Fake yours.

Chapter 3

By Thursday, Zara had a system.

She woke early enough to shower before Lily monopolized the bathroom, ate breakfast alone at the library, attended her lectures in the order they appeared on her timetable, and spent her afternoons at the café. It was a clean, predictable architecture for a week that had started badly and showed no signs of improving. The only variable she couldn’t account for was Noah Kane, so she had simply removed him from consideration.

It worked for approximately three days.

Thursday afternoon, she walked out of psychology with a coffee in one hand and three textbooks pressed against her chest, calculating the fastest route to her next class, and he was just there leaning against a black SUV at the edge of the courtyard with the ease of someone who had decided the campus was his personal waiting room.

She stopped.

He straightened when he saw her paused, and smiled.

“Absolutely not,” she said aloud, to no one, and turned sharply in the opposite direction.

She made it fifteen paces before he fell into step beside her, matching her stride without apparent effort, hands in his pockets.

“Most people walk toward me,” he observed.

“Most people need better things to do.”

“You’re funny.”

“I’m busy.” She kept her eyes forward, cutting across the grass toward the main building. “And whatever you want the answer is no.”

“I haven’t asked yet.”

He laughed... that same unguarded sound she’d noticed at the café, shorter than the public version. She noticed the difference without meaning to, which annoyed her.

“Preemptive no. Save us both time.”

“Lunch?” he tried.

“No.”

“Coffee?”

“I have coffee.” She held up the cup without looking at him.

“Company?”

“Actively unwanted.”

He was quiet for a moment. She thought, briefly, that he might give up. Then: “What jobs are you working?”

The question stopped her.

“Why?” She asked with an attitude.

“You said you were committed to paying your bills.” He shrugged slightly. “I was curious what that looked like.”

The answer was too straightforward to dismiss and too personal to answer honestly, so she said nothing, which was its own kind of answer. He didn’t push. That surprised her too.

Her phone buzzed. Amara: DON’T LOOK ACROSS THE COURTYARD.

She looked immediately. Three girls stood near the fountain with their phones raised obvious, unembarrassed, treating the moment like some t****k worthy content that'd make them campus famous overnight.

Beside her, Noah followed her gaze. His jaw tightened slightly, a subtle shift she wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been paying attention. He looked at the girls once, directly. They dropped their phones and found somewhere else to be.

Zara watched this happen. “Do they always do that?”

“Yes.”

“And that works?”

“Usually.” He glanced at her sideways. “Come to the game tomorrow.”

“No.”

“You didn’t even consider it.”

“I considered it in the time between you speaking and me responding. The answer was no.”

He stepped slightly closer not enough to crowd her, just enough to make the space between them a conscious thing.

“You might surprise yourself.”

“I’d genuinely rather reorganize my inbox.”

“Ouch.”

“Goodbye, Noah.” She turned toward the building’s entrance, and this time...small mercy...he let her go.

That evening the locker room was still buzzing from practice when Ethan dropped onto the bench beside Noah wearing the expression of someone who had discovered something personally entertaining.

“She said no again.”

“I’m aware.”

“To the game.”

“Also aware.”

Ethan shook his head slowly, savoring it. “Nobody turns you down for the game, man. It’s the game.”

“Apparently she’s reorganizing her inbox instead.”

The bench erupted. Two other players looked up from their phones; one of them pressed his palm flat against his chest like he needed a moment. Noah threw a towel at Ethan’s face on general principle.

“Let it go,” said Marcus from the far end of the locker room. He had the tone of someone offering practical advice rather than just chipping in a conversation . “She’s not interested.”

Noah leaned back against the locker behind him. Letting it go was the rational choice. He recognized that. Zara had made her position clear across multiple encounters, without ambiguity or mixed signals, and he had no particular argument against her right to feel that way.

But that was the thing he couldn’t explain even to himself... it wasn’t about whether she was interested. It was the quality of her disinterest. Most people kept a certain distance from him that had nothing to do with him specifically; they related to the version of him that existed in their heads. Zara barely acknowledged him beyond the irritation of having to share the same space, and somehow that blunt indifference felt real, that's the most honest someone has been with him in months.

He didn’t say any of this to Ethan.

He said: “I know.”

The arena held four thousand people on game nights, and on Friday it held all of them.

Noah played well, the familiar calculus of court and body, and for two hours everything that had been complicated became simple. Westbrook won by twelve. The crowd flooded the floor. A reporter materialized at his elbow with a microphone and a question he answered on autopilot.

He was scanning the crowd.

He told himself he wasn’t, and kept doing it anyway, until he found her near the tunnel entrance, half-hidden by the flow of celebrating students, watching the court with the expression of someone who had arrived somewhere they hadn’t quite intended to go. She was there. Against every prediction she’d offered, she had shown up.

Then she looked up, and across the noise and the distance their eyes met, and she smiled. Not the guarded version. Something small and involuntary that she pulled back almost immediately, as if she’d caught herself.

He had already seen it.

The reporter was still talking. Noah registered the sound without processing any words, because a man had materialized beside Zara ..tall, composed, moving through the crowd with the confidence of someone comfortable in spaces like this. He said something. She laughed. Then his hand settled at the small of her back, easy and familiar, and she didn’t step away.

Noah’s eyes stayed on the tunnel entrance long after both of them had disappeared through it.

Who was he.

Not a question he had any right to be asking. He knew that clearly.

Noah’s eyes stayed on the tunnel entrance long after both of them had passed through it. The crowd moved around him... students, cameras, the bright machinery of a winning night... and he stood in the middle of it feeling something he didn’t have a clean word for.

He had known her for less than a week.

That fact did nothing useful.

He turned back to the reporter and finished the interview on instinct, saying the right things in the right order, although his mind was somewhere else entirely.