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Chapter 25: My Fake Girlfriend Just Got Complicated

Chapter 25: My Fake Girlfriend Just Got Complicated

"Hi. I’m Rose. I’m Adrian’s girlfriend."

That was one way to introduce herself.

Adrian didn’t say anything right away. There wasn’t an honest answer that fit in a single sentence.

Drew recovered first. He always did.

"Wait." He looked between them, grin already forming. "Girlfriend?"

"Uh..." Adrian gave a small shrug. "Yeah. Apparently."

That got a laugh out of Drew, the kind that meant he’d already decided this was the best part of his week.

He shook Rose’s hand like they were old friends, introduced himself, introduced Jenna, and somewhere in there managed to imply that Adrian had been hiding her on purpose, which was fair, under the circumstances.

Jenna wasn’t laughing yet. She looked at Rose. Then at Adrian. Then back at Rose, the way she did when she was cataloguing something for later.

"You started dating again?"

Adrian paused, flickering his gaze briefly at Rose and then back at Jenna. "Yeah."

Her eyebrows went up. "Didn’t you just break up with M-"

Drew’s hand came up fast, a light bump to her shoulder that looked almost accidental.

"Sh-" A forced chuckle, meant to smooth things over, left his lips. "Stop talking."

"What?"

"You know exactly what."

He turned back to Adrian and Rose before Jenna could finish being confused, smoothing the moment over with the ease of someone who’d done it a hundred times.

"What she means is, we’re happy for you." He looked Rose up and down, exaggerated, harmless. "Very happy. You somehow managed to upgrade."

Adrian gave him a flat look. "Thanks."

"You’re welcome."

Jenna didn’t join the joke immediately. She held her gaze on Adrian a second longer than she needed to, then let it go, her mouth curving into something easier. "Right."

She wasn’t stupid, as far as Adrian could tell. Whatever she’d almost said, she let it go without pushing; for now, anyway.

"So." Jenna turned to Rose, arms crossing loosely. "How long have you two been together?"

Rose hesitated. Half a second, maybe less. Long enough that Adrian noticed, and probably no one else did.

Rose opened her mouth to answer. "Not long," Adrian said, at the same time. She glanced at him and let it go.

Rose glanced at him.

"A few weeks," he added.

Understanding passed over her face, quick and easy. "Yeah. A few weeks."

Drew wanted to know how they met, and this was the part Adrian had been dreading, because there wasn’t a version of the truth that fit in a sentence.

"We met through the neighborhood," Rose said, vague enough to survive.

"She lives nearby," Adrian added. Technically true.

Jenna caught the shape of it immediately. "That’s it?"

"That’s it."

"You don’t seem like someone who’d just start dating a random guy."

Rose looked at Adrian, something private in it. "He wasn’t random."

That landed somewhere Adrian hadn’t expected. He looked at her, and she gave him a tiny smile, the kind that said appreciate the improvisation, and he did.

She’s getting better at this.

"So," Drew said, leaning back with the particular energy of someone who’d just found a new hobby, "do you two have pet names for each other?"

"No." Adrian said.

"Yes," Rose said, at almost the same second.

Silence. Adrian looked at her. She looked back, entirely unbothered.

"Which is it?" Drew asked, glancing between them like he was watching a tennis match.

"Yes," Rose said again, calmer this time, like the contradiction had resolved itself.

Drew laughed. "Okay, I need to know. What do you call him?"

Rose smiled, the small, deliberate kind Adrian had learned to be suspicious of. "Hentai."

He paused.

Adrian turned toward her slowly. He didn’t say anything right away, mostly because he was busy processing the sheer audacity of choosing that particular nickname in front of an audience.

Rose held his gaze without flinching, and there was something in her expression, small, satisfied, entirely unrepentant, that told him everything he needed to know. She’d done this on purpose. He was sure of it.

Drew looked confused for exactly one second. Then it landed, and he broke into laughter loud enough to draw a glance from a couple passing by.

Jenna didn’t laugh. She looked between Rose and Adrian, then back to Rose again, clearly missing whatever the joke was supposed to be.

Rose noticed. Her composure slipped, just slightly, the satisfaction dimming into something closer to backpedaling.

"It’s a joke." she said.

"A joke about what?" Jenna asked.

"You don’t want the story." Adrian said, before Rose had to figure out how to answer that herself.

"I absolutely want the story." Drew said.

"It’s nothing," Rose said, which only made

which only made Drew laugh harder. Adrian’s refusal to explain was apparently the funniest part of the whole exchange.

Jenna’s mouth curved. She’d caught on. She just wasn’t going to say so out loud. "So your girlfriend calls you hentai."

"Apparently," Adrian said.

He shot a glare at her. Still looking as unbothered as always. He caught the smile anyway, the same one from a second ago and understood that she’d enjoyed every second of putting him through that.

"Alright, alright," Drew said eventually, wiping his eyes. "Let’s eat. I’m starving."

It was, as far as Adrian was concerned, the most reasonable thing anyone had said all morning.

They drifted back toward the refreshment area, and Adrian scanned the menu without much interest, found chicken nuggets on the specials board, something that presumably didn’t taste like grass, and ordered them.

Drew kept talking while they waited, already three sentences into some story that involved Adrian and Jenna, most of which Adrian only half-caught.

Rose, on the other hand, seemed genuinely invested, which was concerning in its own way.

The food arrived. Adrian started eating, and so did everyone else. Once they had all settled into eating, Rose steered the conversation away from herself.

"So how did you three actually become friends?"

Drew brightened immediately. "Oh, I love this one."

Jenna gave him a flat look that Adrian recognized instantly, the one that meant Drew was about to talk for a very long time, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.

There wasn’t.

Drew launched into it with considerably more confidence than accuracy, embellishing details as if he’d been narrating from the sidelines rather than actually present for any of it.

Jenna corrected him twice. He argued both times instead of accepting he was wrong, which only made Rose ask another question, which only encouraged him further.

Adrian let it run without much input, attention drifting everywhere except toward his loudmouth friend.

His phone buzzed against the table. He checked it on reflex.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

TARGET ACQUISITION REMINDER

Target: Not Yet Acquired

Time Remaining: 17:42:18

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He stared at it for a second. Right. He still hadn’t gotten Jenna alone to ask her for her consent as the system had insisted.

And all of it had gotten considerably harder with his fake girlfriend sitting beside him, glued to his arm by her own design. Or, given the last twenty minutes, "fake" was starting to feel like an increasingly generous word for it.

He took a sip of his drink. Lowering the glass, he looked up in time to catch Jenna watching him. She looked away first.

He held onto that a second longer than made sense, then made himself stop.

Drew was still talking. Jenna cut in again to correct some detail he’d exaggerated. Adrian caught fragments of it, most of his attention elsewhere, running through options that all sounded worse the longer he considered them.

His phone buzzed again.

This time he looked down immediately.

Rose.

He glanced up. She was already looking at him, saying nothing, waiting for him to check the message himself. He unlocked it and read it.

Rose: Daniel is here.