’t get to put that back on me!”
But that smirk was already coming back. “You liar.” He looked like he was crawling his way back to even ground. “You want me. You thought I was fucking around with Caleb and you followed me.”
“Nope,” I said. “We just wanted to go out and eat and happened to choose the same place as you did. Nothing more than coincidence.”
“You threatened the waiter and the hostess.”
I scoffed. “That doesn’t sound like something I’d do.”
“It really does,” he said, amused. “I thought they were acting weird, and if I hadn’t already seen you as soon as we were being seated, I would have thought it weirder than it was.”
“The fact that you think I’d threaten waitstaff to do my bidding shows exactly what you think of me.”
His grin only got bigger. “Yeah, because a person stalking another person would draw the line at threatening the waitstaff.”
“Stalking? There was no stalking!”
He shrugged. “I didn’t say I minded. Not that there was anything you had to worry about.”