The Pretend Boyfriend 2 (The Pretend Boyfriend #2)(7)
Author: Artemis Hunt

But there is already a click on the other line.

Sam stares at the receiver.

How the hell is she going to pitch to Henry Moody?

6

Brian sits at his desk in his wide office. His walls are a vista of clear glass, looking out into the skyscraper-filled city of Chicago. If you were to spy on him with a telescopic lens from an adjacent building, you would think him hard at work, tapping furiously at his keyboard.

The truth is that Brian is Googling.

To be more precise, he is Googling Henry Moody.

He finds articles, press releases, images. He reads them thoroughly. Moody isn’t a bad account for his ad firm to land either, he muses.

A line in an article catches his eye. Henry Moody is a patron of the opera.

Opera?

Brian wrinkles his nose. He could never stomach opera music. He always thought it sounds like cats being tortured.

. . . And he can be found frequenting the Galois every Saturday night with his wife, the article says.

Brian picks up the phone.

“Sammie sweetheart? Yeah, I’m calling because I’m thinking about you.”

Pause.

“No . . . I’m seriously thinking about you in a non-romantic, non-commitment, spur of the moment, hanging out kind of way. Yeah, there is more than one way to skin a cat.”

Pause.

“Uh huh. Speaking of cats, what are you doing Saturday night?”

7

“It’s great to go out on a double date,” Cassie says.

She’s dressed in a little retro black dress and her style is done up in a sixties Audrey Hepburn do. She looks amazing, though Brian would rather eat thumbtacks than to ever tell her that. The downside about having Caleb date Cassie is that he’s forced to put up with her now and again – as in every fortnight. Which is far more than Brian can take of Cassie in a lifetime.

Take tonight, for example. He’s sorry he ever dropped the subject of opera to Caleb.

“Hey, I like opera,” Caleb chimed up brightly.

“Since when? I’ve known you since the eighth grade, and you’ve never, ever shown the slightest inclination towards the deviant arts.”

“Like, duh. Opera isn’t deviant, last time I checked.”

“Matter of opinion. Back in the Inquisition, it was a legalized method of torture alongside the rack and anal probes.”

“They didn’t have anal probes during the Inquisition.”

“Speak for yourself. I remember the history books differently. If you were a fornicator, they probed your prostate with matchsticks before they f**ked your ears with La Traviata.”

“Hey, I know my history. La Travalina . . . whatever wasn’t written during the Inquisition. It was written sometime in . . . uh . . . ” Caleb scrunches his forehead.

“How can you like opera when you can’t even pronounce half the Italian names? Now, why do you want to go to something that’s going to trip your tongue up and bore you out of your skull when you can do the same with a power drill?”

“Why the f**k are you going then? Oh, I get it. You’re taking Samantha out on a date.” Caleb grinned. “I think it’s totally cool you’re dating her, though I hadn’t pegged you for the dating type, Mr. ‘I don’t do romance, I only f**k.”

“I believe my exact words are ‘I don’t believe in love, I believe in f**king’. And I’m not dating Samantha. We’re just hanging out, the way you and I hang out. When you do make the time to hang out with your old, lonesome friend who happens to be single, of course.”

Caleb had the decency to look abashed. “Well, Brian, I know I haven’t been around as much as I used to lately – ”

“Hah.”

“ – but it happens when you start dating someone. You want to see them as much as you can to see where you’re going with the relationship. Not that you’d know. Or care.”

“Not that I’d want to know.”

“But it’s a temporary phase. I’m sorry I’ve neglected you – ”

“Oh baby, you haven’t neglected me.” Brian mimicked a woman’s voice. “I’ve just been waiting by the telephone and you haven’t called in days.” He slaps the back of his best friend’s head. “You twat. Of course you don’t have to feel guilty for doing what comes naturally.”

“I just assumed you’ve been hanging out with Sam. So this Saturday is a chance for us to double date.” He spied Brian’s deadpan look. “OK, to hang out. It’s a chance for us to be together again. Cassie has been saying she’d like to take in a little culture.”

Brian was going to open his mouth to protest, and then he thought: What the f**k?

So here they are in a roundabout, pseudo-double dating turn of events. Because it’s the opera and it’s the Galois, they are all dressed to the nines. They are perched on the grand sweeping staircase that leads to the Galois’s plush interior – all red velvet and glorious golden light and liveried ushers and white marble stairways.

Brian is wearing a tuxedo.

“You look very, very handsome,” Sam says warmly.

“Et tu,” he says, lifting the hem of her beaded white shawl. It’s true. She is dressed in a stunning red gown underneath that shawl. Her earlobes are clasped with diamond earrings.

He tenderly brushes away a tendril of her curly hair from her face.

“Thank you for the dress . . . and the earrings,” she says shyly.

“Don’t get too attached to the earrings. They’re on loan from Tiffany’s.” He would have bought them for her, but she would have read all kinds of meaning into his gesture, and it would be easier to just tell her he loaned them for the night.

In truth, he had bought them. For her, to be precise. Once she’s done with them, they can go back into his safe. He hasn’t figured out if he’s going to gift them for her birthday or some other special ‘friendly’ occasion.

“So this is a business meeting,” she says, looking around at all the gorgeously dressed patrons, totally clueless about what he’s going to sic onto her.

“Yeah, you’ll never know who you might meet at these events. I for one am hoping to catch Senator Adair. She can use a new ad campaign for her re-election. Her current one sucks balls.”

Cassie comes up and grabs Sam’s arm.

“You look absolutely fabulous,” she says in envy.

“Thanks to Brian.”

“Oh.” Cassie eyes him up and down as she would an insect. “Buying gifts now to assuage your guilt?”