“We’ve been keeping it quiet,” Rex continues, in the tone of a man who is completely comfortable lying to elderly neighbors. “You know how small towns talk.”
“You andRex?” Mr. Calloway’s eyebrows are somewhere near his hairline. “Well. I’ll be.”
“Started as friendship,” Rex says. “Best friends to more, you know how it goes sometimes. Took us both by surprise.”
“How long?” the older sister asks, already vibrating with the delight of people who have been waiting for this development.
“Six months,” I say, just as Rex says, “Three months.”
We look at each other.
“Six months since it started,” I say. “Three months official.”
“Right,” Rex agrees. “We took it slow.”
“Oh, you two,” the younger sister breathes, as if we have personally given her a gift. “We always thought you seemed made for each other.”
They talk for another few minutes about the summer festival, and I let Rex handle it because he is somehow completely natural and I am trying to remember how to make my face do normal things. When they finally drift toward town with brightwaves and promises to see us at the bonfire, I step out of Rex’s arm and put both hands over my face.
“Putang ina.” The words come out muffled through my palms. “What did I just do.”
“Started a rumor that will be the main topic of conversation in this town by six a.m. tomorrow,” Rex says, with the equanimity of a man who has witnessed many of my disasters and found them, on balance, entertaining. “Very smooth work.”
I drop my hands and look at him. “I panicked! But you did not have to fill in the blanks!”
He shrugs, one easy lift of one shoulder. “What are best friends for, if not fake dating when an ex shows up out of nowhere?”
The absurdity of it lands, and a laugh punches out of me. Short and slightly shaky, but real. “You’re genuinely okay with this?”
“Genuinely okay.” The corner of his mouth tilts up. “I’ve survived worse. After several years of knowing you, I’m pretty good at reading when you’re about to panic. And besides,” he says, voice dropping into something quieter, “you looked like you needed a lifeline.”
I did. Hearing that name, said out loud in the warm evening air like it hadn’t been locked in a box in the back of my chest for four years, it sent me spinning in a way I do not care to examine too closely.
“Why now, why would he—?” I stop. Set my jaw. “Doesn’t matter.”
He’s quiet.
“It doesn’t,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“You don’t look like you know.”
Rex exhales through his nose. Not quite a sigh, more like the sound of a large friendly shark exercising patience. “Cora. It’s me. You don’t have to pretend you’re fine. No masks between us, remember?”
His gentleness is genuinely dangerous. It gets in through all the cracks.
I turn away from him, toward the lake. The last light is leaving the water now, the gold going copper going deep blue at the edges where the dark comes first.
The lake looks back at me the way it always does. Patient and old and full of things it knows that I haven’t told it.
“I need to change before the bonfire,” I say. “We can figure out the details of our apparently very serious relationship later.”
Rex pushes to his feet. “I’ll pick you up at eight. Should I bring flowers?”