“You’re lucky to have a boyfriend who’s such a good cook, aren’t you?” Elise asks him.

“Sure am,” he says easily, coming back to me and grasping my wrist between his fingers. The adoring smile he gives me has me tempted to break out into some kind of happy dance. But I don’t, of course. I just smile back at him.

Then from behind me, I hear—“Boyfriend?”

My good mood instantly drains out of me and my stomach plummets into my ass. Oh no. Fuck, no. This can’t be happening right now.

Yanking my hand away from Brenden, I turn around to face my dad. My no-longer-on-crutches-and-looking-very-horrified dad.

“Dad. What are you...” I shift my weight from one leg to the other as I fumble for what to say. “You didn’t tell me you were coming home.”

He looks good. Healthy. And I should be happy to see that, but instead I feel like the walls are closing in on me. And we’re fucking outside. Shit.

The last time the sight of my dad scared me this much was when I was twelve and accidentally threw a baseball through our front window.

“I didn’t want you to give me any crap,” he says. “Like trying to check with my doctor to make sure he cleared me or something. Because he did.”

“Great,” I mutter. “Glad you’re back on your feet.”

For a minute that feels like an eternity, no one says anything. It’s possible that my dad didn’t actually hear what I think he heard, right? What I’m truly hoping he didn’t fucking hear, because that would be very, very bad.

Then his eyebrows slowly creep up, and my hopes are shattered. “Looks like I missed a lot while I was gone.” He cocks his head toward where Brenden is standing, slightly behind me. “Boyfriend, huh?”

“What? No!” I practically shout.

A loud buzzing fills my head, drowning out any rational thoughts. I still hear the tiny, wounded noise Brenden lets out, but I ignore the way it makes my heart hurt.

My mouth just keeps moving, nonsense words tumbling out in my attempt to salvage this situation and not have my dad looking at me in disgust. “We’re not—He’s not—This isn’t what it looks like.”

“No?” he questions.

“No. It’s fake. It was all fake. We’re not anything.”

This time the noise Brenden makes is louder and even more pained, and someone else sucks in a sharp breath. And oh no. No. Fuck! What did I just do?

The look my dad’s giving me now isn’t disgust—but it’s something strange I can’t decipher. That buzzing has gotten louder in my head, still making it hard to think. The only thing I know is that I fucked up. I fucked up in so many ways.