The clock on Tori Vega's cell phone reminded her of the fourteen long minutes she'd been waiting for her meal to arrive, and the even more aggravating twenty-seven that had passed since noon, the time she'd given her still absent guest. While she pondered what could possibly cause the chefs in such an empty restaurant to take fourteen minutes to put together a stupid sandwich, Tori anxiously picked at her cuticles and tried to keep her heart rate from going any higher. Lately, every time her mind wandered to the subject of her career - or what she was going to have to do because of it - a wave of nausea attacked her stomach. Six months ago, when she'd finally received her recording contract, five years after she'd enrolled in Hollywood Arts and decided that singing was what she truly wanted to do with her life, the thought of the whole thing made her heart jump for an entirely different reason. She was definitely still excited – there was no doubt about that. It was just that now, this whole singing career thing was turning out to be a lot more complicated than Tori had ever imagined it would be. It was a wonderful opportunity – thousands and thousands of people dreamt of what she now had, and what she hopefully was going to have in the future. Gratitude wasn't at all lost on her, but the nagging feeling that she was selling herself out wouldn't go away.

The wait time on Tori's sandwich was officially seventeen minutes when she realized she'd been picking at her thumb so long that it was now bleeding. She reached for a napkin to clean it up just as the chair across from her was pulled out with a loud screech, and a very impatient Jade West took a seat in it.

"Yeah?" She made no attempt to apologize for being half an hour late, and the look she was giving her so-called friend wasn't making it any easier for Tori to do what she'd invited Jade to the restaurant for.

"Well, umm…I have a favor to ask you."

"I don't do favors, Tori. Especially for you." Jade replied bluntly, hardly even giving Tori the time to finish her sentence.

"I know that." Tori lowered her voice as her waitress finally brought her meal, "but you owe me."

"Can I get a margarita?" Jade spoke to the waitress in a rather rude tone of voice, completely ignoring Tori's plea. She'd shown up, at least, and that was a good sign. Tori knew that getting Jade to meet with her would be biggest challenge in part one of her scheme.

"Sure. Lime, strawberry, peach, or coconut?" Tori made a mental note to leave the woman a good tip, solely for putting up with Jade so nicely, as she obviously wasn't getting it for bringing out Tori's meal in a timely manner.

"Lime." Jade decided, adding at the last minute without a second thought, "And put it on her tab." Tori sighed in frustration, but gave the waitress a look of approval before the two were alone again.

"And now you owe me even more." A crease appeared between Tori's eyebrows as she told Jade how she felt without saying another word. She then calmly grabbed one half of her sandwich, watching as her guest reached over a second later to rip a large chunk off of the remaining half before she had the chance to protest. "Alright, so before you're indebted to me for more than what your life is worth, can we talk?"

"Fine." Jade muttered through her teeth after swallowing a bite of stolen sandwich. "What do you want?"

"Okay, so…this is really kind of embarrassing, actually" Those words immediately caught Jade's attention, and her attitude toward the meeting flip-flopped. "but I kind of discovered this week that everybody at the record label thinks I'm a lesbian."

"Oh my god." Jade managed to spit out those three words before she burst into laughter. "Why do they think that?" She gave her friend a mischievous smile as she absentmindedly picked up the spoon in front of her. "What have you been doing lately?"

"Nothing! I don't know, maybe they got me mixed up with someone else." Jade's face was slowly becoming a lovely shade of fire truck red, from her continuous laughter. "Stop laughing at me! This is a big problem! It turns out this is the reason why I got signed…"

"How the hell do you go six months with those people and not realize they think you're a lesbian?"

"It's not really something we talked about a lot until recently… And I didn't know that's what they meant by their little comments. I guess it didn't really help that I haven't had a boyfriend in almost a year, and even then, his name was Sam, so I guess… It's just…They're going for some sort of diversity thing at the label. It's kind of too late to correct them now anyway, but even if I tried, they could drop me! There's not really anything else 'diverse' about me. You know this has been a huge opportunity for me. I can't risk it."

"Yeah, yeah. I get that. What does this have to do with me? What made you think I'd care about your little sob story?"

