Rain against the windows. The house is quiet for the first time since I moved in — no PR handlers, no cameras, no Claire with her tablet and her telephoto-lens kissing schedule. Just the rain and the hum of the refrigerator and two people on opposite ends of a couch pretending to be interested in other things.
Jared is on his end with a glass of orange juice, flipping through game film on his tablet without watching it — I can tell because his eyes haven't moved in three minutes. I'm on mine with a glass of white wine from a cabinet I found behind the kitchen door — fully stocked, bottles with labels in languages I can't read, every surface covered in dust. Nobody's touched it in years. I noticed that days ago. Tonight I ask.
I set the glass down and look across the couch at him. "You have a bar worth thousands and you're drinking juice."
He doesn't look up from the tablet, his thumb still swiping through formations he's not seeing. "I don't drink."
"Ever?" He shakes his head. "Why?"
He finally looks at me. The tablet goes dark in his hands. "That's a big question for a Tuesday night."
I take a sip. "We're fake-engaged, living together, and someone's leaving death threats on your doorstep. I think we're past small talk."
He almost smiles — the corner of his mouth twitches and retreats. Then he sets the tablet on the coffee table and turns to face me.
"Let's play a game. Truth or lie — I say something about myself, you tell me if it's true or if I'm full of it. Then your turn." He holds up a finger. "No follow-up questions. No explanations. You just decide what you believe."
"Therapy-style?" I take another sip, watching him over the rim. He shrugs, and I don't have a better idea, so he starts.
"I'm allergic to nuts." He watches me, eyes bright, waiting.
I narrow my eyes, pretending to deliberate. "True. Nobody lies about allergies."
He nods. My turn. "I once ate an entire birthday cake by myself at three a.m."
He studies me with the intensity of a man reading a defensive formation. "True. You look like a stress eater."
"Rude. But correct." We're both almost smiling now and the rain is doing something to the room — softening it, pressing us closer, turning the enormous house into something that almost feels like a home.
His turn. He leans back, arms spread across the cushions like he's posing for a magazine. "I was homecoming king three years in a row."
I snort so hard wine almost comes out of my nose. "Lie. Nobody's that popular." His eyebrows lift and something competitive sparks behind the green. "Twice. Junior and senior year. Close enough."
I roll my eyes so hard it hurts my concussion. My turn. "I speak fluent French."
He tilts his head, considering. "Lie." He says it with confidence, like he's already figured out the tell.
"Lie," I confirm. "I took one semester and all I remember is how to order wine." I lift my glass as evidence.
He laughs — the real one, the one that starts in his chest and cracks his whole face open. The sound of it travels through the couch cushions and settles somewhere in my ribcage.
His turn. The lightness fades like a cloud crossing the sun. "I haven't had a drink in ten years."
Ten years. The number hangs in the air between us — the same number that orbits every secret he carries, the same decade that separates the party from this couch. I want to ask why, but the rule says I can't.
"True," I say quietly. He nods, doesn't elaborate, and the silence that follows is heavy enough to have its own gravity.
My turn. I take a longer sip. "My husband divorced me when he found out about William's disease. He cheated on me saying he doesn't want to hear anything about us."
I say it the way you say things you've carried so long they've worn smooth — flat, factual, edges sanded by repetition. Jared's face changes. Something dark and fierce moves behind his eyes, his jaw locking, his hand tightening on the couch cushion. Then, quietly: "Your turn's over."
His turn. "My mom died when I was seventeen. Since then nothing's been closer to me than the ball." He says it like a stat — flat, practiced, delivered from a distance that took years to build. But his eyes don't match. His eyes are still seventeen.
"True," I say, and something behind his eyes folds shut like a book being closed. He nods once and looks away toward the rain, and I understand that his mother is the reason the wine cabinet is dusty and the orange juice is always full.
My turn. I swirl the wine. "I once won a regional art competition for a charcoal portrait."
He studies me, something shifting behind his expression. "True."
"True. I was fifteen. The portrait was—" I stop. The portrait was of him. Drawn from the bleachers during a Friday practice, his profile in charcoal on white paper, every shadow placed by a girl who'd memorized his face the way other girls memorized song lyrics. I take a sip instead of finishing and he notices the cut-off, his eyes narrowing, but the rule keeps him quiet.
His turn. "I've never let anyone close in ten years. Not once." The honesty is so naked the air in the room changes temperature, the rain against the windows suddenly louder.
"True," I say, and I mean it in a way that aches somewhere behind my sternum where the truth of him has been quietly accumulating all evening.
My turn. I hesitate. The next truth is bigger than the others, older, heavier, a stone I've been carrying so long my spine has curved around it. I open my mouth and close it. Jared watches me, and when I don't speak he says quietly, "Remember? No secrets."
I exhale. "My mother killed herself six months after my father died. Pills. I found her on the kitchen floor."
The words leave my body and the room absorbs them like water into dry earth. I've never said this out loud to anyone except Olivia. Jared doesn't speak for a long time. The rain fills the silence.
Then: "True." Just the word. No commentary. No sympathy face. Just the weight of believing me, and somehow that's enough.
The game softens after that. Smaller truths, sillier lies. "I can juggle." Lie. "I've seen every episode of a reality dating show." True — he looks genuinely ashamed and I nearly choke on my wine.
"My son is convinced he's going to play in the NFL and has already planned his draft party. " True. He tells me the first time he threw a perfect spiral his mom cried so hard the other parents stared, and the image — a seventeen-year-old boy looking for his mother's face in the crowd and finding it streaming — does something to my chest I'm not prepared for.
I'm laughing and on my third glass and at some point my feet are tucked under his thigh and neither of us moved them there consciously. The space between us has collapsed into something warm and terrifying, the couch cushion that used to separate us now occupied by my ankles and his hand resting on my shin like it belongs there. I say something — I won't remember what — and he laughs and I turn to respond and his face is right there.
The kiss isn't planned. It isn't staged, isn't performed, isn't for cameras or contracts or a woman with a tablet timing the angle. It's sudden and desperate and tastes like cranberry and wine and something underneath both that's just him — warm and real and present in a way that no scripted kiss has ever been. My hand is on the back of his neck, his hand is in my hair, and the cushion between us is gone and for ten seconds neither of us is pretending anything at all.