The One Month Boyfriend Read online

  THE ONE MONTH BOYFRIEND

  A WILDWOOD SOCIETY NOVEL

  ROXIE NOIR

  Copyright © 2022 by Roxie Noir

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Editor: Edits in Blue

  Proofreading: Honey Palomino

  Cover: Kate Prior

  CONTENTS

  Content Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Enemies With Benefits

  Chapter One

  About Roxie

  CONTENT NOTE

  Please be aware that this book contains: discussion of anxiety, on-page panic attacks, on-page PTSD, on-page racial micro-aggressions, discussion of past drug use and addiction, past emotional abuse, and past death by suicide.

  For all the unlikeable heroines.

  CHAPTER ONE

  SILAS

  It’s late afternoon, the first Friday of August, and I’m making a vow.

  I, Silas Flynn, hereby vow to always ask about stairs before agreeing to lift anything heavy. I vow to say no to things once in a while. I vow to use any of a plethora of excuses—busy at work, existing plans, bad back—next time Javier needs help moving his sculpture collection.

  Right now I could be anywhere, doing anything, but I’m sweating myself to death in a downtown parking lot, trying to get a seven-foot-tall Mothman up a set of narrow concrete steps.

  “Higher,” Gideon grunts from below. “I don’t want to—”

  Clang. Mothman’s flank hits the metal banister and something falls off.

  “Fuck,” Gideon swears under his breath as I switch my grip, managing to get it about two inches higher. “Hope he didn’t need that part.”

  “He can come get it himself,” I mutter. “Okay, I think we need to tilt—yeah.”

  The two of us haul Mothman up the stairs, one precarious step at a time. It’s like moving a couch, only the couch has sharp edges you can’t see, pokes you every time you move the wrong way, and is three times as heavy as any couch has ever been. By the time I get to the top step I’m sweating even harder, Gideon’s swearing under his breath nonstop, and my back feels like I’ll regret this tomorrow.

  And the door’s shut. The wooden stopper we’d stuck in there is gone, so I balance the statue on one hand and one knee, pray, and turn the knob.

  It’s locked.

  I swear and re-balance Mothman. Something sharp digs into my thigh, and three steps below Gideon makes a noise of weary-yet-inevitable irritation, shifting his stance.

  I skip knocking and pound on the door with the side of my fist as hard as I can, the dull thud swallowed by the humid August air.

  “Hey!” I shout, already out of breath. “Javi, where the—where are you?”

  It’s fucking heroic, but I don’t scream curse words in the middle of a family-friendly event. Gideon makes up for it by muttering a few more.

  There’s no response. I wait about five seconds, then pound again, because this thing is heavy and if no one answers this door soon, it’ll be broken.

  “That fucking idiot slacker,” Gideon growls. “The fuck did he go?”

  Swearing is pretty much Gideon’s love language.

  “Probably found the snack table and forgot he was having an art show,” I say between my teeth, then take a deep breath. “HEY, SOMEONE COME OPEN THE DOOR!”

  “I swear to God, if he shows up with a bag of fucking Doritos in one hand—”

  “This is the fire door!” a voice shouts from the other side of the door. “Go around!”

  My blood pressure spikes. I swear to God I can feel my veins constricting at the voice on the other side of the door, the very last person I want to deal with while carrying this son of a bitch and sweating my balls off.

  “No!” I shout back, Mothman slipping a little against a slick palm. “We’ve got one of the sculptures for—”

  “If I open it, I’ll set off the—”

  “It’s fine!” I roar. “Just open it!”

  “What the fuck,” growls Gideon from below.

  “IT’S A FIRE DOOR,” she shouts back, enunciating each word at top volume as though I’m a mentally deficient sea cucumber. “IF I OPEN IT, THE ALARMS WILL—”

  “FUCK THE ALARMS!” I shout back, forgetting not to swear because Kat Fucking Nakamura sends me from zero to ten in half a second. “OPEN THE DAMN DOOR BEFORE WE DROP THIS THING AND—”

  The door shoves open and hits me in the shoulder.

  “Shit, sorry,” Javier’s already saying as I swear, Mothman wobbling dangerously. “Sorry, I got hung up with Linda, she wanted to make sure she’d spelled my name right on the plaque and next thing I know she’s telling me how excited everyone is to meet your girlfriend tomorrow and asking whether I think it’ll be a spring wedding.”

  I’m only half paying attention as he holds the door open and I carry Mothman past him, into the slightly cooler dark of backstage, doing my damnedest not to run into a wall or let my sweaty palms slip on the metal. I blink, willing my eyes to adjust faster as the door swings shut again behind Gideon.

  God, I love air conditioning. The pinnacle of human achievement.