"Right. Well..." The realization crossed Jade's face before Tori opened her mouth. "I need you to pretend to be my girlfriend."

"No." Jade answered gruffly under her breath, just as the waitress returned with her drink.

"Thank you." The stressed musician said with a forced grin, when it appeared that Jade wasn't going to say it for herself. The waitress simply smiled and walked away, at which point Jade started up a chorus of "no"s.

"No. No way. Nuh-uh. Not gonna happen. Never in a million years. I'm not helping you. No. No no no."

"Jade, come on! You owe me! I've paid your rent for the past three months, and I'm buying you that margarita, not to mention all the physical and emotional damage you caused me in high school that can never be undone."

"Why me?" She whined, coming closer to giving in to Tori's pleas, just as the girl had expected her to.

"Because, you're the best actress I know who knows me well enough to pull it off."

"Cat knows you. Make her do it." Jade lifted her margarita and dumped a large portion of it into her mouth, grimacing a few seconds later when she had a brain freeze.

"Like that'd last more than ten minutes without her blowing it."

"Yeah, you're right." She sighed with disappointment as she carefully set her fogged up glass on the table and tried one last desperate plea. "I'll pay you back for everything, I swear."

"Oh really? With what money?"

"I actually have a job this week. I got a part in a Nicolas Cage movie."

"Oh really? As what, an extra?" Tori smirked, knowing that Jade wasn't one to stay indebted to someone when she had a way out. She was hooked.

"No. A bartender."

"Do you have to sleep with him?"

"No." Jade retorted, wrapping her fingers around the stem of her margarita glass. "But he does yell at me and then the bar blows up and I die…but I have almost ten minutes of screen time, and it's something."

"Ten whole minutes? Wow."

"Well it's more like seven, but still. After this I'll be able to pay you back at least half." She dunked her spoon into her drink and started poking at it, as she'd drank most of the liquid part and all that was left now was a frozen mass of cheap lime-flavored alcohol.

"Or you could do this for me and not worry about the money." Tori pushed the very last bite of her sandwich into her mouth with her index finger and gently placed both hands together in her lap with a weak and knowing smile.

"No." She said it one last time, though they both knew it was pointless for Jade to continue protesting.

"Look, I know it's kind of early to be saying this, but everyone at the record company keeps saying they've got a really good feeling about this album… We posted one of the singles on Splashface last month and it's got almost sixty thousand hits already. Associating yourself with me might actually get you somewhere someday…"

"Or, in a more likely course of events, it could completely destroy my reputation and I'll spend the rest of my life selling cosmetics to ugly middle-aged women who should really be spending their money on plastic surgery instead."

"Jade. Please." Tori tried to give the actress her best puppy dog face, and it seemed to have worked. Jade's face fell, and Tori realized she'd finally gotten through to her. With a loud sigh, the actress took another drink of her margarita before speaking again.

"So would this be like…a month long thing, or do I have to pretend to like you for longer than that?"

"Oh my gosh. Thank you!" Tori cheered, overcome with relief She took a sip of her drink and realized she'd never really thought the whole thing through. "Umm, it kind of depends, I guess. Maybe a month? Two? We go out for a little while, we break up, we both go back to liking guys as if this were some sort of experimental lesbianism kind of thing that we're by that point completely over, and nobody suspects a thing."

"And that'll work out for you? One fling with a chick and you fit the "diversity" mold?" Jade raised an eyebrow in suspicion and finally finished off her drink.

"Well I haven't really thought that far ahead…but I'm hoping that by that point they'll like me too much to get rid of me…" Jade rolled her eyes at the thought of that. "And you know how this town is. Once you've got a reputation for something, people never forget."

"Alright. When do we start?" She stuffed her napkin into her empty glass and looked up with a straight face.

"Are you free tomorrow night? I have meetings until 7, but after that you could come by my place and we could plan this out a little better…"

"Okay." She nodded and started to stand up, pausing halfway out of her chair to say one more thing. "I'm not sleeping with you."

"Uh, what? I-I didn't ask you to." Tori replied, slightly taken aback.

"Just so we're clear."

"We're clear."

"I have needs but you're not going to fulfill them."

"I don't want to."

"Good. I'll see you tomorrow."