Chapter Text
It all starts, as many things do, with a little white lie.
Emily loves her parents (this is not the lie). Really, she does. They’re a bit overprotective - very much so, she thinks with a sort of fond exasperation - but they mean well; considering she’s their only daughter and currently living 3,500 miles away from them, she can tolerate their overbearing ways. The distance helps.
Which is why, when she gets hit by a car and ends up breaking a leg, she has to fight their immediate offer to ‘come over and help’.
She's propped up on her couch when the call comes, leg elevated on a mountain of cushions that took her a ridiculous amount of time to arrange on her own, the painkillers not quite enough to dull the throb beneath the plaster. Her apartment feels blessedly quiet after the days at the hospital, with its constant noises and alarms; she's about to doze off when her laptop chimes with an incoming call.
She almost doesn't answer; but avoiding her parents would only delay the inevitable and give her mother the best excuse to immediately jump on a flight for New York.
“It would be just for a few weeks,” insists her mother on Skype later, after fussing over her for a good half hour, her worried face slightly pixelated on the screen. “You’ll need some help, honey. With groceries, cooking, cleaning-“
“Mum, I’ll be fine,” she says back, tiredly. Her leg’s been killing her, she has a pounding headache and yet the idea of having her parents around for ‘a few weeks’ - which, knowing them, would mean at least two months - is more unbearable than the possibility of having to drag herself to Runway every day with her foot in a cast. “Really. I’m not alone, I have help.”
Which is definitely not true, bar the help offered from her cleaning lady, but there’s no need for her parents to know that.
“Who’s helping you, Emmie?” intervenes her father.
And, well. Emily will blame the painkillers, the headache and her tiredness for that decision, because really, there is no way that her lie will not come back to bite her in her ass.
“My girlfriend,” she says, succinct. “That’s-yes. I’m going out with a girl and she’s been around to help me. It’s all fine and dandy, you don’t need to come here.”
She holds off her parents’s questions with some vague answers - a colleague, of course she is a colleague, she’s funny and nice mum, you’d like her, but also smart, no I am not going to introduce her until I’m sure it’s serious - and leaves it at that. It takes some more effort to ensure that her mother doesn’t show up at her door within the next three days, but when Emily terminates the call, she’s ninety-percent confident that she has convinced them.
The next few weeks are hellish in an almost inexplicable way. Between her recovery from the injury, Andrea suddenly quitting, Miranda coming back from Paris in the same mood of a nightmarish angry gremlin and having to train the new junior assistant… well, a part of Emily wonders why she can’t just take the easier road and find another job. One where she might not have to wobble on a crutch while putting Miranda’s coat away.
And yet, Emily survives all of that. She’s not a quitter, after all - unlike someone else, says an unkind voice in her head - and she won’t let down Miranda. Not again.
Her parents keep asking about her supposed girlfriend, and Emily soon finds that it’s just easier to pretend she’s still there, instead of giving them some excuse about breaking up. I can always do it later, she reasons; for now, not having to hear her mother’s bemoaning her lack of love life is a rather pleasant change of scenery.
Of course, as we’ve previously established, there is a point when her lie has to come back and bite her ass. And that moment doesn’t come until it’s three weeks before Christmas, when her mother tells her something she had not expected. At all.
“We’re coming to New York for Christmas!”
Fuck.
After the call, Emily stares at her desk, the beginning of a headache already taking its roots at her forehead. This is a complete, unbridled disaster, and she has only two weeks to fix it - her parents will be landing in New York exactly one week before Christmas. Time is the essence.
Relax. Deep breaths. No time to waste, this is a crisis.
Situation: her parents are coming to New York for nine days, they’ll stay at her place, they are convinced she has a girlfriend and are oh so looking forward to meet her.
Task: she needs a bloody girlfriend. She could pretend she has broken up with her non-existent partner, which will make her mother drive her mental, but… no. She can’t deal with her mum being all worried about her, alone and lonely in New York (at least according to her, that’s definitely far from the truth).
Problem: finding an actual girlfriend will be close to impossible, not with this little time. Serena, who perhaps would be willing to lie for her if only to get a laugh out of it, will be in Brazil for the holidays. Putting an ad on Craigslist would be a) mortifying and b) something that works only in b-rated movies. And she cannot think of no one else who she’s either close enough to or who owes her a favour who could-
Wait.
There is someone who owes her - because the bloody clothes are definitely not enough to settle things - who might also possibly be crazy enough to accept.
