Technically Faking Page 6

  “Stay here tonight.” The words were out before I’d registered the will to say them.

  Amber’s hazel eyes went wide in surprise, a joking deflection rising on her tongue in slow motion before my adrenaline-addled brain.

  “I’ve got a spare room and we’re about to convince the world you spend your nights here.” It was a logical statement, but it didn’t cover the way my stomach flipped at the thought or the way I didn’t want her in the bed down the hall from mine. But she was right. We’d been drinking and if I’d been asked to pick the worst brand update that could come out of our little experiment, careening into ‘Iris Spark takes advantage of vulnerable, drunk women’ would be near the top of the list.

  Silence hung in the air, soft and quiet and comfortable just a moment ago, suddenly tight with all the things that silence could mean after my outburst. I brought my feet close and pushed my body upright as evenly as I could, covering the slight wobble with smoothing my sweater, my jeans.

  It didn’t matter if she stayed.

  I was being ridiculous.

  “All right.” The words were soft but they were the only thing I cared to listen for, so I heard them like a siren call. “Could I borrow something to sleep in?”

  “Of course.” Of course she could. I stalked off toward my bedroom with single-minded purpose. Not the purpose of being a gracious host — if I were one, I might’ve had something ready in the guest room to begin with — but the purpose of picking which of my things I would picture Amber wrapped in when I imagined her sleep-mussed and tangled in my sheets.

  Amber leaned against the open door to my room, curled against the doorframe with a languid ease that came from long hours and the soothing influence of wine. I handed her the folded t-shirt, over-sized on me but sure to cling to the curve of her hips, and she thanked me with a smile.

  “Not such a cartoon character,” she said.

  “You don’t know what I sleep in,” I countered. Heat sparked in her eyes, a sharply kindled surprise, and I forced calm into my posture, my voice as I gestured down the hall. “The door there. That’s you. Let me know if you need anything.”

  I wanted to lean forward, to take in the smell of her hair. But we didn’t have a relationship of any kind. We weren’t friends. We weren’t even strangers meeting at a bar, seeing where they could take their evening. I’d hired her and I would be damned if I put my hands on her.

  “Good night, Amber.”

  “Good night.”

  6

  AMBER

  I rolled over in bed, fighting the sunlight I could feel brightening the room around me, and burrowed my face into the soft sheets and the pile of pillows I’d nested in.

  Wait.

  I blinked, blearily resigning myself to the assault on my senses from the accursed day-star, and confirmed the information I’d gathered with the side of my face. Pillows. Lots of them. Way more pillows than I owned.

  Not, however, more pillows than I wanted to own. Obviously, I would be swinging by Target on my way home from —

  Oh right.

  The previous night came back to me in a rush, slamming into me in a way that would’ve been far less comfortable if it weren’t for God’s Own Guest Bed currently cradling me. Raw fish from take-out bowls with cheap wooden chopsticks across from Iris Spark. Sitting on the living room floor, planning a campaign of public deception the way some people planned large-scale invasions. Iris’s feet pressed against mine. The way her jaw twitched when she was resolutely not smiling.

  And so, so much wine.

  Why did I have so much wine?

  It was humiliating. It was severely unprofessional. And there was a part of my brain that was convinced that if I hadn’t had so much, Iris Spark had been intending to make a move.

  Stupid, Amber. My eyes squeezed shut and I indulged in a theatrical groan face-first in my favorite mattress of all-time. I was going to marry that mattress.

  Rolling over again had the effect of wrapping me in high thread-count sheets like an expensive human burrito and brought me face to face with a tray that definitely hadn’t been on the nightstand when I’d crashed the night before. It was a sign of how long I’d been in San Francisco that I recognized carbonized bamboo on sight. The tray was a simple, gorgeous example of it: carbonized bamboo and a subtle white ceramic glazed in so many layers it looked like an opal.

