The One Month Boyfriend (Wildwood Society)

“I’m not coming to your open mic night,” she says, leaning against the bar, hands next to her hips. “Or your improv group. Or your improv open mic night.”

That gets a real, honest-to-God grin out of Silas, his whole face lighting up, one hand going through his hair.

The problem with Silas—one of many, let’s be real—is that he is technically attractive. If there were a kit for creating a handsome male human being, Silas would be what you got in the White Guy package.

In other words, he’s tall and broad and blue-eyed and square-jawed with a nice smile and nice teeth and cheekbones that are almost too pretty and medium brown, almost auburn hair that’s always the exact right degree of almost-but-not-quite unruly. He clearly works out and would probably be happy to bore you with the details of his routine. There are a lot of muscles. He looks good in the suits he wears to work, which I’m forced to know because our offices are on the same floor of the building.

“What about a dinner party?” he says, still grinning.

“Whose?” Anna Grace asks, suspicious.

“Elmore’s.”

“Elmore, your boss?”

“You know any other Elmores?”

“I had a great uncle,” Anna Grace says. “Though he passed before I was born. I think.”

“Yes, Elmore, my boss,” Silas confirms.

Anna Grace narrows her eyes.

“Are you asking me out?” she finally says, as if he’s just presented her with a weird bug in a jar. “To a dinner party with your boss? Why?”

Silas just laughs at that. His laugh is a whole thing: his head goes back and his face lights up and I can see the lines of the tendons in his throat, the way he runs one hand through his hair and his biceps sort of do something nice under his t-shirt.

I turn toward the wine bucket so I stop looking at him.

“Wow, okay,” he says, then casts a look over the bar and toward everyone else in the theater. “Because I need a favor.”

“A plus-one for a work dinner party?” she asks, still suspicious.

“Sort of,” he says, and sighs. “I may have accidentally told Linda Ballard that I have a girlfriend.”

“How do you accidentally tell someone you have a girlfriend?” I ask, pretending to adjust a wine bottle.

“It’s a long story.”

“So you need someone to come be your girlfriend at Elmore’s dinner party tomorrow night,” Anna Grace says. “That is not a plus-one situation.”

“It doesn’t have to be a big deal,” he says. “Come to a dinner party, we’ll hold hands or something, we can break up Sunday morning.”

“Definitely not,” she says.

Silas has the nerve to look surprised, because of course he does.

“I’m that bad?” he says, already covering it up with that dumb, cocky grin he has. “C’mon.”

I snort. They both ignore me.

“Look, you’re fine,” Anna Grace says.

“Thank you.”

“Do you know what would happen if people thought we were dating and I hadn’t told anyone?” Anna Grace asks. “I would never sleep again for the phone calls. My grandmother would cry with relief. My mother would start planning the wedding.”

“I’m that popular?”