Fake yours.

Chapter 4

Noah didn’t remember walking away from the reporter.

He remembered the microphone, the lights, the familiar rotation of post-game questions...how did it feel, what was the turning point, what does this mean for the season...and then Ethan’s hand on his shoulder pulling him back to earth, and the exit where Zara had been standing thirty seconds earlier, now just a gap in the crowd.

“Where are you going?” Ethan fell into step beside him, reading the situation with the instinct of someone who’d known him since freshman year.

“Nowhere.”

“You’re walking somewhere.”

“I’m walking to the locker room.”

“The locker room is behind us.”

Noah stopped. Ethan looked at him with the expression of a man who was about to enjoy himself enormously and had the decency to feel slightly guilty about it.

“It was the girl.”

“Drop it.”

“The one who told you she’d rather reorganize her inbox.”

“I said drop it.”

“You were going after her.” Ethan said it without mockery, which was somehow worse...just a flat observation, the kind that lands because it’s accurate. “You don’t even know who that guy is.”

Noah didn’t answer. Silence, as Ethan had observed before, functioned as a confession.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “Okay. Let’s go to the locker room.”

Outside, the campus breathed the particular relief of a Friday night after a win...students moving in loose, celebratory clusters, voices carrying in the cold air, the arena still audible two blocks away. Zara walked beside Adrian and tried to reconstruct the last hour into something that made sense.

“You smiled,” Adrian said.

“I smile regularly.”

“You smiled at him specifically.”

“I smiled in a general direction. He happened to be in it.”

Adrian had the restraint not to laugh, which she appreciated, but the quality of his silence made his opinion perfectly clear. They had known each other long enough that he could communicate volumes without speaking ...something that was mostly useful and occasionally annoying.

“Adrian.”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“You’re saying everything.”

“I’m saying,” he said carefully, “that you smiled at a specific person across a crowded arena in a way that is not consistent with your stated position of complete indifference.”

Zara pulled her jacket tighter and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.

They walked for a moment in comfortable silence. The streetlights had come on, turning the courtyard amber. Someone across the path was playing music from their phone, something slow and too loud for public space.

Then her phone rang. Unknown number. She answered on habit, expecting spam, preparing the mental script for ending the call quickly.

“Hello?”

Silence. Then: “Who was that guy?”

She stopped walking.

The voice was unmistakable low, controlled, with that particular quality she’d registered against her will, the tone he used when he was serious rather than performing. Beside her, Adrian turned at her expression, read it immediately, and said nothing. The grin that crossed his face was the single most annoying thing she had witnessed all week.

“Noah.” It came out less like a question than a statement of disbelief.

“Well?”

“How did you get this number?”

“That’s not...”

“It is the most important part of this conversation, actually. You called me from an unknown number, which means you obtained my number without asking, which means..."

“Who was he?”

The directness of it silenced her for a moment,no clever framing. Just the question he wanted answered, delivered without apology.

“None of your business,” she said.

“I saw him touch you.”

“I’m going to need you to hear what you just said and think about whether it’s reasonable.”

A pause. Longer than the others. When he spoke again something had shifted in the register of his voice..still controlled, but tighter, “Fine.”

“Good.”

“See you around, Zara.”

The line went dead.

She stood on the path with the phone at her side, staring at the middle distance, reconstructing the conversation to make sure it had actually happened. Adrian waited. His patience, she knew, was a form of torture.

“What,” she said flatly, “was that.”

“That,” Adrian said, “was a man behaving badly because he doesn’t know what to do with himself.” He resumed walking. “I find it quite charming.”

“You find chaos charming.”

“I find specific chaos charming.” He glanced sideways at her. “The kind that happens to people who claim they’re not interested.”

She kicked a pebble off the path with more force than necessary. “I’m not interested.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m not.”

“Absolutely.”

“Adrian.”

“I believe you completely,” he said, in the tone of someone who did not believe her at all.

Noah spent the weekend in a low grade argument with himself.

The call had been a mistake he knew that before he’d finished dialing, knew it more clearly the moment she’d pointed it out, and knew it most acutely when he replayed the conversation at two in the morning while staring at his ceiling. He had no claim on her. He barely knew her. Three encounters and a viral video did not constitute grounds for interrogating someone about their personal life.

He understood all of this and found it completely unhelpful.

By Monday morning he was tired in the specific way that comes not from lack of sleep but from circular thinking, and he walked into the student center intending to get coffee and leave and then saw her at a corner table with her books spread around her and changed direction before he’d consciously decided to.

She spotted him halfway across the room. The expression on her face..a brief, involuntary sequence of recognition, resignation, and the particular look of someone choosing a response told him she remembered the phone call in the same level of detail he did.

She said “no” before he reached the table.

He sat down anyway.

“Good morning.”

“No.”

“I wanted to apologize.”

That landed differently than she’d expected. He watched her recalibrate... the slight shift in her posture, the way she set down her pen with slightly more care than the gesture required.

“For the phone call,” he added.

“You mean the unsolicited interrogation conducted via a number you obtained without permission.”

“That’s the one.”

She studied him the way she studied most things with a quality of attention that felt clinical rather than personal, like she was looking for the mechanism behind the surface. “You don’t seem like someone who apologizes.”

“I’m working on it.”

“That’s genuinely alarming.”

He laughed before he could help it, and something in her expression moved.

Then she asked, quietly and with genuine seriousness: “What are we doing?”

He didn’t answer immediately. It was the right question.

She gestured between them. “The arguments. The café. The phone call. You sitting here right now.” She met his eyes. “What is this?”

The honest answer was that he didn’t know. That was the part that unsettled him, not the situation, but his own inability to name it. He had a vocabulary for most things. This had slipped past it.

Before he could find words for any of that, footsteps crossed the tile behind him.

“Zara.”

He turned.

Adrian stood two tables away with two coffees, his eyes moving between them in a way that suggested he understood exactly what he’d walked into and had decided to walk into it anyway. He handed Zara her cup, fingers brushing hers in the small, natural way of people who knew each other well...and Noah felt something shift in his chest that he chose not to examine.

Adrian looked at him with calm, level eyes. Then, lightly, almost conversationally: “Because Zara and I need to discuss our date.”

The word landed in the silence like a stone dropped in still water.

Zara’s expression said she had not agreed to any date. But she hadn’t said that yet, and in the pause between Adrian’s words and her response, Noah watched something play out across her face that he couldn’t read...the first time since they’d met that her expression had become genuinely opaque to him.

He didn’t know what that meant.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to.