The Airport Lounge Arrangement

by Chloe Bennett

Heat 4 / 5 · 21+One-Shot2,722 words12m read~18m listen

Anouk Whitaker has spent three years writing exit clauses for other people’s love stories. She is very good at it. What she is not good at is being locked in a windowless Los Angeles conference room past midnight with Holden Keane — her infuriatingly charming rival, the man who sold the worst contract she ever drafted — and a single unsigned page with both their names already printed on it.

The Arrangement Desk is hours away from implosion. A rogue ex-client is counting down to a dawn livestream that will expose every ugly clause of an old reconciliation deal, and agency brass have made the calculus brutally simple: Anouk and Holden co-write a radically ethical “Pilot Public Partnership Framework” by sunrise, star in it as a fake couple, and sign on-camera — or walk out and take the blame alone. The Santa Ana winds are rattling the garage door. The fluorescents are humming. Their phones will not stop buzzing.

They were supposed to argue over language. Consent provisions versus romance optics. Iron-clad exit terms versus soulmate copy. What they were not supposed to do is say the true things. Or touch each other. Or discover that the one clause neither of them thought to draft is the only one that matters.

Fake DatingMarriage Of ConvenienceOpposites Attract