Just Pretend by Alessandra Thomas

Author:Alessandra Thomas [Thomas, Alessandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-940562-26-1
Publisher: Sixpence Publishing

* * *

Mark: I’m back in town. My phone drowned and I just got a new one. Really want to see you. Please?

* * *

To hell with my resolve to keep our time together limited between dates. I was absolutely itching to be near her.

Even though it didn’t seem like she felt the same way. I watched that screen for a long time. The reply dots never even showed up.

On Friday, I woke up just in time to be at the studio for our official two-thirty call time for a three o’clock taping, still half-hard from my dreams as I tugged on some clothes, scrubbed my face, and made my hair look somewhat decent before shoving a dry bagel in my mouth and running out the door. By the time I got to the studio, I was dying to see her.

I wasn’t prepared to find her waiting for me at the front desk, perched on the edge. As soon as she saw me, she morphed into the picture of anger: arms crossed, chest heaving, and eyes glaring.

“Toby? Are you okay?”

“You tell me, Whiz Kid,” she hissed, glaring at me in a pretty clear dare to challenge her on calling me that. “Would you be okay if you sent me a dick pic and I never responded? What the hell am I supposed to think? Are we playing some sort of game here, or…?”

Her eyes darted down and to the left, and in that second, I could swear I saw tears welling along the bottom lid.

“Hey,” I said in a hushed, but firm voice. “Can we put this on pause? Talk about this somewhere else, where Ethan or Shari won’t hear us and make this a bigger deal than it is?”

“How big a deal is it, Mark? Because I thought you wanted…”

“Shhh,” I said, grabbing her hand and tugging her to her feet. “Just trust me for a sec, okay?”

Parts of Shari’s studio, like where we recorded the shows, were new, built within the last ten years, but others were older. The only reason most people would walk into one of the old store rooms would be on a search for a long packed away 8-track or set list from a 90s-era live show.

All three of those old rooms, stuffed in the back hallways of the studio, were musty and dark, but they would work just fine for Toby to lose her shit at me without anyone hearing. I tugged her through the twists and turns of the older part of the studio until we came to one of the old heavy pine doors with a worn brass knob.

“In here,” I said, flipping the light switch a couple times before the thing blinked to life.

I took a couple steps into the room, unwilling to get too far away from Toby, whose chest was still heaving and whose cheeks were still flushed and who I wanted my hands and lips on more than pretty much anything else right now. I turned to face her and took in the full picture of her, leaning against the door.

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