Pearl was standing there with her hands clasped in front of her. She had on blue jeans that hugged her curves well. She was built like a woman who knew how to take care of herself, but also wasn’t terrified to take a bite of ice cream. Just the right balance, if you asked me. And it was all the kind of shit I shouldn’t be noticing, but sue me. I was a man, and even if my girlfriend had just tried to rip my heart out and stomp on it with that tiny balled creep–yes, I was going to keep fixating on how small his balls were because that shit definitely mattered. I mean, if you wanted to bake a cake, would you grab the little bag of flour or the big one? You’d grab the big one.

Either way, I was starting to wonder if I’d ever really given Annabelle the chance to rip my heart out in the first place. Could you really break someone’s heart if they never gave it to you?

Fuck if I knew.

“Anyway. I’m sorry my ex and your ex met, I guess,” I said. I raised my hand to wave, but Pearl hurried after me.

“Hold on,” she said, grabbing my wrist. Distantly, I noticed most of the crowd around the corkboard had cleared. Maybe it was the duo of janitors cleaning up what was left of Pearl’s vomit a few feet away, or maybe the drama wasn’t that exciting when it wasn’t your own significant other getting caught cheating. “The fake boyfriend thing. I could use one of those.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You could?”

“It’s my family,” she said. “They warned me over and over about Eric. I’m already going to be getting ‘I told you’ out the wazoo. As soon as they get tired of that, they’re going to try to set me up with this someone. They don’t think it’s possible for someone to be happy and single. The ideas are incompatible to them, and they’ll never stop trying to push some new guy on me, but I don’t need that right now. I don’t know if I could handle it. So, if they thought I was with somebody…”

Holy shit. I’d tossed that thing out as a half-hearted joke. But to tell the truth, maybe I was on to something. And if Pearl was game, it could be a win-win. “You’re serious?”

“I mean, if you are,” she said. “It’s not like we’d have to do anything, right?”

That simple question flooded my brain with a sudden and vivid image of me grabbing her by that braid and tugging it back to tilt her chin up to mine. I saw myself kissing her deep and hard, cupping that tight ass in her jeans with a big hand and pulling her into me.

I blinked. “Yeah. We’d never have to see each other. Just make excuses if anyone asks. You could say I work in another state. Who cares, right? All that matters is we are both in on it.”