6. Lauren
CHAPTER 6
LAUREN
T he entire event was a disaster. Lauren wished she could have done something about the potential that it would fail as badly as it did beforehand, but how could she possibly have predicted it? How was it this hard to pretend to be dating someone? Had Wesley never dated anyone in his life? Because that was what it felt like at the screening. It was so bad Lauren had insisted they leave early. Now they were back at her place, and she couldn’t stop pacing.
“How?” she nearly shouted. “How are you this bad of an actor? I thought everyone had at least a little ability, but you seem to have stage fright without even being on stage!”
He shrugged. “Which is why I’m not out there trying to be an actor. Don’t be surprised when you have a landscaper cook you dinner and it doesn’t taste like it was made by some famous chef or something.”
She spun on him with a hard glare. “Weren’t you ever in any kind of school play or anything?”
“I flunked out of drama.”
“I…” She fumbled her words for a moment, too shocked to respond right away. “Okay, that’s impressive.”
“I mean, most people would think it was a good thing that I’m terrible at lying. I’ve never been in a situation where lying was not only desired but required.”
“Acting and lying are not the same thing,” Lauren said. “In fact, a method lots of people use is to reach back and find something real that made them feel the same way. Then they can use that feeling to empathize with the character they’re trying to play. Haven’t you ever been smitten over someone in the past?”
He seemed to consider her question carefully. “Smitten? Yes. In a relationship with the person I was smitten with? No.”
“Can you imagine what it would be like to be in a relationship with that person?” Lauren asked.
Again, he paused to think. At least he was taking the conversation seriously. Maybe he wasn’t a lost cause after all. Finally, he answered, “Not really. I don’t really do relationships. No time for it, you know?”
Typical. “Mm-hmm,” Lauren said, folding her arms over her chest. “Okay, I think I know your type. Too cool for love.”
He shook his head and sat down on the couch. “More like not cool enough. I’ve watched other relationships fall apart, and there’s no way I could function in my career during the kind of train wreck I saw my parents deal with. It’s better to have a stable life.”
“Huh…” She sat down next to him but as far away as she could get on the same couch. “I didn’t figure you for a risk-averse person. Your job itself sort of defies that, doesn’t it?”
“Some risks are more necessary than others.”
“So love is unnecessary?”
He doubled over and dropped his face in his hands with a clearly irritated sigh. “Look, this… therapy session — or whatever this is supposed to be — is just a massive waste of time. If you want me to act like a boyfriend, then you need to be specific about how a boyfriend acts. Like, when am I supposed to put my arm around you? How often should I hold your hand? Am I supposed to dote on you, or just be the strong, supportive type? Is kissing involved or just hugs?” He sat up and leaned back into the couch. “This is ridiculous. I need some ground rules.”
“Fine.” She crossed her legs on her couch and held a throw pillow in her lap. “We’ll compromise. A few ground rules with a touch of improv sprinkled in from time to time. So, rule number one: no kissing. It worked in Pretty Woman . Now you think of one.”
“Okay. You need to tell me when to improv. Don’t expect me to just read the room. I am room illiterate. Got it?”
She laughed. “Got it.” For some reason, his vulnerability and befuddlement was endearing to her right now. It was possible that last glass of champagne she’d had was getting to her. He was cuter now that she could see beneath the mask he always seemed to wear. Somewhere inside him there was a real person fighting to get out. She’d just have to dig for it if she was going to get a remotely believable performance out of him. “Anything else?”
He thought a moment. “Rule number three: I get to add rules whenever I see fit.”
Lauren laughed again, and she could have sworn she saw a little color in his cheeks. Then again, maybe it was just her imagination. “Okay,” she began. “First lesson in improv. If you’ve never been in a situation similar to the one we’re trying to recreate, maybe you could try to imagine one.”
“Imagine one?”
“Yeah.” She stood up and began to pace again. “Imagine yourself in high school or something.” She paused and reconsidered her scenario. “You… did go to high school. Didn’t you?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes.”
“So, you probably were crushing on someone there. Some cheerleader or something. Just picture her in your mind.”
By the smile that suddenly appeared on his face, she could tell he was feeling more confident about gaining the upper hand. “Assuming my crush is a her , are you?”
“Oh!” And the upper hand was suddenly his. “Oops. I mean, I just thought… I didn’t mean to assume… I mean, I should have…” She could feel herself blushing, and she wished she had better control over her face. The worst part was that her reaction was less about having potentially offended him and more about her disappointment that he might never have any interest in her whatsoever. Why? She was definitely not into him. He was exactly the sort of guy she avoided, someone who was maybe good-looking but took himself way too seriously. At least, that’s what she told herself.
While she was busy mentally torturing herself, Wesley had started laughing. He laughed harder and harder the more flustered she became. Had Lauren been less flustered, she might have seen how hard he was laughing and come to the conclusion he was just messing with her.
After a few minutes of her fumbling some kind of apology, he apparently decided to put her out of her misery. “It’s fine,” he said after catching his breath. “She was a her . You guessed right.”
Lauren was far from relieved. He’d waited for her to make a fool of herself before he put her out of her misery. Rather than respond, she threw a pillow at him.
He caught it and laughed. So he did have a sense of humor after all. The joke just had to be at someone else’s expense. “Okay, princess,” he said, still smiling. “Teach me how to do improv. You’ll have to tell me what it’s like to date someone you’ve been crushing on, since I never did get to do that. I’ll try to imagine it from your description.”
