“I’ll Pretend To Be Your Boyfriend,” She Paused And Said, “We’ll Need Practice, No One Will Buy It”
The Art of Practice
The next evening, I showed up on her porch with two cups of coffee. She opened the door barefoot, wearing an old college sweatshirt, her hair still damp. We sat on the steps, knees almost touching, the air filled with the smell of grass and lavender.,
We practiced holding hands and tried out fake pet names that made us both laugh. The awkwardness slowly melted into something easier. Each night after that, the pretending felt a little less like acting. We talked about work, about dreams we never said out loud.
We talked about things we’d lost and things we still hoped for. Somewhere between shared coffee cups and quiet porch conversations, I realized I wasn’t just helping her anymore. I was looking forward to seeing her, and that scared me more than any block party ever could.
By the second night of practice, it stopped feeling like a favor and started feeling like something I waited for all day. I brought coffee again, this time in a battered French press I dug out of one of my grandpa’s old cabinets.
Julia raised an eyebrow when she saw it, then smiled in that quiet way of hers and let me in. We sat on her porch at first, the wicker chairs creaking under our weight, the skies slowly fading from blue to gray.,
The pretending lasted maybe ten minutes. After that, we were just talking. She asked about the bike shop, so I told her about a kid who came in with a pink bike covered in glitter and a tire so flat it was basically hugging the rim.
His mom had watched nervously while I fixed it, then cried when I refused to charge her. Julia listened like it mattered, chin resting on her hand, eyes steady on me. No one had looked at me like that in a long time.
When it was her turn, she hesitated. Then she told me about Chicago, about long nights chasing stories, surviving on coffee and adrenaline, filing articles from the backseat of cabs. She talked about the thrill of it, and then the crash.
She spoke of when it all stopped feeling like living and started feeling like running. I didn’t interrupt; I just listened. The silence between us felt full, not awkward. On the third night, she invited me inside.
Her living room smelled like old books and cedar. Papers were stacked neatly on the coffee table, covered in red pen marks. She poured us wine, cheap but cold, and we sat on opposite ends of the couch.,
At first, we tried to go over the plan for the party: what time to arrive, when to leave, how convincing we needed to be. But we kept drifting. She asked about my dream shop, the one I joked about at work.
I grabbed a napkin and started sketching, talking faster than I meant to. I described a place with bike racks by the windows, mismatched chairs, and good coffee. She leaned closer, adding ideas of her own: a corner for local art, a shelf for used books.
When I told her the name I’d picked years ago, she smiled softly and said it felt like home. At some point, she fell asleep mid-sentence, her head tipping against the couch cushion. I took the wine glass from her hand and pulled a blanket over her shoulders.
I sat on the floor beside the couch until the clock crept past two. I let myself out quietly, locking the door with the spare key she’d once mentioned was under the mat. The next morning, there was a note tucked under my windshield wiper.
“Thank you for the blanket and for not being weird about it.”
I kept it in my wallet. By Friday, we weren’t rehearsing at all; we were just finding excuses to be around each other. Coffee turned into dinner. Porch talks turned into texts that made me smile in the middle of fixing a chain.
She sent me random thoughts; I sent her photos from the shop. We told each other things we didn’t tell anyone else. The night before the party, she invited me over for pasta. Her kitchen felt warm and small, filled with the smell of garlic and basil.
We ate slowly, the radio playing something soft in the background. At one point, I reached out without thinking and wiped a smudge of sauce from her cheek. She froze, then smiled, surprised but real.
Later, she showed me something she’d written after the divorce—an article she never sent. I read it quietly, my chest tightening with every honest line. When I looked up, she was watching me like she was bracing for a verdict.
“It’s good,” I said.
“It’s more than good.”
She laughed it off, but her eyes were bright. I told her she wasn’t broken, just paused, like a bike with a slipped chain. She stared at me for a long moment, then smiled in a way that made my stomach flip.,
