“Tell me everything,” Chloe demanded. “Unless you’re lying. Wait. Are you lying? This sounds too convenient.”
I hesitated. If I was going to sell this, Chloe couldn’t know the truth. She and my mom were too close. Chloe would accidentally spill the beans, and I’d be tricked under the mistletoe with Glenn before I could stop it. No. I’d tell Chloe the truth after Christmas, when my imaginary lover got kicked to the proverbial curb. And she would understand. Actually, now that I thought about it, she had to understand. She owed me one. She lied to me for three weeks about dating Dirk McCoy in high school. So…yeah. That didn’t make me sound petty at all.
“I’m not lying,” I lied.
“Okay, hold on. I’m putting on a show for the kids so I can listen uninterrupted in my bedroom. First love, yay!”
My eyes widened. “No, Chlo, I’m not in love. I just…we’ve gone out. Like on dates and stuff.” I stood and began pacing the floor, stopping at my chest of drawers near the window.
“Is he your boyfriend?”
My mind quickly did the math. Casual dates did not a boyfriend make. What was the saying again? Date as many guys as you wanted, but kiss only one? （Or in my case, none. A very big, fat none.） If I was going to play the fake-other-man card, I would need to put a title on it.
“Yup. He’s my boyfriend.”
“Who is he? How did you meet him?” This time, her voice had lowered a few octaves. Much less squealing and maybe a smidge suspicious? Like she was sniffing around and smelling something that didn’t quite add up. I needed to add a few irons to the fire.
“It’s all happened fast. The boyfriend title is…new. But I really like him.”
“Who is he? What’s his name?”
My hands stilled in my underwear drawer. Shoot. Who was he?
I racked my brain to come up with a name. Some name. A name. There were none. NO names. I could think of no guy names. My brain was an empty sheet of paper. Men didn’t exist in this world. My life was at my school, and at school there was only…
No.
But suddenly my brain latched onto the name Miles and wouldn’t let go.
NO.
Miles. Miles. Miles. Miles.
Mr. Grady! My brain detected another male human. He was in his seventies, but it was fine. I just needed a name, and his name was Ralph!
Ralph. I opened my mouth to say the name, but the word refused to release its death grip on my tongue. Even though men no longer existed in my brain, I knew for certain that Ralph was not a name from my generation.
“OLIVE. Spill.”
“It’s Miles!”
My heart rate slowed as the pressure of providing a name melted off my shoulders. Though I did feel lighter, my body was immediately filled with remorse. I hated lying to my sister, especially since this type of news had the potential to put her over the moon in the happiness department. It also felt a tiny bit disloyal to use Miles in this way. Not because I liked him, but because I didn’t. I was disappointed in myself that I had sunk so low as to use him like that. Oh well, he would never know. And Chloe didn’t know him, so hopefully it—
“Wait? From your school? The hot new teacher you can’t stand?!”
My grip on the phone tightened. Had I told her about him?
“How did you know?”
“You complain about him all the time.”
I so do not. Do I? Okay, maybe a few horrible things said in passing, but nothing anybody should have remembered.
“How’d you know he was hot?” I knew for certain that I would have never told her that.
“I don’t know, I guess I just assumed. With how you talked about him, I think I just filled in the blank in my mind. So are you for real? This is CRAZY! How did you two start going out? I thought you were never going to date somebody you work with ever again. And WHY didn’t you tell me?!”
Her intrusive questions swirled in the air as my brain attempted to pick one to answer. This was why people warned you about lying—even little white lies told for the simple reason of saving your sanity. Already, my sanity was null and void, and now my anxiety was through the roof. Maybe I could backtrack.
“I’m just kidding. It’s not…it’s a different Miles.”
“There can’t be more than one Miles in Stanton.”
“Why are you more apt to believe me when I told you that it was Miles, the guy I didn’t like from my school?”
“I’m not saying I believe you yet. But please. You liked him. You wouldn’t whine so much about him if he didn’t get under your skin.”
I made a face in the mirror across from me. “That is NOT—"
“Tell me how it happened!” she interrupted. “Did he ask you out first? I had a feeling he liked you. Guys don’t tease like that unless—"
“He just asked me out to coffee one day after school. To talk about a mutual student.” My eyes widened as more words expelled from my lips. “And there you go. Simple. I didn’t want to make it a thing with everyone until it was more sure.” There. That sounded pretty good.
“And what about your no-dating-anybody-you-work-with rule?”
“That’s why we’re being so casual and taking it extremely slow. I don’t want to relive the whole Brian fiasco.” Correction. I would never relive the whole Brian fiasco. Now I was kicking myself that I’d used Miles’s name and that, at some point, I had told my sister about him. UGH. Bad Olive.
I moved all the toiletries from my bed into the pockets of my suitcase. The truth was, I wasn’t against dating. I wanted to date people. A hot, flannel-wearing lumberjack sounded great to me. But not this week. And not Glenn Foster.
“So anyway. There you have it. My dating life in a nutshell. I guess one of us should mention this to Mom so she can warn the Fosters before they get there.”
“Mention to Mom that you’re suddenly dating somebody that nobody knew about? Somebody who nobody will see during this trip? And that your relationship is so abnormally casual and the timing is just perfect enough that it doesn’t sound quite real?”
“Well, maybe not with that tone.”
She snorted.
Her voice was now riddled with wariness. But I had made my bed, and I now had to jump in.
“Listen. You don’t have to believe me, but I am dating Miles Taylor.” The words came off my tongue with frightening ease, but it still hurt to say them out loud.
She spat out a dry chuckle. “Fine. I’ll tell Mom so hopefully it will get Glenn off your back, but I will need to see your eyes when you tell me this is real. If I still feel like something isn’t quite right, and if you’re lying to me, so help me, you’ll pay for it.”
“I just got chills.”
“Thank you. And when I say pay for it, I mean by way of a sexy mountain man that I will find in Vermont. And when I find him, you have to go on a date with him.”
“Not when I’m dating Miles.” I would now take this to the grave if I had to.
Chloe snorted. “I want to believe you, and I’m halfway there, but listen, Ben just got home, so I’m going to go talk to him, but we will definitely be revisiting this tomorrow.”