Fake Girlfriend

“Where are we going?” I asked for the millionth time as we got into Cole’s new car. Cole just shook his head and snickered. I sat down in the passenger’s seat. Seat belts. That’s new. “What happened to your truck?” Not that I missed it all—this car was much safer.

“Scrapped in some junk yard,” he said sadly, like it was someone who just died.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

Cole shrugged. “It’s fine.”

There was an awkward pause in the conversation.

“Okay,” I said as we exited the parking lot. “So you gonna tell me where we’re going?”

Another laugh. “Would you just chill?”

“You’re pretty much kidnapping me here. I think I deserve to know where we’re going,” I said, a smile glued to my face.

“Hey, you got in the car.” Cole was laughing a little harder now, and it reached his eyes. Wow, that was new. I stopped laughing almost immediately. That made him look at me weird, but he was still grinning. “What?”

I shook my head and smiled. “Nothing.” But it was something. Cole was grinning. I never saw Cole grin. It was different to see him with it, but… it was a good different. It was definitely a nice change from his usual sarcastic attitude. Weird. It felt like he was opening up, and it made me grin, too. “It’s weird to see you smiling,” I admitted.

He tried to stop smiling and cocked an eyebrow. “Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve smile before…”

I shrugged, smiling.

Cole let out another laugh. “Weir-do.”

The entire way there, I bugged him. No one could ever guess that we had ever hated each other. Or that we were lying about our relationship. In fact, for the moment, I don’t think either of us was thinking about those things. Honestly, this was the first time I was openly enjoying myself with Cole, and it didn’t bother me in the slightest.

When we pulled into the parking lot, I looked out at the big building. “I know where we’re going!” I said.

Cole laughed. “Oh yeah?”

“Ice skating!” I said.

“Sheesh, how did you ever figure that out?” Cole said sarcastically.

***

Hesitantly, I put a shaky foot on the ice. Cole chuckled. “Come on already.”

I shot him a humorous glare. “I though you said you were no good at ice skating,” I said.

He grabbed my arm, extended for balance as I placed my other foot down on the ice. “Yeah. I sorta lied.” Next thing I knew, he was pulling me out in the rink, away from the wall were I highly preferred to be. Cole was laughing.

“Cole!” I shrieked, latching onto his arm.

“Relax. It’s not that bad.”

Yeah, right. I hadn’t been on the ice for a few seconds, and my legs already felt like Jell-O. “I’m gonna fall,” I said.

Cole snorted. “You won’t.” He pried my arms off his, despite my squealing protests of losing my balance, and took my hand in his. “Trust me, ‘kay?”

I looked up at him. Again he had that new look on his face. A happy look. A smile. Not a smirk. I was momentarily distracted from my wobbly legs. He began skating forward, and I was pulled along, trying not to fall. I looked down at Cole’s feet and watched what he did. It looked almost like he was walking, constantly relying on one foot or the other to push him forward. I knew if I tried, I would just fall. My brows furrowed. How was he doing this so easily?

Cole must have noticed my frustrated gaze, directed at his feet, because he chuckled and slowed down. “Try just going like this.” His feet no longer picked up off the ground. Instead, his skates just dragged along the ice. It seemed a lot easier.

I began to move my feet in pace with his. Granted, we were now the two slowest people in the rink and people were constantly maneuvering around us, but I was actually getting it. I didn’t dare try picking up my feet, though. Gradually, I felt Cole’s hand loosen from mine, then let go all together. I gave him a quick panicked look, but he smiled reassuringly.

“See? You got it!” he said, skating a bit faster so that he could get in front of me. He turned around swiftly to face towards me, now going backwards. He grinned.

“You’re a show-off, you know that?” I said. He laughed.

I tried to focus on keeping myself balanced, rather than the way Cole laughed so freely. When I thought about it, I had never seen Cole so loose. He was always in that cold, sarcastic, sadistic shell of his. I momentarily forgot I was supposed to be concentrating on my feet and stumbled. Trying to recover, my feet flailed on the ice, and my arms waved frantically. I ended up going forward right into Cole’s arm.

A startled Cole wrapped his arms around me to keep me from falling, but do to all my slipping around, he ended up trying to steady himself as well—all the while maneuvering us through all the skating people, nearly crashing into most of them, to the wall. My hands were half way around his neck, holding onto his shoulders, the embarrassment of it all making me even clumsier as I tried to get steady. I kept my eyes on my feet, and Cole kept his ahead of him as he murmured apologies to the slightly pestered skaters he was trying not to bump into. But when our eyes met—

Cue the awkward moment.

His face was uncomfortably close to mine. Not to mention, his arms were around my, and mine were on his shoulders. Neither of us moved, even though we were now near the wall where we could steady ourselves without holding on to each other.

“You okay?” Cole asked, breaking the silence, making it even more awkward.

“Um, yeah. I’m good,” I breathed.

