“Thanks for sharing that with us, man,” Ethan remarked, disconnecting the call. “So, Mark Mahler. Experience anything like that? Feel more…connected to her?”

  “Well,” Mark said, “uh…I mean, I’ve only really known her for a few weeks, really. But there are things you learn when you talk to someone for hours on the phone that you otherwise wouldn’t have.”

  “Hours?” Shari leaned in and asked. I couldn’t help my smile of amusement. I’d rarely seen her this involved in The Bro Show conversations. “How long were you talking to this girl?”

  Mark’s eyes flicked to me and he grinned. “Longer than she was talking to me, that’s for sure. She fell asleep once or twice. I bet most people don’t know she snores.”

  My mouth dropped open and I was a split second from protesting that accusation before I remembered nobody knew that Mark’s mystery girl was me. If Shari knew I was the girl Mark was dating—seeing, fucking, whatever—she might cut it off. I knew for sure and certain that I did not want that to happen.

  “She snores? And you still like her, man?” Ethan crowed. “Might just be true love.” The strains of Elvis singing “Fools Rush In” blasted through the studio. My heart pounded.

  I did not snore.

  And this was not love. I knew I’d let the thought pass my mind at one point or another, but that was just…crazy. I wouldn’t let it be love. Couldn’t.

  Besides, I was sure I did not snore. Someone would have told me if I did.

  Except that I’d never stayed the night with any man, before Mark. I liked my own space. Suddenly, the talking on the phone we’d done this week seemed starkly more intimate than any of the things Mark and I had done in bed, or against a wall, or in a utility closet.

  How was it possible that knowing Mark had heard me fall asleep felt much more intimate than having his cock in my mouth?

  The next caller was a girl, cooing and squealing about how sweet Mark sounded and asking whether he’d consider dating her for a week. My breathing sped up at that, and once again I tamped down the urge to interject and tell her no, he would absolutely not date her.

  The dude that called after her said that talking on the phone sucked, because you couldn’t send pictures. Mark clamped his lips shut, responding with a simple, “Mmm,” but Ethan knew him well enough to push.

  “Bro. Did you get pictures, too? Like, since you were so far away from each other…”

  Mark’s eyes flicked to me, and I gave a quick shake of my head. Even though my mishap with the shower video had happened so long ago, I didn’t want him talking about it and the misunderstanding that ensued. I had no clue why. Nobody—except Ethan—knew me outside of the show. My name had only been dropped as “the sound girl” once or twice. But it felt too…something. Intimate. And not physically intimate, either. More dangerous than that.

  “No. No pictures.”

  “See, now that’s a shame. But whatever. Your thumb is much more effectively used doing something other than texting, man. Texting is literally for pussies,” Ethan cracked as he leaned in. Shari glared at him as she marked the time on the recording.

  “We have to bleep out that word, you know. Boys.”

  “Sorry, Shari,” they chorused together.

  “But please, do not call us boys. This is the week my bro, Whiz Kid Mark Mahler, becomes a man.”

  “He’s having his bar mitzvah?” Shari cracked. Damn, she was enjoying this.

  “No, no. Bigger. He’s meeting the parents.”

  “This is still Ava, then? He’s meeting Ava’s parents, after…what? A week or two?”

  Mark cleared his throat. “It’s seven weeks. I’ve only dated one girl this whole time, Shari, despite what a great player you think I am.”

  “Okay, after only seven weeks?” Ethan’s eyes shone, his eyebrows wiggling in a hilarious dance.

  “It’ll be eight by the time I meet them. But, uh, yeah. Ava. But I’m doing her a favor. Her parents live far away and she just wanted the company on the plane, I think.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, my friend. A girl talks to you for hours, she’s got feelings for you. Serious ones. Hey, are you sure this girl isn’t some kind of crazy attachment freak? Like she’s not gonna handcuff you while you’re at her parents’ house and force you to marry her?”

  My eyes went wide, my throat dry. I coughed, and Mark didn’t miss it.