  “Where’d you want this?” I hear him ask Javier as faces coalesce from the darkness.

  Then I realize I’m staring at her.

  She’s just inside the door, a glasses-wearing oval with dark eyes and dark hair in side-swept bangs. She’s glaring at me, exasperated, arms crossed, like I’m a cat who can’t decide whether he wants to be inside or outside. Her entire stance—her entire being—gives off I can’t believe I have to deal with this jackass energy.

  My attention snags on her like a loose shirt on a thorn. I can’t seem to pull it away.

  “I don’t hear the alarm,” I say.

  Kat doesn’t respond. She doesn’t do anything, except maybe glower a little harder.

  “Silas. Move your ass,” Gideon says. “This thing is fucking heavy.”

  “That way,” Javier tells us. “Next to Bigfoot. There’s no podium this time so it’s just gonna go on the floor…”

  Javier keeps talking instead of helping as I shuffle backward.

  Behind him, Kat narrows her eyes, somehow gives me a look even more disdainful than the look she was already giving me, and then stalks off into the darkness.

  I back into a wall.

  “Silas,” Gideon says, and I turn my head so I can see where I’m going.

  “I wish I could’ve made Bigfoot bigger,” Javier says, staring up at the sculpture, arms crossed in what I’ve come to recognize as his thinking stance. “He really ought to be towering over the other two, you know. King of the gods! Raining down lightning and thunder, all that.”

  “I think any bigger would have killed us both,” Gideon says, voice low and deadpan. “We nearly died getting that into the freight elevator to begin with.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Javier says.

  Gideon lets his silence speak for him. I wasn’t there when he, Javier, and our other buddy Wyatt got a seven-by-three trunk of oak up to his fourth-floor studio, but I sure heard about it later.

  And heard about it. And heard about it.

  “I think he’s majestic,” I offer.

  “Thank you.”

  It’s the first Friday of August, which means that tonight is the last Sprucevale Summer Night until next year, and the town went all-out. They closed a couple blocks of Main Street to traffic in favor of food trucks, pony rides, folk singers, a performance stage for the Sprucevale School of Ballet, and a street magician named The Incredible Dwyane Wayne who pulls empty beer cans from a camouflage baseball hat with a fish hook on the brim.

  I’m not sure who approved that last one. Maybe he’ll switch to Coke cans for a family-friendly event.

  The three of us are on the stage at the Irene Williams Historic Theater, which is currently hosting the Burnley County SPCA Fundraising Carnival, Silent Pie Auction, and Art Show. The carnival—which is just basic games like Pin The Tail on the Tortoise—is set up where the seats used to be, the pie auction is right in front of the stage, and the art show is on the stage. The walls are lined with artistic black-and-white pho
tos of animals up for adoption, and there’s a cash bar in the back.

  The SPCA adoptions are really Gideon’s thing, and the art show is Javier’s. I’m just here because I’m a helpful, supportive guy who’d get into a fistfight over that blackberry pie. I shove a hand through my hair, the roots stiff with dried sweat, and consider the art.

  “Aren’t there supposed to be twelve?” I ask Javier, not for the first time. “If it’s Appalachian Olympus?”

  “Sure, everyone’s a mythology expert.”

  “There are twelve Olympians,” Gideon says. “Everyone knows that.”

  “Look, I’m working on it,” Javier says, and shifts his stance, one hand going through his shaggy dark hair. “We’ll get there. Right now there are three. Deal with it.”

  I give Javier shit, but honestly? These are good. He has a whole spiel about backwoods-cryptids-as-Greek-mythology that he’s told me more than once, but when you’re standing in front of a seven-foot-tall oak Bigfoot wielding a lightning bolt or Mothman made from junked car parts, you don’t need all that. You just need eyes.

  The three of us just look at the sculptures in silence for a minute before another thought crashes into me.

  “Javi,” I say. “Why does Linda think I’m having a spring wedding?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Javier says, casually, tweaking something on Mothman. “That was weird. She thinks she’s meeting your girlfriend tomorrow?”

  On his other side, Gideon makes an ungainly noise that is very definitely a laugh.

  “Fuck off,” I tell him.

  “Don’t tell me to fuck off, you’re the idiot,” he says, still laughing.

  “She’s really looking forward to finally being introduced,” Javier, who’s now grinning, adds.

  “And to being invited to your wedding,” Gideon adds. “In the spring.”

  “Such a lovely time of year, spring.”

  “You’re both assholes,” I tell them. “Fuck,” I add, mostly to myself.

  “Yes, but neither of us told Linda Ballard that we had a girlfriend,” Javier points out. Gleefully.

  “Why does she think—” I start, but don’t bother finishing the sentence because it doesn’t matter. I swallow hard against the knot of anger and resentment that’s formed in my chest, take two deep breaths and stare up at Bigfoot-as-Zeus while the old urge to punch something slowly fades.