“Alright.” Cole let go of me, and I let go of him. There was another awkward pause, and I bit my lip. My stomach was twisted, and not in sickness. Cole, on the other hand, seemed to recover quickly. He beamed at me. “You gonna give it another go? Or are you just going to give up.”

I laughed a little. “I don’t give up.”

He smiled, and gave me one of those looks where I wished I could decipher what his eyes were trying to say. “Good, ‘cos neither do I.”

Something told me he wasn’t talking about skating.

***

For a few laps, I skated without Cole’s help, though he was close at my side, laughing at my vigorous concentration of my feet and how we were just inching along. Cole didn’t even look like he was trying; he was just skating along, walking on ice, watching me struggle. The awkward moment was behind us.

“Try looking up at least once and awhile,” he said.

I shook my head slightly, brow furrowed in concentration.

Cole laughed. “You’ll end up crashing into something.”

“No I won’t.”

“If I wasn’t here, you’d already have crashed into like five people by now.” I could just picture the amused look on his face.

As I watched my own feet, I noticed Cole’s feet start to move ahead, and then out of my direct line of vision. My head whipped up at the guy who was now quickly moving away from me. I panicked just a little.

“Where are you going?” I said, a with little more alarm than I intended to show.

Cole looked over his shoulder at me with the amused smile I pictured plastered on his face. “What? You don’t need me,” he teased.

“Cole,” I whined. “Come back.”

He laughed and turned around, coming back to my side. “That’s what I thought,” he said, sticking his tongue out at me.

“Quiet, you,” I said.

“But, see? You’re looking up now, and you’re not falling.” He grinned.

I smiled. “Yeah,” I said, looking down at my feet for a second. “I’m getting good, huh?”

Cole snickered. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

We both laughed.

Eventually, Cole’s hand somehow managed to attach to mine again. And there was a small silence—not awkward like the last time. Exactly how did I end up getting so friendly with Cole? I decided not to think about it too much, because I realized I didn’t care. I just liked it.

I watched him as he didn’t even seem to think about what he was doing. He might as well have been in his own little world, while I had to concentrate the entire time on turning without falling. When I thought about it, it was kind of funny; Cole didn’t seem like the ice skating type.

“Why are you so good at skating?” I finally had to ask.

“Huh?” Yup, he was definitely in his own little world. “Oh. I did hockey couple of years in middle school.”

I laughed. “Really? You doing a sport?”

He mocked hurt. “What? I don’t look like the sporty type?”

Oh gosh, no. Cole definitely had the physique of someone who did sports. Teamwork was the issue. Cole didn’t seem like the type of guy who’d work well on a team. He just was too hot headed and unsocial sometimes. I got frustrated with him, so no doubt teammates would definitely have a few issues with him.

“No,” I answered. “I just can’t picture you playing hockey.”

Cole shrugged. “Yeah. Pushing people around on ice, I found, was a great stress reliever for me back then.”

Stress reliever for what? I wondered immediately, but didn’t ask. Instead I just nodded, like I understood. But I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand a lot about Cole, and it didn’t bother me much until now. Of course, it made me feel a little better that Cole didn’t understand a lot about me, either.

Cole smiled at me. “Hey, try this.” He began picking his feet up. This time, he did it a lot slower, making it look easier.

Even so… “I’ll fall,” I said.

“I already told you that you won’t.”

I frowned, but tried picking up my right foot. I wobbled a bit, but Cole was right there, keeping me balanced. Then I lifted my left foot. My smile widened with each step. “Look!” I exclaimed.

Cole laughed.

Of course, leave it to little ol’ me to be a cluts. I brought my left foot down a little too close to my right, and they sort of had a collision. I stumbled forward, and because Cole still had my hand and was trying to keep me up, I wasn’t the one who fell on her but he was. And he brought be down with him. Right on top of him.

He groaned as I thudded on his stomach, but then he started to laughed hard, so I figured he was fine. He sat up, causing me to slide into his lap, and scooted the two of us up against the wall, out of the way of the other skaters. I think so of the people skating were pretty annoyed with the two of us at this point, but both of us were laughing too hard to care.

“You okay?” I asked him between my laughing fit as we got up against the wall.

“Yeah. You?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

We spent a decent amount of time just laughing, causing me to lean up against him. And when it died down, it was silent. And I’m not going to lie, it got a little awkward. I looked back at him, and I found his expression surprisingly serious. And his face was, again, rather close to mine.

“I don’t get it,” he said. His brow furrowed.

“Get what?”

“You,” he said, as serious as his expression. I gave him a confused look. “And why I can’t just accept a rejection and get on with my life.”

Rejection?

“Cole, what—?”

He smiled. “I take back taking back what I said at lunch.”

My eyes got a little wide, and I couldn’t hide the blush creeping to my face. “Huh?”

He chuckled.

Then his lips met mine.