THE HOCKEY CAPTAIN’S PRETEND GIRL

SADIE Grant: 'We need to talk. Can I come by?' I stare at the text from my boyfriend, Grant, one hand still stirring the soup on the stove. A sinking feeling settles in my stomach. Things between us have been shaky for the past four months, and something about this message makes it feel worse. Me: 'sure'. Ten minutes later, Grant shows up at my door wearing his favorite long coat. I step aside to let him in, but his expression gives me no clue what he wants to talk about. He doesn't smile or greet me with any of his usual affection. He doesn't even sit. He just stands in the middle of my living room, distant and unreadable. "Hey," he says. "Hey," I say back, and something in my chest already knows. Grant glances toward the kitchen, then down at his watch, like he's already calculating how long this is going to take. "I have to meet with my agent soon, so I'm just going to get straight to the point." My fingers tighten around the hem of my shirt. He draws in a breath. "We need to break up." It was one of the hundred possibilities I'd imagined while waiting for him to arrive. Somehow, hearing him say it still hits me square in the chest. A shaky gasp slips past my lips. "You want us to break up?" "Yeah." He pushes a hand through his hair, already looking uncomfortable. "I mean, come on. We both knew it was heading this way." "Did we?" "The past few months have been…" He pauses, searching for a word that will make this sound mutual. "Distant. We barely spend time together anymore. Things haven't felt right for a while." "I've been trying, Grant." My fingers pinch harder at the fabric, twisting it between them. "I planned dinners. I bought tickets to that comedy show you wanted to see. I've asked you to go out with me almost every weekend, and you're always too busy." "Because I am busy." "I know that. I never complained about your work." "But you don't understand it." His voice rises with a sudden frustration that makes me blink. "I'm an actor, okay? I'm an actor. My life isn't going to look like everyone else's." I stare at him. He says it as if I haven't spent years helping him rehearse auditions, cancelling plans whenever a casting director called, and pretending not to notice when one line in a streaming show became the only thing he talked about for three weeks. "I need to be around people who are on the same level as me," he continues. "People who understand the kind of life I'm building." My eyes narrow. "What exactly do you mean by that?" He looks away. And in that tiny movement, I know. "There's someone else," he says. Tears burn behind my eyes, but I blink them back and grind my teeth together until my jaw aches. My lips part but nothing comes out. I can only stare at him. At the man I have loved for years, standing in the middle of my living room while he delivers the most heartbreaking words I have ever heard. All this time, I've been wondering what went wrong between us. Trying to fix it. Blaming myself. And he's been busy falling in love with someone else. What am I even supposed to say to that? It hurts. God, it hurts so much I feel as though I'm breaking apart from the inside. "Someone else," I finally manage. My voice barely sounds like mine. "Since when?" "It's only been a couple of weeks." He exhales, almost impatiently. "Look, I didn't plan for it to happen but she's like me. We clicked and went out a few times. And I don't think it's fair that I should deprive myself of happiness just to stay in a relationship we've both outgrown." "Outgrown?" The word tears out of me. "You cheated on me, Grant. That isn't us outgrowing each other. That's you being an asshole." "Yeah?" He scoffs. "An asshole wouldn't be standing here telling you the truth." "So I'm supposed to clap for you because you hooked up with some girl and had the decency to come and tell me?" "She isn't some girl," he fires back. "She's Lila Vance." The name lands like it should mean something more than the fact that he cheated on me. Grant steps closer, his expression sharpening with something that looks disturbingly like excitement. "Don't you see it? Lila and I make sense. We understand each other. We're at the same point in our careers, and we want the same things." I've never been pepper sprayed in the eye before but hearing him feels close to that. "My agent says I'm close to booking something major," he continues. "When that happens, there'll be premieres, interviews, and red carpets. I need someone beside me who fits into that world. Someone who understands how important image is." The tears behind my eyes turn hot enough to sting. "And I don't?" "You're not in the industry," he says finally, softer now, as though that makes it kinder. "You couldn't understand." I press my lips together, swallowing around the ache in my throat. "I paid for your first professional headshots, Grant. I bought the lights you use for your self-tapes. Every time you had to travel for a callback you couldn't afford, I covered the ticket." My voice wavers, but I force the rest out. "When you went three months without booking anything, I paid for groceries. I