Just Pretend (Love Comes To Town)

“You aren’t exactly a prompt one, are you?” he says, wearing a stern expression.

I stick out my tongue and he grins.

Inside his car, he has an actual picnic basket.

“What?” he says, as he starts driving and I just smile at him.

The top is down and the cool wind can’t decide which way to whip our hair, so it’s whipping it all ways.

“You really went for it,” I say. “The whole picnic thing.”

“Oh no.” Nolan shakes his head, his long light brown strands streaming even more wildly in the breeze. “I’ve always had a picnic basket and matching tulip utensil set.”

I lift up the top and—sure enough, tulips galore—crack up.

Nolan snaps the top closed before I can make out anything, though. “No peeking.”

“Or what?” I say.

His smirk tugs up one side of his mouth. “Our we’ll have dessert first.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad to me.”

Excitement flickers in his gaze. “Oh yeah?”

Next second, the car’s barreling to the side, and his lips are on mine.

I pull away, breathless. “Nolan!”

His smirk is pure irreverence. “You said it didn’t sound so bad to you.”

God those lips of his, that grin… I rip my gaze away. “Is this your way of saying that you cheaped out with dessert?”

“Did I cheap out with dessert…” Nolan scoffs. He flips open the picnic basket and shoves it under my nose. “This look like cheaping out to you?”

“Oh.” Would you look at that. A mini red velvet cake with an ornate S in blue icing on the top, surrounded by sunflowers. Like my dress earlier today. “No. Not at all.”

He shuts it. “Yeah. Well.”

We drive along in silence.

“Sorry for assuming the worst,” I finally say.

“Seems like you’ve been doing that a lot lately,” he replies sharply.

It takes a few seconds for his words to land, and my response to take off. “Yeah, because it’s completely normal—bringing up a fake engagement.”

He glances my way. “What about us has ever been normal to you?”

I frown. Big words that still manage to skirt around the real issue.

“So, that’s it?” I ask. “You’re not even going to address it?”

He shrugs. “I offered to drop it. You said you’re in.”

“I am, just…” I sit there, feeling so wordless and useless that part of me wants to just climb out of this car right here and now, middle of the highway be damned.

I don’t want to go through it again. I don’t know if I even can.

I don’t know if I have the words to make him see that him even considering it hurts me, makes me question everything we have, everything I thought we had.

Maybe part of it is that relationships, especially new ones, are murky waters, and I’m not comfortable enough to tell him how I really feel about us, let alone this arrangement.

So, I just sit there and let him drive us to wherever he’s driving us.

Once we pull into an empty parking lot, I nod. “OK. So, you took me here to kill me.”

Nolan snorts. “A waste of a lot of good food, then. Besides, I’m kind of having fun with you.”

I shoot him a sidelong eyebrow raise. “Kind of?”

He grins, and kisses my check. “Alright, I am. So sue me. Now, are we going to have our picnic, or are you afraid of a little dark?”

The words “I’ve never had a nighttime picnic” are barely out of my mouth before he’s swept around to my door and opened it.

I can’t help the fluttery surprised feeling in my chest, even if Nolan scowls. “I can be a gentleman, you know.”

“I think we’ve established that you’re full of surprises,” I say, mouth smiling around the words.

“Speaking of,” he says, hooking his arm in mine. “What would you say to a cliff picnic?”

“I hope you’re joking.”

Right now, with no lights in sight and my eyes unadjusted, we’re basically walking into pitch blackness, like somehow the Earth shook and dislodged us into a separate forgotten dimension, and now we’re just wandering in the middle of empty space.

It keeps feeling like this with Nolan—like we’re venturing into new, untrodden ground.

“C’mon,” Nolan urges me, a playful note in his voice. “It only erodes a few feet a day, nothing we can’t handle.”

At my playful swat, he chuckles. “OK, OK. We’re almost there. You’ll see.”

And so, I do.

Nolan was right about the cliff—kind of. There’s a tottery old metal table and chairs that sit about 10 feet away from a cliff, underneath what’s probably the biggest oak tree I’ve ever seen.

“Don’t ask me the name of this place, because I don’t know,” Nolan says. “Couldn’t point it out on a map either. I can only drive here on one road—the route our dad used to take us.” In the dark, his teeth flash into a grin. “It helped him make his big speeches, the whole cliff backdrop.”

“I’ll bet.”

We get out the picnic foods: crispy baguette, aged cheddar cheese and some charcuterie meats, some red grapes, and start eating.