  “Oh, I’m one hundred percent sure she’s not going to do anything that even comes close to that.” His gaze flicked to mine again.

  He was right. Marriage was absolutely, positively out of the question. Forever.

  But unlike when we started this experiment, I was seriously hoping I wouldn’t be sitting here and listening to him talk about any girl whose name started with a “B.”

  “It occurs to me that we’ve been neglecting feelings, Mark Mahler. How are you feeling about this whole thing? Nervous to meet her parents?”

  Mark’s eyebrows flicked up and he leaned back in his chair, like the question was too heavy for him to consider while sitting upright. “Obviously, I want them to like me,” he said simply.

  Oh. Oh. But they would hate him. That simple, obvious certainty had been the crux of Mark’s appeal to me since the day I met him. My chest tightened and heat flushed my cheeks. There had to be a way to prepare Mark for all this, to let him know that I fully expected my parents to hate him, but that was just fine with me. Ideal, even.

  Hopefully, I could communicate this one simple, yet terribly complicated, concept: that the reasons my parents would disapprove of him had nothing to do with the way I felt about him. They’d been trying to fit me into a mold my entire life. I didn’t care that he didn’t fit into it, not one bit. I wanted him not to.

  Maybe, if I figured out the right way to prep him, I could get him to understand that his goal should be for my parents not to like him, that my parents hating him would be the most promising sign for our future that I could imagine.

  Our future. For the first time ever, thinking about any future with a guy, however nebulous, made me smile instead of cringe.

  * * *

  A couple hours later, we were finally wrapping up. Shari was giving me notes, assigning me the first couple hours of the show to edit. I’d have to squeeze it into a shorter week than usual, which was stressful. Anticipating that, I’d scribbled at least a dozen questions in the margins of my show notes, which I asked her while she packed up her stuff and closed down the main computer. I noticed Mark leaving, and hoped I’d get a chance to snag him before he left the studio. Maybe revisit that back room I’d taken advantage of so many weeks ago. God, I’d been sitting for so long, I could use some variety of movement anyway.

  But by the time Shari and I left, turning off lights and locking doors behind us, Mark was nowhere to be seen. I hurried off to the train stop, craning my neck down the stairs that led to the platform bathed in sickly yellow light. He knew this was my train. Maybe…

  But he wasn’t waiting for me there, either. When the train slid into the station, I slumped into a seat, suddenly exhausted, inside and out.

  All it took was a buzz of my phone to have me sitting up at attention again.

  * * *

  Mark: Hey, beautiful. Sorry I couldn’t wait. Had to get to work.

  * * *

  I frowned, checking the time. It was almost ten on a Friday night. I knew Mark made a little money helping local artists, but I’d assumed most of that was studio-based, and that late nights out were a rare occurrence. What in the heck could work want with him this late on a weekend? And why wouldn’t he have mentioned it to me before he left me hanging?

  I felt full-on petulance start to take over. The sound of him moaning as he came still rang through my memory, and it had been priming me for more all night. I’d really wanted to see him tonight. What the hell?

  I shook my head sharply, hoping to knock myself out of this train of thought. I was starting to want him too much…and to assume that he still felt the same as he had about me when I first met him. He’d wanted a real relationship, not just sex. But maybe now he’d changed his mind.

  I clenched my fists and took a deep breath, reminding myself of what I knew for sure. Mark was going out with me because it made his life easier on the show. It was obvious that he liked me, which was a nice bonus, but really, I was helping him. Guys like him just didn’t go on the prowl, especially not for girls like me. In turn, he was making my life easier by coming home with me to my parents.

  This had always been an arrangement. It was never meant to be anything more. Certainly not something to get all heart-twisty and piney over.

  Despite what had been building between us the last couple months, I had no right, no evidence, to assume that he’d want to spend any time with me after the terms of the deal had been fulfilled. I had no business acting like he did.

