“Yes, I promise it’s going great,” I say into the phone. I’m sitting at the hotel bar waiting for Jason and speaking to Mrs. Pathmoore, tracing my finger along the edge of my glass. I’ve ordered a beer for Jason, and I keep checking over my shoulder anxiously, what feels like every few seconds, to see if he’s arrived.

He said he wants to talk to me. He said he has something to discuss.

“No need to get defensive,” Mrs. Pathmoore replies. I roll my eyes in response. I hadn’t thought I was being defensive. “You’re doing fabulously. Everything is going smoothly. And after the pageant is over, you can say goodbye to that man.”

I sigh deeply and bring my cocktail to my lips, taking a big sip to steady myself. She’s right.

After this is all over, Jason and I can go back to just being friends. We can go back to...whatever the hell we were before.

I feel a soft smile play against my lips when I think back to that first night with him. He did everything I’d ever wanted. Everything I had ever imagined. Then forces outside our control intervened, and I never got to find out his true feelings. He’d said he wanted to continue hanging out with me, but that’s not an indication of his feelings.

That’s an indication he wanted to continue having sex with me. And wanting to sleep with someone is not the same as wanting them. The two can overlap - god, do I know that - but it’s not the same thing. In the Venn diagram of the heart and the body, there’s only a very small slice of reality where wanting someone and wanting someone completely coincide, and it’s so small and so fragile.

I know my feelings for Jason occupy that space. They have since before I can even remember. But that doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything for Jason.

Still, despite his feelings for me - whatever they may be - it really freaking irks me that Mrs. Pathmoore referred to him as “that man.”

“I don’t plan on...on doing that,” I say cautiously, because of course I don’t know if Cynthia is lurking around some corner.

“You can do precisely as you wish,” she replies, “after the pageant is over. For now, you know how to continue on. You will display an image of the perfect couple in love, without any public indiscretions.”

Again, I roll my eyes.

“But Mrs. Pathmoore,” I say with a hint of sarcasm, “how do people in love act? Are we supposed to act like strangers in public? A pat on the shoulder and a hearty handshake? People who are in love usually show they’re in love, don’t they? Now, I’m not talking about grinding up on each other…”

“Cassie!” she hisses as I take another sip of my drink, “you will do no such thing!”

“I’m just playing around with you,” I sigh, “or is that not allowed either?”

I guess I’m so invested in messing around with my manager that I barely hear Jason come over to me. I only realize he’s arrived when he slides into the stool next to me and I breathe in his sexiness. He sits back and takes a swig of his beer, and I feel a spear of hit shoot me low in the belly.

“As I said, you can do whatever you want after the pageant is over,” Mrs. Pathmoore says.

We say goodbye as Jason takes another sip of his beer and looks over at me with an uncertain expression on his face.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Nothing really,” he says, “but I wanted to ask you something. Could we go outside so we can talk without all these people around?”

I study the uncertainty in his eyes as I feel myself deflate.

Okay, so maybe this is the part where he breaks my heart. I avert my gaze from his and take a final sip of my cocktail, draining the whole damn thing into my gut to steady myself. The best tactic for ensuring a woman doesn’t make a scene when you break up with her or do something that will otherwise upset her is to do it in a public place. It seems that, for my sake, he has the decency to do it in semi-private so we don’t jeopardize this charade we have going on.

I nod a little bit too eagerly and follow him through the bar.

“Everything alright?” I say as we make our way through the lobby and out onto the boardwalk.

I cast a glance up at him as he puts his hand on my lower back. I want to ask him what the hell is going on, why he’s being so damn reticent. But then, I guess he was always like this.

“Yeah, everything’s good,” he says, guiding me over to a bench on the edge of the boardwalk.

He takes my hand and we sit down, looking out over the water.

“Cassie, listen,” he says, turning his knees toward mine, making them touch my thighs. I’m wearing a dress he once complimented me on. It’s simple, and even though I’m supposed to only wear new, trendy stuff this week according to the guidelines of the contest, I thought I could get away with this. It’s just a simple black sundress, and he said he liked it because you could really see me. “I wanted to ask you to go to the gala with me. But not as my fake date. As my real date.”

His eyes are colored with want, and as they roam over my face, I watch his expression change. The hardened, slightly-distant yet intimate expression is difficult to read; I can tell he wants me, though. I can feel it as the air whips around us. I can feel it as he puts his hand on my lower back and pulls me into him, a slight rumble pushing through his body and emanating into mine.

“And if I don’t want to?” I ask, his gaze burning against mine, “what if I want to just keep going on the way we have been?”

“Then I’d tell you you’re crazy, because the way we’ve been acting isn’t because of the fucking contract.”

Jason puts his hand behind my head and pushes his lips into mine, forcing his way into me. I get lost in his kiss and my hands move up his chest, until I’m wrapping them around the back of his neck.

I feel myself getting wetter when we kisses me. Before, I was wet just from the way he looked at me.

He pulls away and exhales deeply, his breath shaky. But he has a certainty in his eyes, even though he is so damn hard to read and so infuriatingly sexy.

“God, Jason,” I say, putting my hands on his shoulders, “I just wish I knew what you were thinking. I always have.”

“All you have to do is ask,” he whispers into my ear, pulling me close.

And then I feel the full weight of me and Jason crash down on me like a piano falling out of the sky in an old cartoon. The ones where the hero is walking along, minding his own business, and some great, cosmic tragedy befalls him. But this time, it’s not a tragedy. It’s just the weight of the last several years falling on us and it’s the sweet ache of finally feeling Jason with his arms around me.

It isn’t any big injustice; it’s just long, long overdue.

“I guess I never thought of it like that,” I say, swallowing thickly.

Has it really been that simple all along?

“Listen,” he says, his eyes shifting from mine. I watch intently, hanging on his every damn word as he looks past me down the boardwalk. “I have an idea. Something to commemorate this week.”

“Hopefully I’ll have a crown to commemorate the week,” I quip, raising an eyebrow, “or did you forget why were were here?”

“Nah, I could never forget,” he says, “but I have an idea. Plus,” he adds, throwing a look over his shoulder toward the hotel, “it looks like we have company. Let’s give them a new headline.”

Before I have time to ask what he’s thinking, he grabs me by the hand and leads me down the boardwalk. I take big strides next to him.

I feel taller. I feel bolder. I feel wanted. And I look behind us, and I feel…

“Jason, we have company,” I say.

They’re following us. It’s Cynthia, it’s a camera crew, it’s a big microphone on the end of a big rod and they’re gaining on us.

“Let’s go, baby,” he says, holding my hand tighter.