No, no. It’s madness. She’s literally the last person I should ask this.
Except it could actually work.
Her parents surely wouldn’t expect Andrea to spend the holidays with them. She has her own family, after all - Emily distantly remembers Cincinnati being mentioned - which means she could appear for one single dinner and never be seen again. Of course, Emily will announce their breakup in a couple of months, when her mother will be far enough to bother her only through Skype and emails.
Yes, it could work. And if not, well, she’ll have to accept her failure, grow a backbone and fake a breakup that will make her Christmas holidays unbearable.
She still has her number saved in her directory; the last time she had called Andrea the other woman had not answered, so she decides to go for a text this time. She types it quickly, and hits Send before the sudden rush of courage can leave her.
To: Andrea Sachs
Hello Andrea, this is Emily Charlton. Are you free for a coffee tomorrow?
***
Andy is, in fact, very much not free.
The Mirror is kicking her ass - she has two pieces to finish, one still in an early draft phase, and the notes of one of her interviews have been sitting in a Word document for the last week, completely untouched.
The only silver lining, if it can be called as such, is that she’ll be able to catch up with her work during the holidays, since she’s not going anywhere; her parents have won a Christmas cruise to the Caribbean, and after a little push from Andy herself - who is very much aware about all the sacrifices they’re doing to help her - they had decided go and celebrate their thirty years of marriage.
Andy is a little sad about spending Christmas on her own, of course - Nate is still in Boston, and in any case they are moving to a Do Not Contact sort of relationship, while Lily and Doug will be spending the holidays with their families far from New York - but her parents deserve a vacation, and she’s not going to ruin it just because she misses them.
So, yes. She guesses she’ll use the time to catch up on work, maybe watch something on tv, write another few articles for her portfolio; maybe she could take a yoga class just for the sake of it, too.
Or at least that’s what she thinks until she gets a text from Emily asking to get a coffee together. And honestly, Andy should not even entertain the thought, because she’s busy as heck, but hey, it’s Emily we’re talking about. If her former colleague wants to have coffee together then Andy will find the time to - even if she has to work overtime for the next couple of days. So she texts a rapid agreement - Sure! Where and what time? - and wonders with no little degree of curiosity the reason why she had decided to contact her just now.
They meet on the next day at a nice café in SoHo, the kind of spot that seems strangely suited to Emily, with its exposed brick and overpriced pastries displayed behind the glass like museum pieces; when Andy arrives, her former colleague is already sitting at a table, tapping her fingers against the wood. She looks good, impatience aside; no signs of a cast and no everlasting injuries, so she must have healed well from the accident.
It’s been months since they last saw each other, months since their fight at the hospital, since Paris and Andy leaving Runway and, well. She’s just happy to see that the redhead seems well.
“You’re late,” says Emily in lieu of a greeting when Andy nears her table.
The journalist frowns, taking a look at the huge clock plastered on the wall showing the timezones of several countries. “Only by four minutes,” she points out with a small smile as she takes off her coat.
“Still late,” grumbles Emily, drawing an eye-roll from the other. “Maybe you wouldn’t have been, if you had not wasted all that time staring.”
Andy wisely decides to not mention her staring. “What about ‘Hi Andy, how are you doing?’” she responds, in a high-pitched tone and a terrible imitation of an English accent. “Oh, I’m doing well, thank you so much, having a great time at the Mirror. And what about you?”
Emily throws her a half-irritated look, though she can see a small smile tugging at her lips. “Bloody hell, Andrea. I’m fine, Miranda is being Miranda, Runway is still standing, the new junior assistant is completely unfit for the job, Nigel sometimes looks at your chair like some Victorian widow. All is well.”
“Glad to hear this,” grins Andy. A waiter comes by to take her order; once he leaves, the journalist speaks again. “You know, I was pretty surprised when you texted me. Happy, of course, but I didn’t think you’d want to keep in touch after I left.”
“I didn’t, not particularly at least,” responds Emily, with the brutal honesty Andy remember so well. The brunette just raises her eyes to the ceiling; that call from a few months before had really been just a butt dial, then. “But desperate times call for desperate measures, and I need a favour. A rather large one.”
Andy blinks. She can’t, for the life of her, think of a single thing Emily might need from her. “Okay…?”
Emily takes a deep breath, her eyes avoiding Andy’s gaze. “My parents are incorrectly convinced I have a girlfriend,” she blurts out. “They’re coming to New York in two weeks, and obviously they expect to meet her.”