  I cradled my phone in my palms, my thumbs poised to type. I thought of what that one caller had said, that Mark’s thumbs were better suited to doing different things with me than texting, and felt that surge of arousal between my legs again. Just thinking of Mark’s hands, and especially Mark’s hands on that particular part of my body, had the power to make me squirm.

  I let out a long, slow breath. If this Bro-Show segment, and the impending doom of Passover Seder with my parents, were the only things holding us together, then the only sane thing would be to not put any more thought about the situation on hold until both of them were over.

  Two weeks. I could continue to date and fuck Mark Mahler, Whiz Kid in and out of the bedroom, for the next two weeks, without letting myself get hung up on stupid sentimentalities. Feelings. After all, I never had with any other guy. Why should Mark be any different?

  Still, as I made my way home, I couldn’t escape the feeling that things had already begun to change, and that I had no idea how to stop them. I also didn’t know if I really wanted to.

  Chapter 30

  Mark

  One thing I’d learned about Toby Eisen was that, aside from the occasional frenzy to get in my pants, she was chill and indifferent to all things. At least, that was the outward appearance she’d maintained. Over the eight weeks I’d known her, I’d learned the signs that she was more agitated than she let on. If her knee lightly bounced, if she twisted a long strand of hair around her index finger, if she bit down on the top right corner of her mouth until it turned white, she was anxious.

  When we parked the car and walked to our gate at Philadelphia International Airport, she squeezed my hand and smiled.

  On the plane, even during the shaky ascent and roaring landing, she sat relaxed, tapping at the edge of her Kindle, flying through the pages at her impossible, but typical pace.

  Behind the wheel of the convertible—she’d said we should treat ourselves—she laughed as her hair whipped into her eyes, guiding my hand to the wheel while she tied her long waves up in a messy bun.

  When she had control of the car again, I cast my gaze upward, watching the fat palm leaves as we passed under them give way to open sky a few minutes later. I lifted my head and looked around, finding myself on a pristine stretch of road lined with small mansions, circular drives whirling in front of some, and wrought-iron gates framing others.

  “Jesus, Toby. What do your parents do for a living?” It was a rude question, I knew, but my shock pushed it out of me. We hadn’t talked about her house, or her parents, or anything that would have hinted at her living in a freaking mansion in a swanky suburb of Los Angeles.

  Just one more aspect of her life I knew nothing about.

  “Dad’s a producer. My mother’s a writer, here and there.”

  “Really,” I said, turning fully to her and raising an eyebrow.

  “Well, Ima dabbles. She hasn’t landed a pilot for…oh, God. Six years now? I don’t know what she’s been up to since then, just that she’s gone on a lot of trips with her friends.” Toby wrinkled her nose and looked at me, a little worry line creasing between her brows. “You’re not one of those star-struck types, are you?”

  I choked out a laugh. After working with Magnus, sitting next to him and his mom when they got the call about his Grammy nomination and hearing him thank me in his acceptance speech, I thought I was pretty immune to swooning over celebrities. “I don’t think so. I like to think of myself as a pretty simple man.”

  “Well,” she said, blowing out a long breath, “Dad’s the lead producer on Breathe Free.”

  Now I choked for real. Breathe Free was the show Kylie left me to audition for.

  Currently entering its thirteenth—or was it fourteenth? – season on one of the three major networks. Centered on the lives of five intertwined New York City families at the turn of the 20th century, it was a fiery, sometimes sexy drama dotted with political and crime-thriller subplots. The show literally had everything any viewer could want, and America had eaten it up, even if I still sort of hated it for pulling Kylie away from Philly. Every celebrity in the country, and many from abroad, wanted to guest on it, and the show had earned dozens of Emmys over the course of its run. I’d sat through God knew how many episodes with Kylie, listening to her sigh over how she’d kill to have just one line on that show.

  “Your dad is—”

  “Jonathan Kahn, yeah. My brother and I grew up using my mom’s last name for school stuff just to keep a low profile, kind of, and I decided to keep using it when I left home. I didn’t want—”

  “You didn’t want it to define you,” I supplied. Damn. Suddenly a whole lot of things made sense about Toby.

