All Work and No Play by Julie Cohen

looking at her hard, as if he wanted to try to look straight through into her soul.
    ‘Because I don’t have any friends,’ she blurted instead. Which was bad enough, but better than the real truth.
    Jonny looked surprised.
    ‘I don’t have time,’ she explained. ‘I’ve had to work very hard to get where I am right now, and then there was Gary, and …’ She trailed off, fully aware of how lame she sounded. ‘I like lots of the people at work,’ she added.
    ‘But they’re colleagues,’ Jonny finished for her. ‘And you want to put up a good front with them.’
    ‘Not just that. It’s complicated. And I really don’t have the time.’
    She thought of the hours last night, alone and empty, with nobody to talk with. Not even via the internet.
    ‘I can’t lose you as a friend, Jonny. If we date and it goes wrong we can never go back to how we were before. And I liked how we were before. It made me happy to talk with you.’
    ‘I liked how we were before, too. But I’d also like more.’
    She shook her head. ‘I can’t risk it. We’ve known each other since we were kids. And—Jonny, all I wanted last night was to talk to someone about what was going on, how confused I felt about what had happened between you and me and how awful I felt about Gary. I wanted to talk to you about it. And I couldn’t because you were involved in it. I was so lonely.’
    Her voice sounded pathetic to her own ears. But it was the truth, and probably the only way that she could salvage her friendship with Jonny was to trust him with this weakness.
    He looked at her for a long time. Behind his glasses, behind his sharp gaze, she knew he was thinking, weighing up what she’d said, how she felt, how he felt, the whole situation. Jonny was clever; he’d always been clever, more than she was. He’d sent her a copy of one of his how-to computer books one time and she’d marvelled at how he could take something so incomprehensible and simplify it down so that anyone could understand it. That, as far as she was concerned, was a more difficult skill than understanding it in all its complexity in the first place.
    She’d only presented him with the simplest of her motivesfor not dating him. If he was clever enough to see through her to her real fears …
    ‘All right,’ he said, finally. ‘Just friends. For now.’
    Jane didn’t quite like how he said the last two words. It was as if he had some intention to make ‘now’ history as soon as possible.
    ‘Promise me,’ she said.
    Jonny sighed. ‘Jane, you can trust me.’
    ‘Okay.’ She bit her lip, because the most difficult part was coming next.
    ‘So now that you’ve agreed that we’re not dating,’ she said, ‘I need you to pretend that we are.’

CHAPTER SEVEN
    J ONNY had been about to take a drink of coffee. Instead he put it down.
    ‘What?’ he said.
    ‘Just for a little while, until all this dies down. And you’re going back up to the Lake District after you finish this job, right, anyway? So it’s not for long at all.’
    Jane was speaking too quickly; there were spots of red on both her cheeks. She was acting as if this were a normal thing to ask, but he could see that she knew that it was deeply strange.
    ‘How long isn’t particularly the issue,’ he said. ‘The issue is that you’re asking me to do it at all.’
    She didn’t answer. She toyed with her glass and avoided his eyes.
    ‘I want to date you, Jane. But instead you want me to pretend to do what I want to do for real.’
    ‘If you want to do it for real, then pretending won’t be so hard, will it?’ She glanced up at him, and then back down at her glass.
    She was most definitely not telling him everything about this. He felt the same anger and frustration he’d felt this afternoon come rushing back. ‘Do you mind if I ask you why?’
    ‘Everybody saw us this afternoon,’ she said. ‘Plus, it seems that Gary didn’t stop with telling Thom about what I’d said to him. The entire