  I scooted toward the edge of the bed, sitting up to look at the tray. It was ridiculous. A double-walled glass mug filled with coffee was still steaming on the bedside. There was cut fruit arranged in a bloom, a dish of poached eggs on toast — I absolutely would have remembered if Iris had hit me with the ‘how do you like your eggs’ line, and she hadn’t, I was sure of it — a bud vase with a single blossom, and — oh thank God.

  Aspirin slid down my throat, dry, with the long practice of the freelancer before I remembered that I should probably take a photo of the breakfast tray. It was fine. My followers didn’t need to know it was breakfast-in-bed accompanying a hangover, did they?

  * * *

  ONCE I’D SNAPPED enough photos — the lighting in that room was amazing — to satisfy my followers and devoured the rest of the tray, it was late into the morning. Late enough that I was pretty sure Iris would’ve given up on me and left the apartment hours before.

  I was sort of right.

  Stumbling out of the guest room — over nothing, because that was apparently how I rolled — brought me face to face with a stylishly-coiffed woman dressed in clean lines and a politely blank expression.

  “Hi!” I offered with the bright smile that was my only natural defense in most situations.

  “Good morning, Ms. Kowalczyk,” Ms. I-Have-A-Key-And-A-Legitimate-Reason-For-Being-Here said.

  Had Iris hosted some sort of seminar for pronouncing Polish surnames? I was starting to wonder if the whole beginning of my life had been some sort of long con, where people only pretended they didn’t know how to say a ‘c’ and a ‘z’ at the same time.

  “Ms. Spark was needed in the office this morning, but instructed that you should have full use of the car. A driver is prepared to take you whenever you are ready.” There wasn’t any judgment on her face. It was nice, but also a little perplexing.

  Did Iris have female overnight guests a lot? Was I just the latest in a long line of breakfast trays her housekeeper had been sent in to deliver?

  Discomfort wriggled in past the armor of good sleep I’d acquired the night before and made my shoulders tense. I huffed. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t there for anything other than a somewhat unconventional client meeting. Who cared how many recreational guests Iris had?

  The last thing I needed was to get the idea that Iris Spark might want me for anything other than my follower count.

  “Thank you, Ms. — Uh…?”

  “Green.”

  “Ms. Green. Thanks!” I flashed a grin that was hopefully less awkward to look at than it felt and edged around the older woman toward the door. “I think I’m ready to head out now, so I can meet the driver wherever…?”

  “Mr. Stevens will be waiting for you out front. Have a pleasant day.” Her vowels were just off-round, her consonants clipped and sharp, and I had the distinct impression that her upbringing involved the words ‘finishing school’. She also looked ferociously competent and my detour through her workday would be barely a hiccup by the time she was done.

  And hey, at least I didn’t need to figure out how to get a bus from Iris’s super-expensive neighborhood back to where the commoners lived, right?

  It wasn’t so bad.

  Something cold and hard settled behind my lungs, and I felt the lie of it with every breath. It wasn’t so bad.

  * * *

  “HEY!” Dave’s voice called from the far side of the couch as I pushed open the door to our apartment. “Was there a package down by the mailboxes? I’m waiting for —” His eyes went wide as he sat up and finally looked at me. An instant later, bright white teeth shone in a wicked g
rin. “Princess,” he breathed, delighted and scandalized. “Those are the clothes you were wearing yesterday.” Dave shuffled onto his knees and spread his elbows across the back of the couch. “I can’t believe you’ve been gone all morning. I’ve been talking to you through your door.”

  I laughed and crossed the living room to open my bedroom door and toss my backpack onto the bed. “Sorry to disappoint you,” I teased.

  “Oh, this is entirely the opposite of disappointed. This is my thrilled face. Don’t I look thrilled?” He pointed to his expression, and I had to admit that the curve of his mouth and the sparkle in his eyes all added up to someone surprisingly pleased about my walk of shame. “This is the part where you tell me everything, by the way.”

  Everything? Oh man, I wanted to tell him. Dave was the most normal, most overworked person I knew. He managed to be basically incapable of judgment while also having a perfect grasp of the ‘everyman’ perspective I’d grown up around. He always knew why I was freaking out, but almost never thought I should.