covered your half of the rent twice. I have spent two years helping you build this career, and now you're telling me I'm not good enough to stand beside you when it finally takes off?" For once, he has the decency to look uncomfortable. "I appreciate everything you've done," he says after a moment. "I do. And when I get my big break, I'll write you a check." A check. As if I've been keeping receipts. As if every sacrifice I made was a loan and not something I did because I loved him. Grant checks his watch. "s**t. I'm late." He steps toward me and raises a hand, reaching for my arm but I stumble back before he can touch me. A frown crosses his face. "Fine." He drops his hand with a shrug. "If that's how you want to be." The audacity of this man. He cheats on me, walks into my home to tell me I no longer suit the image he wants, and somehow he is offended that I'm not making this easier for him. "You should go," I whisper. "This is exactly why I didn't want to drag this out." He gives a short, humorless laugh. "You always make everything so emotional." He turns and walks out before I can find enough air to answer him. As soon as the door closes, every tear I've been holding back breaks free at once. A sob rips out of me. I clutch my chest as my legs buckle, sliding down until I hit the floor. Tears stream over my face faster than I can wipe them away, and soon I stop trying. I fold into myself and cry so hard my ribs ache. Two years. For two years, I built my life around the belief that Grant and I were building one together. I was there before the headshots and auditions, before the tiny roles he made everyone rewatch three times just to catch him in the background. I learned his lines with him until midnight. I celebrated every callback as if he had already won an Oscar and held him through every rejection he pretended didn't hurt. I thought all of it was leading somewhere. I thought we would move into a better apartment when his career took off. I imagined watching him at his first premiere from somewhere just beyond the cameras, knowing I had been beside him before anyone knew his name. I imagined marriage. A home. The kind of future you don't realize you've planned in perfect detail until someone takes it away. While I was picturing the rest of our lives, Grant had already started imagining his without me. I don't know how long I sit there. Long enough that my legs go numb. Long enough that a low groan starts above me, somewhere near the ceiling, like the building itself is clearing its throat. I barely register it. It sounds like background noise to my own personal disaster. The second groan is louder. The third one is the ceiling. I have about one second of clear thought before it happens, and the thought is 'that sound is wrong', which turns out to be a completely useless thing to think in an emergency. Then the drywall over my kitchen table caves in, and water and plaster and broken wood come down with it, an entire wave of it, straight through where I was sitting seconds ago. Instinctively, I throw myself into the hallway. I watch from the doorway as my kitchen table gets crushed flat, as grey water spreads across my floor and finds every box I never got around to unpacking, every photo album, every book. The smoke detector starts screaming. Somewhere below it, someone else starts screaming too, and it takes me an embarrassingly long moment to realize the someone is me. *** The fire department comes. The building super comes, pale, apologizing over and over. A woman from the city shows up around nine with a clipboard and tells me, gently but plainly, that the apartment isn't safe to stay in tonight. She says I can grab what's left in my closet, which is most of what survived, and go somewhere else. I don't have parents to call. Mine died three years ago, eight months apart, and grief taught me a lot of things, but it never taught me who you're supposed to call when your ceiling falls in on the same night your boyfriend leaves you for an actress. I have friends I text and laugh with, but not the kind whose couches I can wreck at ten at night with my whole life in a duffel bag. I have one person. Jonah picks up on the second ring. "You're supposed to be blocking my calls tonight. Pretty sure you said something about needing silence to hate eat ice cream in peace." "My ceiling fell in." A pause. "What?" "My ceiling. It actually fell in. There's a hole in my kitchen you could park a car in, and Grant broke up with me two hours ago for an actress, and I have nowhere to sleep, Jonah. I have nowhere to sleep." He doesn't hesitate. "Okay. Come here. You remember the address." "You have a roommate." "He's not going to care. Just come." I grab the go bag I keep in my closet for exactly this kind of night, though I never actually thought I'd need it, and I call a cab, because my hands are shaking too hard to drive. On the way, I text Priya back. Me: he dumped me. for lila vance. also my ceiling literally fell in tonight Priya: WHAT Priya: WHICH PART Priya: sadie i am coming over right now Me: i don't have an over. i'm homeless as of tonight. staying at jonah's