She lies, “Yeah, Michael’s really making us come into work tomorrow.”

He’s watching something on TV and doesn’t even look at her when he groans and says, “Oh, babe, that sucks. Well, I guess Dave and I will just go down to the lake ourselves.”

“Yeah.”

She wakes up early the next morning. Earlier than she needs to because she has to pretend like she’s going to work. So she puts on her work clothes and kisses Roy and drives around for two hours before coming back to the house once Roy’s left.

She changes into jeans and a t-shirt. She does her hair differently. Takes out her barrette and spends an hour and a half putting it into loose curls. She does her make up more carefully than she normally does. She wears her good bra and stands in front of the mirror for twenty minutes, imagining what it will be like.

She wonders if strangers will think they’re together. And if she’d mind.

And just to see what it might be like, she slips off her engagement ring and places it on the dresser and then poses in front of the mirror with her left hand on her hip. She smiles for a second, but then feels so incredibly dizzy so she grabs the ring and puts it back on. She spends the rest of the time before he gets there, staring at the pictures of her and Roy on the dresser. Saying to herself that she looks so happy there in that one at his mom’s house. Or in that one where he’s kissing her cheek and she’s smiling widely.

The doorbell rings and she jumps. She checks herself in the mirror one more time before answering the door.

He’s standing in her doorway in faded jeans and worn red t-shirt.

“Hey,” is all she can say.

“Hey- Uh, you look…Wow. You look great.” His eyes move up and down her body, lingering in places that make her skin burn.

She hates how hard she blushes. “Thanks. So- So do you.”

He pokes his head in the door.

“Oh, God. I’m sorry. Come in.”

She stands aside and lets him come into the foyer. He looks around curiously. “Roy isn’t home?”

“Oh, no. He’s at the lake with his brother.” She leaves out the bit about lying and saying she had to work so she could be here with him, going to the outlet mall.

“Cool.” He claps his hands together, “So. Ready for those big savings on big names.”

She smiles. “Always.”

The car ride is quiet but comfortable. She rolls down her window and lets in the cool, fresh air as she sings almost silently along to the song on the stereo. She can see him smiling in the corner of her eye and it makes her heart do something strange.

He asks her The Question, “Does Roy know, uh, what you’re doing today?”

She thinks about lying, but when she looks at him, she’s shaking her head. “I told him I had to work.”

He just nods and turns into the parking lot.

She watches him try on new shoes for work. Scrunching her nose and shaking her head at the ugly ones. He watches her try on shoes she’d never wear with killer heels and pointy toes. He laughs at the way she stumbles around the store, trying to walk in them.

In the end, he buys a pair of brown shoes like the ones he already has and she buys a pair of pointy toed, high heeled shoes because he dares her to wear them to work on Monday.

He says he needs some new shirts for work and lets her pick them out. She picks out a bunch of shirts in various shades of light blue because she likes the way he looks in blue. He says something about trying one of them on just to make sure it fits right because sometimes they’re too short and he has to get the long kind. This is when he comes out of the dressing room looking down and fumbling with the buttons on his shirt and he’s only gotten three done because he’s having trouble so she tries really hard to not look at his stomach and the bit of his chest that she can see. He half blushes when he looks up and realizes what he’s doing.

“Oh. Uh, sorry, these damn buttons are sort of…tricky.”

She shakes her head and tries to be calm as she reaches out and does it for him. She makes a joke about men being incapable of doing things or something. She isn’t sure because she’s concentrating so hard on the way his chest feels.

When she’s done, she steps back and looks at him in the shirt. “It looks good.”

He smiles. “Thanks.”

She walks closer to him now as they go from store to store. Maybe she does it on purpose because she likes the way it feels when their arms bump into each other and it would be so easy to grab his hand. She doesn’t though. She’s content with just walking close and feeling the hairs on his arm brush against her skin.

But maybe he isn’t content with that because he keeps sort of grabbing at her fingers with his. Just a little, just loosely. And he lets them go the second he actually has them like it was an accident. He keeps doing it until he finally just holds on to her.

They don’t look at each other for a while. They just hold hands and don’t really pay attention to any of the stores.