MY FAKE BOYFRIEND CAN HEAR MY THOUGHTS
Chapter Seven: He's Been Reading My Mind This Whole Time
"How much," I asked, my voice coming out smaller than I meant it to. "How much have you actually heard. Since the beginning. I need the real number, not the version that makes you sound better."
Thomas didn't look away from me, which I would later decide was the only reason I didn't walk out of that library right then.
"Everything," he said. "Every thought you've had within about thirty feet of me since the night you signed that pen. I don't get to choose which ones. I just get all of it."
That was five minutes ago. First, though, there was the walk to the library, silent and tense in a way nothing between us had ever been before.
Julian's question had landed in that cafeteria like a dropped glass, and neither of us had said a single word to each other until Thomas caught my wrist gently in the hallway afterward and asked me, quietly, to come somewhere private. I'd known, walking beside him, exactly what conversation was waiting for us. I just hadn't known how much it would actually hurt to finally hear it out loud.
"Start from the beginning," I said, once we'd found the emptiest corner of the library, tucked behind the reference section where nobody ever seemed to go. "The real beginning. Not the parts you've been editing for me."
Thomas exhaled slowly, like he was bracing for something. "The night you signed, I heard you panic about the pen glowing. I heard every single thought you had at that party, every worry about being caught, every moment you doubted yourself. I told myself it was just background noise at first, something I could tune out if I tried hard enough."
"But you didn't tune it out."
"No," he admitted. "I started listening on purpose. Not to your secrets specifically. Just to you. You were the most honest thing that had happened to me in years, and I got greedy about it."
He's not making excuses. He's actually just telling me the truth, all of it, even the ugly parts.
"The debate," I said slowly, working through it out loud. "The hug. Every time you called me by my real name. You'd already heard it in my head dozens of times before you ever said it out loud, hadn't you."
"Yes."
"And the kiss." My voice cracked slightly on the word, and I hated that it did. "Did you already know I wanted that too? Before it happened?"
Thomas was quiet for a long moment, and when he finally answered, his voice had gone rough in a way that told me the answer cost him something. "Yes. I knew before you did, probably. I stood in that studio hearing you fight with yourself about it for twenty minutes before either of us moved."
And he let me be the one to close that distance anyway. He waited. That has to mean something. Doesn't it?
"That's the part that actually hurts," I said, and felt my eyes sting in a way I refused to let turn into actual tears in the middle of a school library. "Not that you can hear things. I understand that's not something you control. It's that you knew exactly how I felt this entire time, and you let me be the one to say it, or almost say it, or nearly humiliate myself trying not to say it, while you already had the answer the whole time. That's not fair, Thomas. That was never fair."
"You're right," he said simply, no defense in it at all. "It wasn't fair. I don't have a version of this where I make that sound okay, because it isn't."
I sat with that for a long moment, watching him accept the accusation without flinching away from it, without trying to soften it into something more comfortable for either of us.
"I need you to actually stop," I said finally. "Not the hearing part, I know you can't control that. But the using it part. If I don't say something out loud, you don't get to act like I did. No more finishing my sentences before I've decided to say them. No more knowing things about how I feel before I've told you myself."
"Okay."
"I mean it, Thomas."
"I know you do," he said, and something in his voice told me he genuinely understood the weight of what I was asking, not just agreeing to make the conversation end faster. "You have every right to ask that of me. I should have offered it before you had to."
"There's one more thing," I said, before I lost my nerve. "If you hear something I'm clearly trying not to say, something that scares me, you don't get to just sit on it either. You tell me you heard it. You don't get to keep it as some private thing you know about me that I don't know you know."
"That's fair."
"It's not about fair. It's about not doing this to me again. Slowly, without meaning to, the same way you did it the first time."
He nodded, and for once didn't try to fill the silence that followed with anything clever or reassuring, which somehow told me more about how seriously he'd taken it than any actual words could have.
We sat in silence for a while after that, the specific, careful silence of two people who had just rearranged something important between them and weren't yet sure how the new shape of it fit.
THOMAS
I have never once, in three years of careful, practiced composure, wanted so badly to fix something I knew I couldn't fix by simply trying harder.
I sat across from her in that library, watching her decide, in real time, how much of her anger she was willing to let me see, and understood, for the first time since the crossroads, exactly what my grandmother had meant when she talked about the pen's cruelty. It doesn't just take things from the person who signs it. It hands the listener a kind of intimacy nobody consented to, and calls it a courtesy.
