The Bachelors of Coconut Beach

“You’re invited to the wedding of the summer. We hope you can join us. Mia, it’s a pity you don’t have a date.”

After receiving that rude invite from my childhood crush Rex, I did something wildly unhinged. I suggested to my best friend, Luke (Rex’s brother), that we should go to the wedding together and pretend we’d been secretly dating for a year.

The rules were simple:

Pretend we were soulmates, written in the stars.

No crossing physical lines (I was dumb).

Break up immediately after the wedding.

As you can guess, the plan derailed as soon as Luke arrived back in town. Maybe it was being forced to share a luxury hotel room, or the game of Twister on the beach, or the strip poker we had too much fun playing, but the lines blurred almost immediately. Whatever it was, Rule #2 went out the window faster than you could say, “This is a bad idea.”

Things hit a boiling point when Luke and I got into a massive argument that felt way too real, and suddenly Rex decided he wanted me after all. Our pretend relationship got complicated fast. Somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling fake. Now we have to decide if risking the best friendship of our lives is worth a summer romance that neither one of us saw coming.