  He also always paid his part of the rent on time, never microwaved fish in our shared kitchen, and didn’t mind throwing my laundry in with his every now and then. Basically, Dave was perfect.

  He would completely understand the horrible writhing mass of conflicting feelings I was having. Dave would know exactly how Iris hit all of my weak points, how last night would’ve looked to me. He would also understand that me catching the eye of Iris Spark was about as likely as hitting the jackpot in the hundreds-of-millions lottery. And I never even bought a ticket to those things.

  But I couldn’t tell him.

  The whole thing was fragile. I had three weeks to spin a whirlwind romance of a social media campaign — and I still didn’t know what it was supposed to accomplish at the end. It was already going to be rough bringing it to life out of nowhere, out of nothing. The absolute last thing I needed was the suggestion that it was fake.

  Even if I also really, really needed someone who would remind me of that.

  It was only three weeks. Three weeks without trying to remember who knew what and what I could say in whose company, and then I could buy some sparkling wine and laugh with Dave and Rain — assuming she ever came home again — about it until I cried.

  “Not a lot to tell,” I said breezily, but even looking away, Dave’s narrowing gaze hit me like a spotlight. “Other than the fact that I embarrassed myself over too much wine and had to be put up in the guest room.”

  A quick, sidelong glance back at Dave confirmed that his eyes had narrowed exactly the way they did when he was nearing the third act in one of those cozy mysteries he loved to read. One from his favorite authors, the ones that made the puzzle worth working on. I was suddenly sure I had made a mistake.

  “Guest room,” Dave said after a long moment. “Princess, we don’t know anyone with a guest room.”

  “Hey, some of us have a social life outside of our job,” I countered. It wasn’t exactly a lie. It only sounded like one. And felt like one. And, okay, probably met most of the standards. “Speaking of which, why are you here? Did I lose track of time? Is it not Thursday?”

  Brown eyes glittered at me. “Doing something that made you lose track of time, huh? Or maybe someone?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  Dave waved a careless hand through the air, expression going lazy and languid where it had been rakish a moment before. “The firm is having some sort of super lockdown meeting. Everyone above the associate level is trapped in a conference room together and have been since seven this morning.”

  I frowned. “Didn’t they just have a retreat?”

  “Yep.” The ‘p’ popped like bubble gum from Dave’s expressive mouth. “This isn’t that. In fact, I’m a little worried they’re all in there making some sort of suicide pact without any of the PAs around to rein them in.” He swept his thumb over his phone, checking a lock screen that looked empty from where I stood. “I haven’t had an email or a text message from Herself all morning.”

  The frown was settling deeper into Dave and I tried to reassure him. “I’m sure it’s fine. Probably some new venture capital opportunity, right? Something secret they need to get on top of.”

  “Yeah, probably.” Dave didn’t sound convinced.

  In my pocket, my phone vibrated. And then it vibrated again. They were text tones rather than the ringer and reminded me that I still had a pile of work waiting. My boss wasn’t trapped in a conference room doing something mysterious. My boss had lingered in bed in a fancy part of town all morning and needed to get her ass in gear.

  “I’ve got a mountain of work to do — but feel free to shout at me through the door if you get lonely.” A quick wink from me and a huffed laugh from Dave sent me wandering back into my bedroom.

  “I’ve been hurt before!” Dave called as I swung the door closed.

  My boots thudded against the floor as I toed them off and began peeling myself out of day-and-a-half clothes. Apparently, I needed to get back in the habit of keeping a spare set of socks and underwear in my backpack. Maybe another shirt, too. Wriggling my hips sent my jeans slithering down my legs to pool at my feet with a surprising thunk.

  Right. My phone.

  Thankfully the screen wasn’t shattered despite hitting the floor at an angle, and the phone buzzed again while I was checking it over for new scuff marks.

  Unknown number. Huh.

  A few swipes opened the messenger app and the three text messages I’d received filled the screen.

