~~~~~ Emery’s Pov ~~~~~
Priya’s reaction to the news arrived in four increasingly unhinged voice messages before I had even finished walking home from the rink, the last of which consisted almost entirely of her screaming into her phone in a way that made me hold it away from my ear on the bus.
“You’re WHAT,” she said, when I finally called her back properly.
“You agreed to fake date Calloway Marchetti for her actual father?”
“It’s not fake dating exactly.
It’s — a controlled narrative.”
“That’s the most Emery Hale sentence I’ve ever heard in my life.
‘A controlled narrative.’ You’re fake dating a hockey captain and you’re describing it like a thesis defense.”
“I’m trying to keep it professional.”
“There is nothing professional about this.
You’ve been in love with this girl for three weeks and now you get to hold her hand in front of her scary rich father and call it a business arrangement.
This is either the best thing that’s ever happened to you or an actual disaster, and I genuinely cannot tell which yet.”
“I’m not in love with her,” I blurted out immediately.
“Sure, Emery.”
The exact tone she had used about the restaurant, about the seven dinners, about all of it — patient, amused, thoroughly unconvinced.
“Okay, fine, let’s pretend I believe you.
What’s your actual plan here?
You’re going to spend a weekend playing girlfriend for a man who apparently controls whether she keeps her housing, and then what?
You go back to being just tutor and student on Monday like nothing happened?”
“That’s the plan, yes.”
“Emery,” she called out.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She paused, but it was weighted with everything she wasn’t saying outright.
“I just think plans like that work a lot better on paper than they do in real life, that’s all.
Be careful.
Not of her — I don’t think she’s going to hurt you on purpose.
Just — of yourself.
Of how much you’re going to want this to be real by Sunday.”
I didn’t have a good response to that, mostly because some quiet, honest part of me suspected she was right, and I wasn’t ready to sit with that yet, not with Friday’s rules-meeting still ahead of me and Saturday looming somewhere just beyond it.
“Tell me the rules, then.
What did you two actually agree to?” she asked, quietly now.
“That, unfortunately, was the part I hadn’t fully worked out yet,” I said slowly.
“You’re not serious, Emery,” she said.
“I’m still on my way home,” I said.
“Talk later.”
“Okay, bye,” she said, and hung up.
Calloway had texted me the details of Saturday — a home game, dinner afterward with her father at some restaurant downtown, expectations about what “girlfriend” was supposed to look like in that specific, high-pressure context.
But the actual rules, the boundaries I had insisted on before agreeing to any of this, we hadn’t gotten to yet.
We were meeting Friday, the day before, to sort it out properly, and the closer Friday got, the more I found myself turning the whole plan over in my head, trying to figure out exactly how much of this was going to feel like acting and how much of it was going to feel dangerously close to something real.
Friday arrived with a text from Calloway that read simply:
*my place.
6pm.
bring a notebook, apparently you like those. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Her apartment was nicer than I’d expected, though in retrospect I wasn’t sure why I’d expected anything different.
It was a clean, sparsely furnished two-bedroom off campus that practically had “parental funding”
written across every surface, from the leather couch to the enormous television mounted over a fireplace neither of us would probably ever use.
It felt strange standing in it, strange in a way I couldn’t quite articulate until I realized it was the first time I had seen a piece of her life that wasn’t the rink or a library table or a restaurant booth.
It made her feel more real somehow, and more distant at the same time, like the apartment itself was proof of a world I didn’t fully belong in.
“You can sit,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the couch, herself pacing near the kitchen island instead of sitting down.
“I made a list.
Of things he might ask.
And things we should probably agree on before he does.”
“You made a list?” I asked immediately, my eyes widening.
“You’re not the only one who likes being prepared.”
She slid a piece of paper across the counter toward me, and I had to bite back a laugh at the sight of her handwriting.
The same rushed, slanted scrawl from her chemistry worksheets, except this time organized into careful, deliberate bullet points, clearly drafted and redrafted.
