Chapter 1

When Matteo asked me to be his boyfriend, I laughed.

Not because it was funny, exactly. More because I thought it had to be a joke. Matteo jokes about everything. He’s the kind of guy who flirts with waiters just to make them blush, then tips them like he’s doing penance for it. So when he leaned across the café table that morning and said, completely straight-faced, “I need you to pretend to be my boyfriend,” I nearly spat out my espresso.

He didn’t even flinch.

That was my first clue he was serious.

Now, before I sound like the kind of guy who gets swept into other people’s chaos, I should probably explain something. Matteo Romano has a gift. He can make absolutely anything sound like a good idea. Even this.

He said it like we were planning a road trip or adopting a dog. “Just for a bit,” he told me. “To get her off my back.”

“Her,” of course, being Jessica Moretti.

Jessica and Matteo dated for almost two years, and for a while they were the kind of couple that looked like an ad for Italian summers. Gorgeous, loud, inseparable. But things between them started to crack somewhere between the arguments about work and the jealousy that Matteo swears he never understood. When they finally broke up, it should have been clean. Except it wasn’t.

Because Jessica is still his roommate.

And Matteo, being Matteo, still insists on being the nice guy who won’t kick her out.

They live in a beautiful old apartment near the waterfront in Palermo. Big windows, terracotta walls, a tiny balcony that looks like it should be in a postcard. It’s the kind of place no one gives up easily. Especially not Matteo.

Reference image of Matte’s house

He loves that apartment almost as much as he loves his morning cappuccino and his Vespa. And finding a new place in Palermo right now is impossible unless you are either rich or lucky, and Matteo is neither.

So he stayed.

And she stayed.

And now, apparently, she refuses to believe it’s really over between them.

According to him, Jessica has convinced herself that Matteo just “needs time.” She’s been watching him like a hawk, waiting for him to crawl back. He says she still asks who he’s texting, still lingers in the kitchen when he brings someone over. Which, lately, he hasn’t.

That’s where I come in.

Matteo doesn’t want to date anyone right now. He says he is done with women for the moment. Which would have been fine, except his friends will not stop trying to set him up. And Jessica will not stop acting like his fiancée. So, in his head, the logical solution was to tell everyone he is already seeing someone.

A man.

Me.

I swear, I thought it was a prank.

I told him he was insane.

He just grinned at me like he was offering me a cigarette after sex. “Come on, Adrian,” he said, that lazy smirk curling the side of his mouth. “You’re the only one I trust to make it believable.”

Believable. Right.

The word still makes something in my chest tighten a little.

Because the truth is, if there is anyone who could make that kind of lie feel real, it would probably be him.

Matteo and I met five years ago, back when I moved to Sicily for work. He was the first person to show me around Palermo. I was the quiet new guy in the office, the only openly gay one, and Matteo was the loud, charming, everyone’s-favorite-person type. He had a girlfriend back then, a different one, and a laugh that could fill a bar. Somehow we ended up friends.