Andy tilts her head. “That doesn’t sound good, but I’m failing to see where I fit into-”
“I need you to be her.”
For a moment Andy just stares, waiting for the punchline that doesn’t come, but Emily looks entirely serious. In fact, she seems faintly ill at having to ask at all. “You’re joking.”
“Andrea,” says Emily, a smile that is all teeth. “Have you ever heard me utter a single joke?”
She hasn’t, not in all the months she has worked with the redhead, but still, this is just… no. Absolutely not, that’s insane. She doesn’t even like girls, not in that way at least, except for that one single time with Steph at college, and that was just to try. Sure, it had been pleasant and fun, but still - she doesn’t like girls. Emily, however, seems to do, which leads her to another realisation.
“Wait, you’re a…”
She trails off, because finishing that phrase feels terribly rude, but Emily just gives the loudest scoff she has ever heard.
“A lesbian? Of fucking course, Andrea,” she huffs, without much of a bite in her voice. “God, for a journalist you really pay no attention to clues.”
Clues? What clu-
“Unfortunately, that means that my pool of options is rather limited,” continues Emily, entirely insensible to Andy’s turmoil. “And you do owe me one for Paris. So, congratulations, you have a temporary fake girlfriend who is entirely out of your league,” she concludes, sarcastic.
“You can’t be serious.”
Because, really, this is mental even by Emily’s standards, and Andy does remember how the other woman tried to lose weight with a diet made of a single cheese cube.
Judging from her expression, however, Emily is entirely serious. “Do I look like I’m joking?”she says then. If Andy didn’t know her better, she might have called that specific note in her voice something very close to desperation. “You have no idea how overbearing my parents can be. God knows I love them, but there is a reason why I moved to the other side of the pond, rather than to Milan or Paris.”
“That reason being…”
“Putting more distance between me and them. God, Andrea, do try to keep up,” complains Emily. “Look, it won’t be anything too difficult. Just one dinner, and then we can both go back to our lives. In a couple of months I’ll tell my parents that we’ve broken up, that you’re going to take some job far from New York and that I cannot follow you, and that will be it.”
“Oh, so it will be my fault that we’re breaking up?” asks Andy, half offended. Why does she need to be the one at fault?
Emily groans. “Yes, it will. It’s not like you’ll ever meet them again, Andrea, so I fail to see why you should care about your reputation in absentia.”
“Wow. Just wow, Emily.”
“Oh, don’t be dramatic,” Emily sniffs, entirely unbothered. “Look, I’m really not spoilt for choice here. I need someone who can hold a conversation without sounding like an imbecile, who won’t embarrass me in front of my mother and who I don’t actively despise. That last part alone eliminates most of Manhattan.”
“Flatterer.”
Emily shoots her a vexed look. “By some sheer dumb luck, you do actually possess some of the… characteristics, let’s say, that I described to my parents. You could be described as funny, after all,” she admits with a look of reluctance. “And you are kind. Usually.”
“Emily-“
“No,” interrupts the redhead. “Let’s not go there. “
There, meaning Paris. Andy assesses for a few seconds the option to push back, to actually force Emily to speak about it, then decides to drop the matter. Paris is gone, Andy doesn’t even work at Runway anymore, and there’s no point discussing it again; not when there’s a much more urgent topic waiting in front of her.
On one hand, this is insane. Utter and complete madness that will surely come back to bite them in the ass. On the other hand, it offers a very neat solution to her Christmas problem, all at the cost of a single lie.
“Look, I might be willing to help you,” she starts off, and Emily’s shoulders drop slightly in relief. “But I have a couple of conditions, too.”
“Conditions?! You-” Emily pauses, taking a deep breath; once she exhales, her face goes back to a mask of coolness. “Let’s hear them.”
Andy barely keeps a victorious smile for herself. “One. You don't get to talk to me the way you did when we worked together. I refuse to be verbally slapped in front of your parents,” Andy holds up a finger before Emily can protest. "And don't give me that look, you know exactly what I mean."
“When have I ever-”
“Ugly skirt convention? Human resources having a sense of humour?” says Andy, raising an eyebrow. She’s not angry about it, of course - Emily had somehow been nicer than Miranda, which said everything - but if Emily wants her help, she refuses to be treated like an idiot. “I could go on.”
