I Paid My Grumpy Neighbor to Be My Fake Boyfriend, and He Took the Job Way Too Seriously novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Venmo

Eli read it over my shoulder.

I felt him go still all down the front of me.

"Public," he said. "Your Venmo's public."

"I didn't know it did that."

"It does that by default."

"How was I supposed to know that?"

"Read the settings."

"Nobody reads the settings, Eli!"

He almost laughed.

Then he didn't.

He bent down and picked up my shoes from the dock and held them out to me.

"Go," he said.

"Come with me."

"She said your room. Not mine." He put the shoes in my hands. "Go. I'll be upstairs."

Mina's room was at the other end of the hall from mine.

It was twice the size, with its own bathroom and a window over the lake.

Her wedding dress hung on the closet door in a clear bag, enormous and white.

Mina was sitting at her old vanity, taking off her earrings.

She didn't turn around.

She watched me in the mirror.

"Shut the door," she said.

I shut it.

"Twenty-four hundred dollars," she said. "That's a lot of lattes. How many shifts is that?"

"Mina."

"I'm genuinely asking. I want to know what you think love costs."

She put one earring down in a little glass dish.

Then the other.

"I knew it at the front door," she said. "You've never had a boyfriend, Hana. You've never had anything that wasn't handed to you or taken away from you."

"That's not true."

"Ballet. Piano. Debate. The internship I begged for. Finance." She counted on her fingers. "Now you've bought a person."

"What do you want?"

She turned around on the stool at last.

She'd taken off her lipstick, and without it she looked tired.

For a second she almost looked like our mother.

"Here's what happens," she said. "There's a bus out of town at ten after six tomorrow morning. He's on it. Then you go downstairs and tell Umma and Appa you made him up. You were embarrassed. You panicked. They'll forgive you. They always forgive you."

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