Best Fake Fiance (Loveless Brothers 2)

“Yes,” I say, feeling a little exasperated. “It wasn’t where I put it, because either someone stole it or it fell through a very small wormhole that doesn’t seem to have affected the rest of the fabric of our reality, just my phone.”

She just sighs again, then comes over to me, the dry cleaning in the garment bag swishing, and drops a kiss on top of my head.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But I brought you a suit.”

At last, I actually look at the garment bag. All day I’ve felt like I was watching the world through a haze, like something was separating me from everyone and everything. A fancy shower door or something.

“Thanks,” I say automatically.

I pause for a moment, looking at the suit.

“…why?” I ask.

“For Daniel’s hearing tomorrow,” she says, as if we’ve discussed it, decided that I’m going, and I had any idea that she was letting me borrow a suit for the occasion.

Finally, I stand from the couch and turn off the trashy reality TV show I was watching, grab my empty cereal bowl, take it to the kitchen.

“I’m not going,” I call, putting it in the sink and balancing it carefully on several other bowls. “I promise you that if I go, I’ll make everything worse, because that’s what I do, and Daniel has made it pretty clear that I should stop making everything worse for him—”

“Daniel said what he said standing the hallway of the emergency room,” Elizabeth says. I turn back to my living room, and she’s still standing there, freshly dry-cleaned suit hanging off of one finger. “No one is their best self in an emergency room. Except maybe the doctors and nurses, or at least I would hope—”

“I’m not gonna be the reason he loses his daughter,” I say.

“Charlie.”

“Elizabeth.”

“You should go,” she says. “If nothing else, prove that Daniel wasn’t lying.”

“He was,” I point out, but she just waves one hand in the air.

“Only technically,” she says.

“That’s lying! Technically lying is still lying!”

Elizabeth turns, walks to the door to my room, and hangs the suit from the top of the door.

“You should go,” she says, simply. “You said you would, and right now you need to be the bigger person and go to the hearing, even if Daniel never speaks to you again afterward.”

I look at the suit, hanging on the door. Of course Elizabeth would both try to push me down a hill inside a tractor tire and be responsible enough to dry-clean her suit before lending it to me. Even though I know I’m lucky to have her, right now I’m annoyed at her for being so much better at life than I am.

“I’ll think about it,” I lie. I’m not going to think about it, because I’m not going.

I’m not going, and I’m never going to feel better, and I’m just going to wallow in my sadness and self-pity and eat Lucky Charms and queso until my butt literally fuses with my couch, and I’d like to see my stupid, responsible sister try to stop me.

“Thank you,” she says.

Then she walks over and wraps me in a hug.

I’m surprised. It takes me a minute before I hug her back. Her hair smells like flowers, of course, and mine probably smells like sawdust, but she squeezes me a little tighter and then releases me.

“Call me when it’s over, I want to hear how it goes,” she says, giving my hair a light ruffle.

“I’m not going, and I don’t have a phone,” I remind her.

“Use Daniel’s,” she says, heading for my door. “Bye, Chuck. Good luck. Love you.”

“Love you too,” I call out, ignoring the part about using Daniel’s phone, and then the door closes behind her.

I take the suit and put it in my closet, and then I go back to dumb television and queso dip.

I’m not going.

I’m never going to feel better.

I will become one with this couch, and that’s what I deserve.That night, I sleep like the dead, and I wake up late because my alarm was on my phone. I shower as fast as I can. I eat cereal. I run out the door, hop into my car, start on my way to work.

I’m halfway there when a rabbit runs across the road, right in front of me, and I slam on the brakes. I lurch forward into my seatbelt, bracing my whole body for the sickening thump of flesh under my tires, but it doesn’t come.

A second later, the bunny disappears into the grass on the side of the road, safe and sound, probably with no idea that it nearly met a gruesome death just now.

I feel it like a fist right to the chest, like my ribcage is being squeezed, my organs shaken, and I start sobbing. Right there, still stopped in the middle of the road, I start crying hysterically about the bunny who didn’t die and about the sister who’s too nice to me and about Rusty who was so brave about getting her arm broken and mostly, I cry because I’m sorry and because I already miss my best friend.