How long have we been together.
(Since the tutoring started?
Feels safest — consistent timeline.)
Public affection — how much.
(Minimal.
Hand-holding fine.
Nothing that feels performative.)
What does he know about her family/background.
(Nothing specific unless asked directly.)
Exit plan if it gets weird.
I read through it twice, something warm and unfamiliar settling in my chest at the sight of how much thought she’d clearly put into protecting me from whatever version of her father I hadn’t met yet.
This wasn’t just about controlling a narrative for her own sake.
She’d built in an exit plan.
She’d thought about my comfort specifically, not just the performance.
“This is thorough,” I said.
“I told you.
I don’t like not knowing what I’m walking into.” She finally sat, across the counter from me instead of beside me, like there was some invisible line she wasn’t ready to cross yet even in private.
“Since the tutoring started works for timing.
Late September, so it’s been a little over three weeks, which tracks with the photo, tracks with why my grades started improving.
It’s clean.”
“Okay.
And hand-holding’s fine, but nothing performative — I actually appreciate that boundary.”
“I figured you would.” Something flickered across her face.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t want this to feel like a performance either.
Not the parts that don’t have to be, anyway.”
I didn’t quite know what to do with that sentence.
The careful, deliberate way she had chosen the words, like she was testing how much honesty the moment could hold before it tipped into something neither of us had agreed to yet.
“Your dad.
You’ve mentioned him a lot without really describing him.”
She was quiet for a moment, turning her water glass slowly on the counter the same way I did with mine when I was stalling.
“Successful.
Controlled.
The kind of person who’s never once raised his voice at me and somehow makes that scarier than if he did.
He doesn’t yell.
He just — recalculates.
Decides you’re not worth the investment anymore and moves on to whatever the next plan is.”
She looked up at me, something rawer in her expression than she usually allowed.
“I’ve spent my whole life trying to stay worth the investment.”
“You’re not an investment, Calloway,” I said, a little bit louder.
“Tell him that.” She gave a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, but underneath it was something almost grateful that I’d said it at all.
“He’ll be polite to you.
Probably overly polite, actually, the kind of polite that’s really just assessment dressed up nicely.
Don’t let it throw you.
He’s not actually asking about you.
He’s asking about what you represent for me.”
“No pressure, then,” I said, trying to sound normal.
“Enormous pressure, actually.
I just didn’t want to lie about it.” The corner of her mouth curved, not quite a smile.
But there was something about the honesty of it.
No performance in it at all and that settled a strange, steadying calm over the nervous energy that had been building in my chest since Priya’s first voice message.
“We’ll be fine,” I said, surprising myself with how much I meant it.
“You don’t know that.”
“No.
But I know you’ve prepared for every possible thing that could go wrong, which means the only thing left to worry about is the stuff neither of us can plan for.” I slid the list back toward her, our fingers brushing briefly over the paper in a way that felt entirely too significant for something as small as a piece of loose-leaf notebook paper.
“And honestly, I’m better at improvising than you would think.”
“Is that supposed to reassure me?” she said, smiling.
“A little.”
She laughed, the sound filling the sparse, expensive apartment in a way that made it feel, briefly, less like a stranger’s space and more like somewhere I could imagine returning to.
Tomorrow suddenly felt less like an ordeal to survive and more like something I was, against every practical instinct I had, actually looking forward to.
I gathered my things around seven thirty, lingering a beat longer than necessary at the door while she walked me out.
The two of us stood in the hallway outside her apartment in a silence that didn’t feel like the awkward kind.
“Thank you,” she said again, quieter this time, like the word meant something different the second time around.
“For all of it.
The rules, the list, actually showing up tonight instead of backing out.”
“I don’t back out of things.”
“No,” she said, studying me for a moment longer than the sentence required.
“I’m starting to notice that about you.”
I should have known better than to feel that way about something we were both still calling fake.
“I’ll get going then,” I said, waving at her and already walking away to avoid any further discussion that would make me think otherwise.