Fic Summary: Twelve years of friendship, and Sebastian Sallow has supported her through every stupid decision she's ever made. So when she panics about her cheating ex bringing a date to their friend's birthday trip in France, he agrees to the most reckless plan yet: pretending to be her boyfriend for the weekend. It should be simple. They've been best friends forever. They know how to sell it! Except the line between performance and reality has always been thinner than either of them wanted to admit, and a weekend in Arcachon might be exactly what it takes for everything to implode.
Tags: Best friends to lovers | Fake Dating | Slow Burn | Modern AU | Idiots in Love
Chapter 10: Saturday Evening & Night
How do you tell when you actually know a person?
It's not about the easy shorthand you collect just by accidentally occupying the same square footage for years. Anyone can memorise the list of food someone is allergic to or concede the left side of the mattress without trying. For her, prediction was the ultimate factor for real understanding, and she'd have staked her life on it. For example, she could run Sebastian forward in her mind like a simulation, watching him execute a move three seconds before he actually did it. Give her a scenario, any scenario, and she could map his exact reaction, beat for beat.
Put him in a room with someone arrogant, and she could tell the precise moment he transitioned from charming to irritated. Hand him a crisis, and she knew whether he’d immediately tear into it or circle it for three days.
They’d been doing this dance since they were twenty. Like the night he’d turned up to a house party with a fake smile plastered on his face, trying to pretend his uncle hadn’t just spent twenty minutes ripping into him over the phone. She’d spotted the furious line of his mouth, grabbed his sleeve, and dragged him out to the street. He’d argued the entire way down the pavement, insisting he was completely fine, until she sat down on the damp kerb outside a late-night kebab shop and refused to move. Instead of pressing for answers, she just let the quiet stretch between them, knowing he was far too restless to leave a silence unfilled. It took less than five minutes for him to give up and start telling her things he'd never admitted out loud to anyone else.
Predicting him wasn't a skill anymore; it was an involuntary reflex. The sun rises in the east. Water is wet. Sebastian Sallow is entirely legible to her.
Which was why she felt so incredibly stupid right now...
@barnabyjr, what would i do without you and the hours we've spent brainrotting together. thank you thank you thank you 🩵
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