  “Exactly. And I really never had an interest in working on TV, either. So…ta-da! You’re dating Jonathan Kahn’s daughter.” Her mouth stretched into one of those cringy-fake smiles, hiding a nervousness that was obvious to me after all these weeks. We’d pulled to a small booth in front of a gate with the letter “K” woven into the design.

  “Hey, Tim,” Toby said, pressing her lips together in another fake smile.

  “Hey, Tobes! Welcome home! It’s been a whole year, hasn’t it? Your dad hasn’t told me what’s keeping you so busy on the other side of the country, but—”

  “Thanks, Tim. Good to see you, too.”

  Tim’s mouth clapped shut, like her shortness had taken him by surprise. But I wasn’t surprised. Toby was nervous. That much was obvious. But if it wasn’t normal for her to feel all shaky when rolling up to her parents’ mansion, if Tom wasn’t used to her behaving this way, the only thing that could have made this year’s visit different was…

  Me.

  Toby’s fingertips—her nails painted an uncharacteristic shade of dark burgundy—drummed on the gearshift. I gingerly reached out and took them in my palm. “I’m really happy to be here with you. I’d be happy about it if your dad was Tim. Or Voldemort.”

  She didn’t respond, her lips still tight, and cruised to a stop at the apex of the circular driveway. Finally, she turned to me. “I’m sorry,” she said in a deep exhale.

  I reached for her other hand, and she placed it in mine. They were trembling. Giving her a soft smile, I squeezed her hands lightly. “I have literally never seen you this nervous about anything. Anything you wanna talk about before we go in?”

  “I’ve never brought a guy home before,” she said, her voice barely audible with the engine still running. The ridiculousness of letting the idling car keep spewing fumes into the California atmosphere was too much, and I reached a hand over to turn the key. Her eyes flared wide, looking from the stopped car to me. “We can leave. There are so many things to do around here. We should take a couple days, just for us. Check into a hotel, and…”

  “Toby,” I said, my voice quiet but firm. “Your parents are expecting you for Passover. Let’s just…have dinner tonight and then we can decide, okay? We can skip out first thing in the morning.”

  “Or we could fly home?” she asked, her voice small.

  Home. Whatever the reason for her nervousness, she’d just talked about ‘we’ and going ‘home’ in the same sentence and if that didn’t mean, at least a little bit, that she was developing real feelings for me like I was for her—hell, like I was falling head-over-heels in love with her—then I didn’t know what else it could mean.

  I let my thumb swipe over the back of her hand. “This’ll be fine.” She took in a shuddering breath, then we both got out of the car, stretching our legs. I turned my face to the sun. LA really was a breath of fresh air, in some ways.

  At that exact moment, the front door creaked open and a tiny, very tanned whirlwind of bronzed skin, large gold jewelry and bright, perfectly-coordinated clothing barreled toward us in a haze of perfume.

  “Toby, bubah, you didn’t even let him drive?” The tiny woman had made it around to Toby’s side of the car and swept her into vice-like hug in her sinewy arms, which looped under Toby’s. The woman’s hands gripped Toby’s shoulders from behind, holding her tight as she swayed them both back and forth while crooning in her ear. “It’s been more than a year since I’ve seen you, oh, my baby!”

  I would have busted out laughing at Toby’s face if I thought there was any chance of her not killing me later. She looked absolutely miserable, yet tolerant of what was happening to her, like a squirrel caught in a tree with a hyper dog barking on the ground, just waiting for it all to be over.

  Finally, her mom released her, and Toby let out a soft grunt as her feet were finally allowed to plant themselves completely back on the ground. Her mother couldn’t have been taller than five-five to Toby’s five-ten, but she clearly possessed a great enough strength to manhandle her daughter. The whole scene was heartwarming and hilarious, and I fought back a grin.

  “So?” she said breathlessly, the whiteness of her smile almost as blindingly bright as the patterns on her capris. “You going to introduce me?”