The thing about having a best friend of the opposite sex for eight years is that eventually, in some form or another, someone will ask you to do something insane and you will say yes, because that is the deal you made the day you became each other's person.

Jess Hartley had said yes to a lot of things in eight years.

She'd said yes to driving Noah Park to the ER at two in the morning junior year of high school when he'd convinced himself he was having a heart attack (he was not having a heart attack; he'd had too much Mountain Dew and was seventeen and anxious). She'd said yes to helping him move his furniture out of his sophomore-year dorm room at midnight when his roommate turned out to be someone who clipped his toenails during phone calls. She'd said yes to going as his date to his cousin's quinceañera when he desperately needed a buffer from his extended family's consistent and aggressive interest in whether he was seeing anyone.

So when Brooke Calloway — her sorority sister, her actual friend, the most aggressively enthusiastic person Jess had ever met who still managed to be likeable — called her on a Tuesday in March to say that the Cabo wedding was in six weeks and that the +1 situation was "kind of important to her" because all the other girls were bringing serious boyfriends and she really didn't want Jess to feel weird—

Jess said: "I'll bring someone."

And then she called Noah.

"I need you to be my boyfriend," she said, without preamble, the moment he picked up.

There was a pause. Then: "Say more words."

"Destination wedding. Cabo. Six weeks. Brooke is one of those people who cares about things like seating charts and couple photos and I will literally have to sit at the singles table which I am told has a separate, worse appetizer situation."

"The appetizer discrimination is real and I'm with you on principle," Noah said. "But I need you to be clear on what you're actually asking me, because the words 'be my boyfriend' have a kind of scope."

"I need you to pretend to be my boyfriend for four days in a Mexican resort town so that my sorority sister's wedding photos have even numbers. You get a free trip to Cabo out of it."

"Do I get my own room?"

"We share. It's a resort, rooms are expensive, and I've already spent four hundred dollars on a bridesmaid's dress that makes me look like a lavender meringue."

"A lavender meringue," he repeated. "Describe the meringue."

"It has a ruffle, Noah."

"One ruffle or several ruffles?"

"The question you should be asking is whether you are coming to Cabo with me."

Another pause. She could hear him doing something — the sound of pencils, which meant he was at his desk in the architecture building doing something with his hands while he talked, which was a thing he did when he was actually thinking rather than deflecting. She knew all his sounds. Eight years of sounds.

He said: "Will there be good fish tacos?"

"We're going to Cabo, not a gas station."

"That's a yes then." A beat. "Okay. I'm your boyfriend. Do I need a cover story or can I just be Noah?"

"Just be Noah. I've told them about you — they know we're friends, they just don't know we're only friends."

"So they already think we're borderline?"

"Noah, everyone thinks we're borderline. We've been having this argument for eight years."

"It's not an argument when both parties agree," he said, which was the kind of thing he said that she had stopped trying to parse because parsing it always led somewhere she didn't need to go.

She said: "I'll send you the packing list."

He said: "Please don't send me a packing list."

She had already opened a new note.

*

The thing about Noah Park was that he was exactly the kind of person who was easy to be with, which was either the nicest possible thing or the most complicated one depending on how you looked at it, and Jess had learned very early to look at it only from the nice angle.

They'd met in ninth grade biology when they were assigned to the same frog. She'd named the frog Gerald; he'd pointed out that frogs were notoriously difficult to gender and she'd said she stood by Gerald and he'd said, okay, fair, and that had been that. Gerald had not survived the semester in any meaningful anatomical sense. The friendship had.

Eight years. She knew his coffee order and his sleeping schedule and the particular way his jaw tightened when he was trying not to say something. She knew that he had a thing for girls who were slightly intimidating and slightly out of reach, which had been a running theme throughout high school and college, and that his current version of this was a graduate student in his architecture program named Lily Chen who apparently had a master's thesis on adaptive reuse that Noah found, in his words, "unreasonably compelling."

He knew her. All of her. The anxious list-making and the thing she did where she laughed first and processed later and the fact that she had been half in love with a guy in her marketing cohort named Chase Donovan for most of junior year, which had not resolved itself into anything because Chase communicated primarily through ambiguous late-night texts and a general air of being very good-looking and only somewhat interesting.

They knew each other like people who had chosen each other for eight years know each other: completely, comfortably, and with the specific blindness of two people who have never let themselves look too carefully at the whole picture.

Cabo was going to be fine.

Jess sent the packing list anyway. It was extremely thorough.

*

Six weeks later, at LAX gate 42, Noah appeared with a carry-on bag that Jess was reasonably certain did not contain a single item from the packing list. He was wearing a shirt she'd seen before and a pair of sunglasses she hadn't, and he had the coffee — two of them, her order in the hand he extended toward her without looking up from his phone — and Jess thought, not for the first time and with the practiced ease of someone who immediately redirects such thoughts: he really was unreasonably easy to look at.

She took the coffee. She said: "You didn't pack sunscreen, did you."

"I packed sunscreen."

"What SPF?"

He looked up. He had the specific expression of a man who had grabbed whatever was under the bathroom sink. He said: "The right one."

"That means fifteen."

"Fifteen is a number of SPF."

"You're going to burn in two hours and come to me for aloe vera and I'm going to say I told you so and apply it anyway."

He put his sunglasses on. He said: "That's what I'm counting on." He said it with the ease of someone saying something that was a joke and also was just true, and Jess processed it and filed it under that's just Noah the way she processed and filed most things about him.

She said: "Okay. Here's the deal. You're my boyfriend. We've been together for —" she thought. "Four months."

"Why four months?"

"Because if we say longer people will ask why they haven't met you, and if we say shorter people will ask why you're at a destination wedding."

"Four months is perfect," he agreed. "How did we get together?"

"We just — finally did. After being friends for years." She said it practically.

He was quiet for a moment. He said: "That's going to be easy to sell."

She looked at him. He was looking at the departures board. She said: "Right. Exactly. Because it's plausible." She adjusted her bag strap. "The key thing is the PDA — we need to be convincing in photos but not so much that it's weird."

"Define the spectrum."

"Hand-holding. The occasional arm around the shoulder. Maybe a look."

"A look," he repeated.

"The boyfriend look. You know — like you're paying attention to me specifically."

"Jess," he said, still looking at the departures board, "I always pay attention to you specifically."

This was, objectively, true, and Jess absolutely did not let it do anything to her sternum. She was a professional. She had a plan.

She said: "Great. You're a natural. Let's go."