Chapter 3 Fake date him

Nora

Cal standing in front of me wasn’t the shock.

I had spent the whole night preparing for that part.

I had seen his pictures enough times over the past three years to know what I was walking into. Campus was large and our departments were on opposite ends of it, and I had only transferred here a year ago, so our paths had never crossed. 

Seeing him in person was different from a picture. 

I looked away before he could catch me looking.

The shock was what came after.

“Cal, meet Nora. Your acting girlfriend.”

The word girlfriend hit me somewhere between my ribs.

That was not in the plan, it was never mentioned in any email. I was supposed to be documenting this. Covering it, standing on the professional side of a camera with a safe and appropriate distance between me and everything that had happened three years ago.

I stared at Marcus. Then at Cal. Then back at Marcus.

“Marcus,” I said, keeping my voice completely level, “can I speak to you outside?”

The corridor was quieter than the hall but not quiet enough. I turned on Marcus the moment the door closed.

“What girlfriend?”

“Did you not get the email last night?” he said.

“What email, Marcus?”

I was already opening my inbox. My eyes moved fast down the list and stopped on a message from Mrs. Festus, head of my faculty, my project supervisor, the woman whose signature on a document could determine the entire direction of my academic year.

I read it once. Then again more slowly.

My mouth opened. I closed it with my hand pressed flat against my lips, standing in a corridor outside a room that contained Cal Reid, reading an email that explained exactly how thoroughly my life had just been reorganized without my input.

I lifted my eyes to Marcus.

He had the expression of someone who had been waiting for this moment and was choosing optimism as a survival strategy.

“Nora, you’ve got this,” he said simply. Then he turned and went back inside.

I stood alone in the corridor. Pressed the back of my head against the door. 

I had approximately thirty seconds to become a different person,  someone unbothered and professional, 

I took one breath in. Let it out slowly.

Then I went back inside.

The full briefing lasted forty minutes. Scripts, schedules, planned activities, public appearances, Marcus walked through all of it with the thoroughness of someone who understood that details left unexplained became problems later. I sat and listened and took notes and kept my face arranged into something that looked like engagement.

“Everything’s been sent to your emails,” Marcus concluded. “Review it all before tomorrow and come prepared. The more comfortable you are with the plan the smoother this runs.” He smiled at both of us.

“I’ll give you two some time to get acquainted. Getting comfortable with each other now will make the cameras easier later.”

He walked away toward the rest of the team.

And then there were two of us. And a silence that had three years of weight behind it.

Cal’s attention was somewhere across the room, which gave me the opportunity to look at him properly without being caught doing it. He was almost the same as I remembered. The jaw was sharper. There was a beard now, close-cut and deliberate, that had absolutely no right to suit him as well as it did. His shoulders were broader. 

Three years had settled into him differently than they had settled into the boy I grew up beside.

But underneath all of it he was still recognizably Cal. That was the part that made everything harder.

I had so many questions stored up. Things I had pushed into corners over three years and refused to look at directly. The silence between us now was loud enough to make all of them surface at once, rising up through the professional composure I was working very hard to maintain.

Did he regret that night?

Who was the girl he admitted having feelings for, the one Jade never knew about? Was it someone I knew? Was it..

I stopped that thought before it finished forming.

Someone had to break the silence. I wasn’t going anywhere near the past. I needed this to be professional, clean and functional and forward-facing, the way you treated any working relationship that required you to perform something you didn’t entirely feel.

“So,” I said.

His attention came back to me immediately.

“Since we’re going to be working together, I would like to know some truth so I don’t cross any lines on camera.”  I kept my voice steady under the full weight of his gaze now fixed on mine. 

“Starting with the game. What was the reason for the fight?”

The question landed between us.

He was quiet for long enough that I thought he wasn’t going to answer.

“They spoke ill of my dad,” Cal said.

Then he stood up. Picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. And walked out of the hall without another word, leaving me sitting alone at the table, watching the door close behind him.

I understood completely.

Cal’s father had been the fixed point of his entire world.

A player himself once, that was where the love of the game had come from. Cal used to talk about his father the way other people talked about air, like the man was simply something required for basic function. Their relationship had a specific quality I had witnessed up close as a child and had never seen replicated anywhere else since, the kind where the son genuinely wanted to become his father, not out of pressure but out of love.

I was five years old the first time I really understood it. We were running around the garden outside Cal’s house,  me and Cal and the particular chaos of two children with too much energy and nowhere specific to put it. His father was sitting on the back step watching us, not interfering, just present. When Cal fell and scraped his knee he didn’t cry. He looked immediately at his father’s face to see what expression to wear. His father smiled. Cal got up and kept running.

I had thought about that moment many times over the years without fully understanding why it stayed with me.

His father died when Cal was fifteen. And from that point forward Cal had been holding himself together with the specific determination of someone who had decided that falling apart was not available to him as an option.

Standing in that hall, watching him walk away over something nobody else in the room understood, I felt the full weight of what those fourteen seconds had actually been about.

It was never about the fight.

My room felt like the first safe place I had been in all day.

I dropped onto my bed, stared at the ceiling, and let the tension of the past several hours slowly leave my shoulders. My phone was already in my hand, I opened the email with the full activity schedule and scrolled through it, trying to get a sense of what the next eight weeks were actually going to look like up close.

The further I read the more complicated it seemed.

Week two had an outdoor picnic. Week three had a public campus event. Week five,  I stopped reading. I put the phone face down on my chest and stared at the ceiling instead.

How is any of this going to end well.

Buzz. Buzz.

I picked up my phone and felt my stomach tighten before I even fully registered the name on the screen.

Jade.

I lay there for a moment with the phone buzzing in my hand, feeling the specific weight of everything I wasn’t saying to her. 

I answered.

“Hey, favorite sis.” Jade’s voice came in warm and easy.

“Haven’t spoken properly in ages, how are you doing?”

“It’s just work,” I said. My palm was damp against the phone case. “Busy. But don’t worry, after this project wraps we’ll have proper time together. I promise.”

“You always say that,” she said, not accusatory, just fond. That was the worst part about Jade. She was never accusatory. She just loved you and trusted you and assumed the best.

“Jad, I’m sorry, can we talk later? I really have to go.”

“Of course. Love you.”

“Love you.”

I ended the call.

Sat with the phone in my lap and the quiet of my room around me and the full weight of what I had just done settling somewhere in my chest.

I pressed my hand flat against my chest.

My heart was still beating too fast.

That was the part I couldn’t explain away.