I still don't regret the kiss, she'd said, and I'd felt something in my chest loosen slightly at hearing it out loud instead of catching it before she chose to say it. That was the whole point, I realized. Not that I couldn't hear her feelings. That she got to decide, from now on, which ones I was allowed to have handed to me on purpose.
I promised myself, sitting there, that I would spend whatever time I had left in this arrangement proving that promise meant something, even though some small, honest part of me already suspected proving it would not be simple, not with Julian circling closer every single day, and not with a grandmother who had built her entire understanding of loyalty around a pen that had never once, in six generations, been wrong about anything.
HAZEL
"I still don't regret the kiss," I said eventually, quieter now. "Just so you know. I'm angry about the rest of it. I'm not angry about that."
Something in his expression eased, just slightly, relief he didn't quite let himself show fully. "I don't regret it either."
We stayed there a while longer, not quite touching, not quite as far apart as we'd been at the start of the conversation, and when the librarian finally announced closing time over the intercom, neither of us moved right away, both of us apparently reluctant to let this particular, fragile truce end just yet.
Thursday arrived with its impossible collision fully intact, the Hartwell interview and the Larkspur donor gala scheduled for the exact same hour, and true to his word, Thomas handled his half of it without a single complaint, sending Priscilla to the gala in his place with a carefully worded excuse about a family obligation, while I sat in a small, fluorescent lit waiting room at the Hartwell offices, portfolio case gripped in both hands, rehearsing my artist statement under my breath like a prayer.
I had texted Milo that morning, more for the reassurance than any actual advice, and his response had been exactly as ridiculous and exactly as helpful as I'd needed it to be. You've got this. Also if they ask about your influences just say Millet and look mysterious, works every time. I did not, in fact, mention Millet, but the small, familiar absurdity of him got me through the parking lot without throwing up, which counted for something.
The interview itself passed in a blur of nervous energy and careful, honest answers about Priya, about cut studio hours, about why I painted people mid motion instead of posed and still, and by the time I stepped back out into the parking lot, I had no idea whether I'd done well enough, only that I'd done it as myself, without a single borrowed name attached to any of it.
I checked my phone the second I got in the car. Six missed calls from my mother. Two texts from Thomas, sent twenty minutes apart, each one shorter and more urgent than the last.
Call me when you're out.
Hazel. Please call me. Something happened at the gala.
My stomach dropped before I'd even dialed his number, some instinctive, cold certainty settling in before he'd said a single word.
"What happened," I said, the second he picked up.
"Julian," Thomas said, and I could hear, even through the phone, exactly how carefully he was controlling his own voice. "He cornered my grandmother at the gala. Told her everything. The twin swap, the pen, all of it. She's not angry, exactly. She's something worse than angry. She wants to see both of us tomorrow morning, together, and Hazel, I don't think there's a version of tomorrow where this stays contained anymore."
"How did he even prove it. Telling her isn't the same as showing her."
"He didn't need to prove it," Thomas said, and something bitter crept into his voice for the first time since I'd known him. "He just needed to plant enough doubt that she'd start asking her own questions. And once my grandmother starts asking questions, cousin, she doesn't stop until she has every answer."
This is it. This is the moment everything actually falls apart.
"What do we do," I asked, hating how small my own voice sounded.
"Tonight, nothing," he said. "Tonight you sleep, and you let the Hartwell interview be the only thing you think about, because you earned that today and I refuse to let Julian take it from you too. Tomorrow, we figure out the rest. Together."
"Promise?"
"I don't make promises I don't intend to keep," he said, quiet and certain, and for one small, stubborn moment, in the middle of the worst possible night, that was almost enough to make me believe things might still be survivable.
I drove home in a daze, replaying every possible version of what tomorrow could look like, radio off, hands too tight on the wheel, and walked through my own front door still half convinced I could somehow think my way into a plan before morning arrived, some careful, three step strategy that would make Julian's betrayal smaller than it actually was.
I did not get the chance.
Elowen was standing in our kitchen, suitcase by the door, still in her travel clothes, looking exactly like herself for the first time in three weeks, and the moment our eyes met, whatever relief I might have felt at finally not being alone in this evaporated entirely under the weight of what she said next.
"Okay," Elowen said, arms crossed, studying me with an expression somewhere between guilt and fierce, protective curiosity. "Which one of us is dating Thomas Hale?"
Of all the ways I imagined this exact moment going, my sister asking that question first, before hello, before an apology, before anything else at all, was not one of them.