Emily’s mouth thins, but she waves a hand in agreement with a small eye-roll, as if conceding the point. “Fine. I’ll be… nice. Or as nice as I can be.”
“Can’t wait to see that,” responds Andy, only half-sarcastic. “Second one. I get to actually be there, for all of it, not just for a dinner. Christmas included."
Emily blinks. "You… want to spend Christmas with my family?”
“Well, I-” Andy exhales, trying to look for a reason that does not sound like I’m alone for Christmas and I’d rather spend the day with someone then no one at all. But nothing comes, and suddenly she decides that if going to pretend being Emily's girlfriend, she might as well be honest about her reasons for that.
"My parents are on a cruise. Lily and Doug are with their families. Nate is in Boston and we're not exactly speaking. So it's either this, or takeout and whatever's on television, alone, on Christmas,” she gives a little shrug, aiming for casual and painfully aware of having missed the mark. "So yes, I’d prefer an actual Christmas out of this deal, not just one awkward dinner.”
"Oh," Emily says, looking slightly taken aback. "Well, that’s-fine. That's not a problem."
"It's not a big deal if you say no,” Andy says quickly, already regretting revealing all of that. "Forget I-“
"Andrea,” Emily’s voice is gentle, more than she had ever hear it to be. "It's fine. Truly."
She pauses for a moment, then purses her lips. “My mother will be thrilled, actually. She can now feed two underfed people. Prepare to be fattened up, carbs are like a Bible for my mum.”
"I'm not underfed,” protests Andy, though she cannot hold off a smile at Emily’s weary expression.
“According to my mother's standards you definitely are, so am I, and at least I will be able to share my suffering with someone else. Be careful with your words, the last time I mentioned liking some cheese she sent me a bloody half-wheel of Parmigiano,” warmth flickers across Emily's face before she smooths it away, back into business mode. “So, fine. Christmas included. Anything else?"
Andy shakes her head, throat a little tight. "We're done."
“Good. Then I do have one last condition, too.”
“The lady drives a hard bargain,” chuckles Andy, drawing a smile from Emily.
“I do. But - while we could have just tried to wing it as much as possible for one single dinner, we’re not going to make it for the entire visit unless you’re well prepared. What you need to understand, Andrea, is that my mother is Irish,” she says, a little bemoaning note in her voice. “An actual Irish from Cork, not some policeman in Boston claiming an Irish ascendance because his great-grandfather once visited Dublin.”
“And…?”
“And she will have questions,” sighs Emily. “Tons of them. And each question will be cross referenced with the previous responses, and God help us if we get anything wrong, because she will know.”
“Were you raised by the CIA?”
“That would be the MI6, and I do have to admit that at times I wondered about that.”
Andy’s smile falters. “On second thought, maybe we shouldn’t-“
“No. You want to become a journalist, don’t you? Well, welcome to your first undercover assignment,” says Emily, voice dripping with dry sarcasm. “Because - and you can trust me on this - if pretending to be my girlfriend for a week is too much for you, then you might as well look for a different career.”
Andy knows fully well that Emily is just trying to goad her into agreeing - the attempt is ridiculously obvious, and still it works. Because if there is one thing that Andy doesn’t deal well with, it is being told she is not capable of doing something. “Fine. What’s your proposal then?”
"A trial run," Emily says, and really, only she could offer such an invite and somehow sound like she’s presenting at a quarterly business review. "Dinner at my place before my parents arrive. You’ll need to know the flat - where things are, how long I've lived there, what's mine and what I'd never in a million years actually own - and we have to get our backstory straight.”
“Or not so straight.”
Emily pauses. “Lord, give me the patience,” she mutters, shooting her a venomous look. “Next Thursday at seven o'clock. Don't be late, for once in your life."
"I'm never-well almost never-“
“I thought we established already that you’re not capable of being on time,” huffs Emily, but there's no real bite in it, and Andy finds herself smiling despite everything.
“Agree to disagree, but yes, I accept your incredibly romantic invitation to dinner.”
"Good,” Emily extends a hand across the table, like they're closing some kind of deal. “Then we have an agreement. Do try not to embarrass me, Andrea."
“It’s Andy,” the brunette shakes on it, ignoring the small, treacherous flip in her stomach at the contact. It’s just her nerves. Or maybe she’s hungry, since they have yet to bring them anything they ordered. “And no promises."
"Wonderful," says Emily, dry. "This is absolutely going to be a disaster."
She has no idea how right she is.