She wasn’t quite meeting his eye. “You didn’t say anything about a fire! Did you set the fire? What am I, your patsy? Listen, Pinky Kumar, I am not going down for arson—not for you, not for anyone.”
“Oh my God, will you relax?” Pinky stared at him. “I forgot how uptight you are. And who says ‘patsy’ in real life anyway?”
Samir narrowed his eyes. “Tell me about the fire.”
“All right, all right. My mom thought I’d set the fire and basically called me an arsonist. Well, I’m not. I didn’t set it, okay? Turns out D—someone else did it. But naturally, my mom immediately suspected me. Because hello, who else would do something as messed up as that, right?” She laughed, but the laugh was tinged with some real anger. Samir kept silent. “Anyway, then she said something about how I’d never had a boyfriend she approved of or something and I found myself telling her you were my boyfriend. So.” She shrugged. “Don’t worry.” Pinky rolled her eyes. “No one’s going to think you’re an arsonist, Mr. Khaki Shorts. They already know who did it.”
Samir relaxed a bit and leaned back against the gazebo’s narrow wooden pillar. “The entire reason I’m here is so you can show them you’re capable of dating someone they’d approve of? So they think you’re, what, a decent, upstanding citizen incapable of arson?”
Pinky glared at him. “I am a decent, upstanding citizen incapable of arson.”
Samir’s shirt was sticking to his back in the sweltering heat in this enclosed space and he was getting kind of annoyed. “Are you always so defensive?”
“Are you always so annoying?”
Samir crossed his arms. “You know, I can just call a cab and head back to the airport. I don’t need this.”
“Oh yeah? Head back where? To your nonexistent internship?”
They stared at each other. Out on the lake, there was a big splash and some dude whooped. “Fine,” Samir said finally. “I do need this. But so do you. So can we at least try to get along?”
Pinky smirked. A bird warbled in the trees, sweet and sad, in direct contrast to this baby shark he was stuck with in the gazebo. “What do you think this is, kindergarten? We don’t need to get along in the sandbox, Samir. Stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours.”
Samir blinked. Whoa. “Wow. Okay.”
Sighing, Pinky ran a hand along the back of her neck. “Look,” she said, shrugging, “I just want my parents to like you and to see me as something other than a delinquent.”
Interesting. And why did that seem to get under her skin so much? But whatever. He wasn’t her therapist. Samir held up his hands. “Hey, that works for me. So what are the ground rules for this thing?”
Pinky frowned and leaned against the handrail. It seemed she had only three expressions: smirk like a jerk, frown in disdain, or glare with intent to maim. “What do you mean? You have to pretend to be my boyfriend. Why do we need rules?”
“Well,” Samir said, wiping a trickle of sweat off his forehead. He glanced nervously at the house looming behind Pinky, hoping no one in her family would choose this moment to step outside and see what she was up to. “We’ll need to get our stories straight. For instance, how long have we been dating? Where did we meet? Who asked who out? What was our first date like? Is it okay for me to hold your hand?” He raised an eyebrow. “Kiss you?”
Taking a step back from him, Pinky looked outraged. “You wish!”
Samir laughed.
“What?” she asked.
“Your self-confidence never ceases to amaze me,” he said, still chuckling. “Anyway. Have you thought any of that out?”
Pinky regarded him pensively, drumming her sparkly polish-doused fingers on the railing. Of course she used sparkly polish. Nothing about Pinky was ever plain. Or easy. “No, but it’s just like making a Sims character, right? How hard can it be? Okay, so to answer your first question, we’ve been dating a month. That’s why I haven’t told anyone. I wanted to make sure it was going somewhere. We met at Ashish’s place and you asked me out. I was really skeptical at first, but I said yes because I felt sorry for you.”
“Really?”
Her fingers stilling, she made some extremely challenging eye contact. “Really. This is my plan. I get to say what goes.”
Samir sighed, shook his head, and sat on the almost painfully warm wooden seat running around the interior