  ‘I assume the absence of aspirin from your tray means you took them, rather than Ms. Green forgetting’

  ‘Let me know if you require further medical attention’

  ‘This is Iris’

  Disbelief rose in my chest and bubbled into a grin before I could make sense of what I was reading. It was understandable that Iris was following my social media posts — it was what she’d hired me for, after all. The breakfast photos would have crossed her desk. But that second message? That was a joke. She was teasing me.

  My eyebrows drew together. She didn’t think I had actually become incapacitated, right? Had to be a joke.

  But the thing that caught me up, the part that left me standing in my underwear in the middle of my bedroom far longer than it took to read the messages, was the difference in the timestamps between the second and third texts.

  Three minutes. There were three minutes in between her joke and clarifying her identity.

  Had she sat there with her phone, waiting for me to respond? Had she felt awkward about messaging me and wanted to smooth it over?

  Ugh, don’t be an idiot, Amber.

  Denim tangled around my ankles as I hopped out of the jeans and tapped out a response.

  ‘Aspirin consumed and appreciated! And Mr. Stevens kept me from wandering the streets in a post-wine fog.

  No injuries to report’

  I saved the number under a new contact — just ‘Iris’, no last name — and pulled a clean set of clothes out of the dresser. The new pair of panties were barely over my hips when the phone buzzed again. A rush of delight swept through me, the sort of idiotic cheer that came from attention from a crush or a smile from an attractive stranger. It was a silly reaction. For one thing, I didn’t have my phone number on any of my contact pages. Not my freelance work, not my social media profiles, nothing. And I definitely hadn’t given it to Iris or Carrie.

  I preferred to conduct normal business through email. It created a handy record of everything we agreed to and didn’t have the habit of interrupting my concentration all the time. But Iris had my number anyway. It should’ve bothered me. Should’ve unsettled me.

  All it did was make me blush like a junior high schooler.

  ‘Good. How would it look if my new girlfriend were hit by a bus?’

  ‘Girlfriend’ slid along my skin and through my nerves and wrapped around my spine with all the sinuousness of a snake. Didn’t matter that I knew it was a cover. It felt ama
zing. My fingers were poised to tap out a response when her next message came in. Iris Spark obviously didn’t give a single shit about double texting.

  Of course, I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking Iris Spark’s attention was anything other than completely welcome.

  ‘Our next scheduled encounter — I can be there around seven?’

  Right. Work. Not just flirting with some gorgeous blonde over text message while still hazy from wine and the best night’s sleep I’d had in months. This was work, even if it felt like play. And that meant I probably owed her an apology.

  The grimace tasted sour, but there wasn’t anything else for it.

  ‘Seven is perfect. Sorry about last night. Wasn’t very professional of me.’

  The reply was instantaneous.

  ‘Unless you did something I don’t yet know about, I can’t imagine the basis for your apology. Consider it rejected.’

  I blinked down at the screen.

  Well, that was new.

  I settled in at my desk, shoving the lurking Envelope of Doom beneath another pile of work. I was handling it, wasn’t I? The Spark job was going to more than make up for the difference. It would be fine. And for the next few hours, I kept my phone in sight, waiting for the screen to brighten with a message as I built campaigns and checked email and tried not to give myself away too badly.

  Just because it was work, that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy myself, right?

  * * *

  VIDEO GAME STREAMING HAD BEEN something I’d stumbled on accidentally, rather than a calculated move. It’d been the beginning of my trying to turn my knack for silly social media games into a line of business, and I had been looking for anything I could leverage.

  It turned out that I wasn’t the one who’d grown up watching while a sibling played console games. And most folks who liked my social media presence generally were also on board for watching me get better at all the games where I’d been stuck as ‘Player 2’. They’d tuned in pretty much every week — and judging by my engagement numbers, they’d also recommended the stream to their friends — and hung out with me while I plummeted off cliffs, sailed over the edge of raceways, and spun uselessly in a corner while I tried to figure out how first-person shooters worked.