My assumption to say that Thalia looks beautiful has been proven right. I picked her up from her house and when she stepped out of the wooden double door, my breath hitched in my throat. Her long black hair is pulled into a sleek ponytail and her makeup is heavier than usual but it doesn’t mean that it’s able to diminish the beauty that she already possesses naturally. I was well aware that there’s a line I’m still not able to cross but it took so much self-restraint to not tell her that she looked perfect as she climbed up into my car.

“You look,” I paused, trying to find the right word that will not sound as cliché as ‘beautiful’ sounds, “decent.”

Thalia laughed as she punched my arm — a little habit that she does whenever I try to compliment or sweet-talk her — before nodding, “You don’t look too bad yourself, Shua.”

The nickname rolls off her tongue so easily, like it’s meant to. Not a lot of people call me Shua, only a handful of my most-trusted friends have the audacity to call me that, even none of my siblings call me that. But with Thalia, the two-syllabled nickname sounds different. It sounds private, it sounds intimate. A secret that only the two of us know. Only the two of us share.

And now we’re both in the ballroom of the Renaissance Hotel Bali, a small distance between both of our arms as we stand behind one of the round tables. She’s introduced me to a couple of her colleagues and I met some of them that I’ve met when Daniel fed me to the sharks a couple of weeks ago. This night is all about Thalia, her and her only.

It’s a little challenging maneuvering through all of her work friends and trying to figure out which one of them that we’ll announce our (fake) relationship to and which one of them should still be kept in the dark about us. But as the line between what’s real and what’s fake between the two of us has become blurred, the line between friends that should be kept in the loop and those that shouldn’t have also become obscured. In the end we gave up and decided to tell all of them that we’re dating — a ticking time-bomb that’s ready to explode after Sabrina’s wedding.

“So you guys were dating when we held the meeting?” Louis Leroux — the director of Human Resources in Marriott International or more easily referred to as Thalia’s boss — asks as the champagne on our table has been served.

I take one big gulp from the liquid, mustering up the courage to do the acting, “Yes.”

“No wonder Thalia kept on looking at you,” one of her colleague adds, “I initially thought it’s because of the way you hold yourself but apparently it’s because you’re her boyfriend.”

At the word boyfriend, I blush. I know what we’re doing is dangerous, borderline psychotic with how raw and unfinished the whole plan is, but the idea of being called Thalia’s boyfriend makes my chest feel a little warm. I look at the woman standing beside me with her long-sleeved, backless black dress that fits her figure like a glove. She takes a sip from her champagne, her cheeks showing a red tint that wasn’t present seconds earlier.

“It’s hard to not admire him, Anjali, I mean look at the material.”

It never occurs to me that Thalia’s a big flirt. We have flirted a couple of times before but I always take them with a grain of salt, we do it jokingly, like two best-friends who have known each other forever love to flirt with one another to mess around. But this time, she flirts openly — in front of her colleagues, no less — and I feel the compliment comes from within her. It’s an honest one. Not done in a joking manner.

“So, when did you two meet?” Louis asks, his ‘s’ sounds a bit more like ‘z’s due to his French accent.

We’ve rehearsed this before, “At one of Marriott’s hotels, she’s there during a meeting and I met her. Was an accidental one but it felt right.”

I can feel Thalia shift her weight beside me, “Yep, I had that meeting in Mandapa, Ubud. He was there on a holiday and we sort of just,” she pauses to look over at me as I stare back at her. Our eyes meet and I feel a sudden whirlpool form inside the pit of my stomach, the kind of feeling that makes my knees weak and the hairs behind my neck stand up. A feeling that I haven’t experienced in so long — I’m unable to pinpoint the last time I felt like that. Her eyes flicker to my lips for a millisecond before it catches my gaze once again, “Clicked.”

“Yes, she’s awesome and we share a lot of things in common so I just had to ask her out,” I announce to the group once again. The sensation in my stomach hasn’t gone away completely, I still feel blindsided by the sudden influx of emotions.

There are huge smiles all around the table as we share our fake story but as we progress deeper into it, it gets realer and realer. It feels easy to lie about our relationship. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve grown comfortable with lying or because I enjoy the presence of the woman I’m lying with. She lets all the fake scenarios out, tells them inside jokes that we’ve shared and even gives them some personal information that they don’t know about yet. Even though the night is supposed to be about her — I’m there as a plus one and an accessory for her — she doesn’t mind talking about me, steering clear from all the family talk.

And I let her explain, sometimes looking over at her. It’s difficult trying to describe how she looks like without being repetitive — because I’ll probably continuously talk about how beautiful she looks — but she’s very pleasing on the eyes. Maybe the first time I met her I never truly noticed just how gorgeous she looked as I was too nervous about meeting Sabrina again after 2 years to actually take in her appearance. But this time, under the dim-lighting of the ballroom and while she’s explaining about the history of a relationship we never truly had, I can finally see her for her.

She has a strong jawline that compliments the heart-shaped face she has. The bridge of her nose fits perfectly in the middle of her whole face and even though her fox-like eyes can be intimidating at times, the smile that’s ever-present on her face is able to offset that easily. Although I notice that she doesn’t really smile that often — especially during meetings — I’ve caught her smiling more openly in the past couple of days. There’s a life inside of her that I didn’t see the first time we signed our lives away to each other in Cork & Screw. Whenever I stare at her, I’m able to see the hopelessness and anger she still has for the world.

This time her shoulders aren’t as tense as they used to be and she doesn’t purse her lips too often. Whenever we go out and eat together, she doesn’t grab the box of cigarettes in her purse anymore and she has started to drink tea more often than coffee. Usually there’s a wall that closes her up from me — a blockage that doesn’t let me peer right into her — but she’s more laid back nowadays, I feel like I’ve scaled the metaphorical fence she’s made. I feel like she’s letting me in, little by little, bit by bit.