“Ananthropomorphizedfox.”
“Which of those was your first crush?” he asks.
I make a prim face. I’m not telling him it was Prince Eric. “A bit personal for conversation with a stranger, isn’t it?”
That gets me a sidelong glance. “I thought we wereold friends.”
“Not to mentionfirst loves,” I say pointedly.
Alex grimaces as he flicks ash off the end of his cigarette, staring at its red-orange ember glowing in the darkness. “Guess we should talk about that at some point.” He clears his throat. “Obviously, I got a little carried away.”
“I got it started,” I concede.
“Yeah, but I dialed it up to an eleven. I do that a lot, dial myself up to an eleven.” He sucks hard on the cigarette and exhales a stream of smoke up into the night sky. “It’s my fatal flaw.”
“Mine is dialing myself down to a one.”
He glances my way. I expect him to say something, like,Why would you do that?the way others have before, like there’s a simple answer—like, if I just tried harder, I could change how small I’ve learned to make myself.
But he doesn’t. He simply nods, flicking the cigarette’s ash in the planter.
“Well, Ted,” he says, “we’ve backed ourselves into a pretty tight corner.”
“That we have.” I stare up at the stars and sigh. “If we come clean and say we made it all up, we look—”
“Pathetic,” Alex says.
“Deeplypathetic,” I agree.
“And if we don’t…” He watches me out of the corner of his eyes.
I glance his way. “Then we get a very satisfying upper hand. A mysterious history of first love that was too precious, too dear to our hearts to ever talk about with our exes. Now, a rekindled friendship that spans decades.”
“Sounds great,” he says. “Let’s do it.”
“Before you commit,” I tell him, “I need to warn you that keeping up appearances will require something I’m not sure you’re prepared for.”
He frowns. “And what’s that?”
I point to my face. “Being my friend.”
His frown dissolves, and in its place a full, wide smile lifts his mouth. A little thrill runs through me. “I think I’ll manage,” he says. “That is, if you can handle being friends”—he points to his face, too—“with me.”
I shrug. “I think I can make that work.”
“Friends it is,” he says.
“Friends,” I agree.
“And for the purposes of appearances, in front of the exes?” His gaze travels my face. Like he’s studying me. A swallow works down his throat. “What about then? Would we act like friends or…”
Heat creeps up my cheeks, as his meaning dawns on me. “Or more?” I ask.
He nods. “They think we were first loves, after all.”
“It would probably be very satisfying at first,” I say slowly. “To act romantic in front of them, rub it in their faces.”
I let it play out in my head, this scenario in which I get to cozy up to an attractive man like Alex, flaunt a romantic relationship in front of my ex and show him I’m doing fine, too, in that department, thank you very much.