  It’s not Linda’s business whether I’m dating someone or not. It’s not anyone’s business but mine—and, I guess, whoever I’m dating or not dating but for some godforsaken reason, everyone in Sprucevale seems to think it’s their business, not least Linda Ballard, the office manager at Hayward & Marshall, Attorneys at Law.

  Because it’s odd and unnatural to be closing in on forty without a romantic partner. Because if I don’t have a wife or a girlfriend—the possibility of boyfriend or husband doesn’t seem to have crossed anyone’s mind, though it doesn’t apply here—I must be desperately sad and lonely and lacking.

  Because there’s no way I could be perfectly happy to be single. No way that, after years of failing to find that special someone, I’d prefer it.

  Still, telling Linda that I was seeing someone just so she’d stop asking was dumb, impulsive, and I’ve already lived to regret it.

  “I need a reason to break up with a girlfriend,” I say.

  “I think you two should try and make it work,” Javier offers, grinning like an asshole. “Have you considered couples’ counseling?”

  “Try bringing her flowers,” suggests Gideon. “Maybe a love sonnet.”

  “She doesn’t even exist and you two assholes assume I’m the one who fucked up?”

  “If she’s not real, can’t be her fault, can it?” says Javier.

  Gideon shrugs, his hands in his pockets. I think he’s trying not to smile, but it can be hard to tell behind the beard.

  “Tell Linda and your boss that she can’t make it because she’s busy rescuing a bus full of orphans that’s about to fall off a cliff,” he says. “Or… she has a work thing.”

  “My girlfriend has had a work thing for almost three months now,” I point out.

  “And Linda still believes you?”

  I glance over the edge of the stage at the people on the floor below, all setting up cardboard carnival games, dragging coolers around, putting pies on a table, and hanging glamour shots of various cats and dogs. I should probably be down there, helping, but instead I’m here trying to untangle this damn mess I’ve made.

  “For now,” I say. “Which is why I need to break up with this girlfriend, and then maybe be so heartbroken about it that I can’t possibly think about seeing someone new for at least a year.”

  That might get Linda off my back for a while, and by extension, half the Sprucevale gossip machine.

  “I’ll just tell her I work too much and my girlfriend left me,” I say.

  “For another man,” Javier offers.

  “A billionaire playboy with a superyacht,” adds Gideon.

  “Who’s also an underwear model and a firefighter.”

  “There was just no way you could compete,” Gideon says, and claps a hand to my shoulder. “Sorry.”

  “You think I couldn’t compete with that?”

  “You have a yacht?” asks Javier.

  “I don’t need a yacht to be a better boyfriend than some rich asshole,” I point out.

  “You kinda do.”

  “Guys,” interrupts Gideon in his most imposing Oldest Brother voice, even though he’s younger than me. “Silas, stop fighting with Javier over whether you’re better than fictional people. Javier, stop baiting Silas into fighting over fictional people, you know how he is.”

  “Sorry, Dad,” Javier says, grinning. I flip them both off, then remember I’m on a stage at a family event and shove my hand back in my pocket.

  “Fine,” I say, and fold my arms over my chest. “I guess I’m getting dumped for a Greek shipping heir or something.”

  “Aim high,” Javier agrees.

  “You think she’ll believe me?”

  “That you’ve conveniently been dumped for a billionaire by a woman who you’ve refused to give literally any information about? Why wouldn’t she?” Javier says.

  “Javi,” warns Gideon.

  “No, he’s right,” I say, and scrub my hands over my face. “Fuck. Maybe she’s busy with work again tomorrow.”

  Javier makes a noise that clearly means that won’t work but I can’t be the one to say it aloud. Gideon contemplates the art, frowning.

  Silence falls between the three of us.

  “Or,” Gideon says, slowly.

  I turn and look at him, hands in his pockets, looking stern and backwoodsy as ever with his dark hair, dark beard, and eternal frown.

  “Just get someone to be your date tomorrow and break up afterward,” he says. “Same end result, less suspicious.”

  “That’s a terrible idea,” I tell him.

  “Why?” says Javier.

  “Because,” I start.

  They both look at me expectantly as I grasp at reasons.

  “I can’t take a first date to dinner at my boss’s house?”

  “Obviously your date is in on it,” Gideon explains, as if to a child. “You get a girlfriend for a night, she gets free drinks and, I don’t know, a gift card and flowers or something. Make it worth her while.”

  I look away and swear under my breath because I can’t believe it’s come to fake dating for gift cards. Jesus, what’s wrong with me?

  Problem is, I still can’t find a reason it’s a bad idea, or at least not a worse one than anything else.