[Rae’s POV]
* Present *
The warehouse greets me with Monday morning enthusiasm—none whatsoever. It's six AM and Miles is already here, because sleep is for people who haven't torpedoed friendships with impromptu golf course make-outs.
He's reorganizing inventory shelves with the meticulous focus reserved for bomb disposal. Each bucket placed with mathematical precision, labels facing forward like soldiers.
This is Miles in avoidance mode—when he alphabetized my spice rack after his last breakup, I found saffron under 'E' for 'Expensive Mistake.'
"So," I start, because someone has to lance this boil of awkwardness, "about yesterday…"
"These roses are mislabeled." He doesn't look up from his clipboard, which probably contains a spreadsheet about spreadsheets. "The Damask are mixed with the David Austin varieties. It's chaos."
"Miles—"
"Do you know what happens when you mix heritage roses with modern hybrids? The pH requirements alone…"
"I kissed you to prove a point to my grandmother and I'm sorry."
The words tumble out like clowns from a tiny car, all wrong angles and desperation.
Miles sets down a bucket of roses with the kind of deliberate care that makes my stomach perform gymnastics routines. When he finally looks at me, his expression is perfectly neutral.
Which on Miles is basically a war crime.
"You agreed to the rules, Rae."
His voice is steady but his shoulders are doing that thing where they try to become one with his ears.
"You sat in my apartment with my color-coded notebook and agreed with the boundaries. To protect our friendship, we decided. To keep things from getting complicated."
"Dorian was being—"
"And then the moment things got difficult, the second someone challenged your narrative, you shattered every single boundary like they were suggestions written in disappearing ink."
The accusation lands like a slap from a velvet glove—soft impact, lasting sting. "It was strategic move."
"Strategic." He laughs, but it's the wrong flavor of laugh, like ordering chocolate and getting licorice. "Right. Because I'm just a prop in the Aurelia Valmont theater experience. Need to make a point? Grab Miles! Need to prove you're taken? Deploy the emergency boyfriend! It's like I'm a break-glass-in-case-of-awkward-family-dynamics situation."
"That's not… You could have pulled away." Even as I say it, the words taste like expired milk, sour and obviously wrong. "You could have said no."
Miles stares at me with the intensity of someone trying to set things on fire with their mind. "When, in the entire history of our friendship, have I ever been able to say ‘no’ to you?"
The question hangs between us like a piñata nobody wants to hit because we all know what's inside. "That's not fair…"
"Isn't it? You needed Florisight saved, I learned forensic accounting. You needed a charity date, I bought an unaffordable tux. You needed a fake boyfriend, I memorized your grandmother's orchid collection like the world's most specific SAT."
Each example hits like a tiny papercut, individually manageable but collectively creating a pattern I've been pretending not to see. "I never asked—"
"You never had to!"
His voice cracks slightly, like a teenage boy asking someone to prom. Except we're adults and this is so much worse.
"That's the point. You just exist and I rearrange my entire molecular structure to accommodate whatever you need."
"Oh, so now you're the victim?" My defenses snap up like those inflatable emergency slides on airplanes, fast and not entirely helpful. "Poor martyred Miles, suffering in silence while evil Rae takes advantage?"
"I'm not a martyr," he says quietly, which is somehow worse than yelling. "I'm just tired of pretending I don't want things. Tired of being grateful for whatever percentage of yourself you're willing to allocate to my emotional portfolio."
"You're never honest about what you want!" The accusation shoots out before I can stop it. "You make me guess, you drop hints like breadcrumbs, then resent me for not following your secret trail to your feelings treasure chest!"
Miles goes very still, the kind of still that happens right before avalanches or emotional revelations.
"You want honesty?" His voice is dangerous now. "Fine. That kiss meant something to me. Not strategically, not theoretically, not as a performance metric. It meant something real, even if it meant nothing to you."
The words create a vacuum in my chest.
I want to say it meant something to me too. I want to explain that I kissed him because seeing him diminished made me feel like someone was performing surgery on my soul without anesthesia.
But my throat has apparently decided to cosplay as a closed highway, and what comes out instead is: "It was just an act."
The four words fall between us like a judge's gavel, final and damning.
Miles watches me for a beat, maybe two. His eyes searching my face like he's reading the final chapter of a book he'd hoped would end differently. Then he nods, once, with the resignation of someone confirming a diagnosis they already knew was terminal.
"Right," he says, the word containing entire ecosystems of disappointment. "Just an act."
He turns to leave, each step measured and deliberate, like he's walking through wet cement that's already starting to harden. "Miles—"
"I need some air," he says without turning around. "The wedding arrangements for the Morrison event need to be ready by Thursday. I'm sure you can handle it."
The door closes with a businesslike click that somehow sounds worse than slamming.
I'm left standing alone in our warehouse, surrounded by thousands of dollars of flowers all destined for other people's happy endings. Roses for first anniversaries, peonies for proposals, baby's breath for beginnings I'm apparently too broken to navigate myself.
The Damask roses Miles was so concerned about stare at me accusingly, their perfect petals a mockery of my spectacular inability to say what I mean when it matters most.
Somewhere in this warehouse is the exact spot where I asked him to be my fake boyfriend, where he agreed despite every obvious reason not to, where I agreed to rules I couldn't keep and built walls I'd eventually demolish myself.
The flowers don't care about my emotional crisis. They just keep being beautiful and temporary, which feels like a metaphor I'm too exhausted to properly unpack.
Thursday.
The Morrison wedding needs to be ready by Thursday.
That gives me three days to pretend my chest doesn't feel like someone's running a paper shredder through it. Three days to act like I didn't just destroy my one stable relationship for proving a point to people who don't care about my happiness.
I pick up Miles's clipboard, still warm from his hands, and stare at his neat handwriting documenting the rose catastrophe. Even his annoyance is organized, efficiently formatted for maximum clarity.
Just an act.
The lie tastes worse the second time, like reheated coffee that was terrible to begin with. But admitting the truth means acknowledging I broke the rules because kissing Miles felt like coming home and declaring war simultaneously.
Because his hand on my waist made me forget my own name. Because for thirty seconds on that golf course I stopped calculating and just… wanted.
And wanting, as my parents demonstrated, is how you end up screaming over breakfast while your daughter memorizes bathroom hand towels.
So I'll stand here, among flowers for other people's love stories, pretending mine isn't withering on the vine of my own cowardice.