She sat back down and thought about it. How was she supposed to explain something like this? It seemed like something everyone should know, but apparently, Wesley had never experienced that magical first date with someone he’d been pining over. Odd.
“Well… it feels like a flood, I guess,” she said finally. “It’s someone you’ve been starving for — someone who just looks at you and your whole world starts to spin — suddenly giving you all their attention. It’s almost painful in a way, and you have to keep yourself together when all you want to do is dance around and scream for joy. There’s all these chemicals, hormones I guess. It feels like being high on something amazing that you can’t get anywhere else.”
“Okay, I get how it feels, but can we talk about how it looks? This is about acting, right? You don’t want me to get a crush. You want me to look like I have one. So what should I look like?”
Lauren shrugged. “It looks different for every person, I guess.”
Wesley sighed impatiently. “What does it look like when it’s you, then? I’ll just do that.”
That was a question Lauren hadn’t quite expected. She had to think about it. “I guess you just try to be close to the person. You want them to be touching you all the time. You randomly look over at them and your heart just does these leaps. It’s like you could take on anything, and nothing can tear you down.”
He arched an eyebrow expectantly. “And? You keep telling me how it feels. How does it look? I’m not going to crush on you, however badly you may want me to.” She clenched her teeth at him, and he seemed to have been wanting that exact reaction out of her. “Let me know what to do to be a convincing madly-in-love-with-you date, and I’ll do those things. Otherwise, you’re just going to have to be satisfied with my bad performance. That or get your mother to assign someone else the job.”
Lauren shook her head. “Once she’s made up her mind about something, you’ll have a hell of a time trying to talk her out of it. I doubt she chose you randomly, and I doubt even more that she’d be willing to consider someone else for the job.”
She paused a second, and then decided to just woman up and do what needed to be done. “So, if I were sitting next to my crush like this, and he’d recently admitted he liked me back, I’d probably sneak closer a little at a time.” She moved closer to him. “I’d sort of touch your hand, hoping you’d want to hold mine. And depending on how busy it was around, I might lean into you a bit.” She leaned closer to him and tried not to think about how good he smelled. “That’s an invitation for you to put an arm around me.”
He did, and she couldn’t stop herself from nuzzling into him.
“Then what?” he asked, his voice wavering a little. Lauren had to wonder if he was possibly feeling the same way she was, if his heart was pounding just as much as hers.
“Well, we’d just sort of… stay like this I guess. The point is to touch each other as often as we can because, you know, we can’t keep our hands off each other. The whole rest of the world seems to fade away when we’re together, and all that matters is the other person.”
“Interesting,” he murmured.
“We’d probably kiss now if that was allowed, but it isn’t, so we’ll just have to learn to be extra touchy feely.” He was cracking — she could almost feel it. Now it was her turn to fluster him.
But then he pulled away and stood. “I think I’ve got the gist of it now. And my shift’s about over.”
“Ah, no fair,” she said without thinking. “I was going to get back at you a little.”
He straightened his suit and collected his coat from the chair he’d draped it over on his way in. “I think we should keep the improv to public excursions to maintain a professional working relationship.” He smiled quickly. “As fun as it would be to compete to see who can out awkward the other person, and as confident as I am that I would win?—”
“Not a chance,” she cut in.
Wesley grinned. “I think we should avoid any potential misunderstandings. So, the rules are, when we’re in public, we’re dating. I’ll try to be as grabby as you need me to be. This little training session was fine, but from now on, we’ll be professional in private to avoid potential miscommunication or confusion.”
“I’m not the one in danger of becoming confused,” Lauren said, punching him lightly to add some believability to her obvious lie.
He didn’t seem to buy it. “Sure.”
She walked him to her door. “Well, goodnight I guess.”
“Goodnight,” he said cooly. But as he was walking down the hall she heard him quietly add, “princess.”
* * *
Lauren’s head was still spinning an hour after Wesley had left. She was supposed to be the one messing with his head, not the other way around. She’d been determined not to let the fact that he was positively gorgeous get the better of her. But keeping her distance seemed to be more of a lost cause than she’d originally assumed.
She needed to talk to someone, but she hadn’t spoken to her father since she was a child, and she didn’t dare call her mom about this, considering her involvement. Needing to confide in someone and realizing just how few people she had to confide in was depressing in and of itself.
Well, there was someone. She just hated to call him about something like this. Jesse was an ex-boyfriend, but they’d dated and broken up when they were so young, it hadn’t even made a dent in their friendship. At some point, they had just realized they worked way better as friends. It was probably the most amicable breakup anyone’s ever had, and she’d advised him through later dates and relationships as they both grew into adults.
Lauren poured herself a glass of wine and texted him. Do you have time to talk?
He responded immediately. Sure, babe. Give me five.
The beauty of Jesse was that no matter how long it had been since they last spoke, they always seemed to pick up right where they left off.
“What’s up?” Jesse said when he finally called. “Your mom again?”
Lauren took a gulp of wine and fell back into bed. “Yes and no,” she said. “She’s assigned me a bodyguard.”
“Really?” His voice was so familiar. For Lauren, it was more like talking to a brother than a friend. “Why’d she do that?”
“Rumors.” She half sat to take another sip before falling back again. “She’s being overprotective as usual. But this guy is… I mean he’s always around. Like always. He follows me everywhere.”
“Can’t you just ignore him?”
She groaned. “He’s really hard to ignore.”
Jesse cackled when she said that, and Lauren could practically see his expression. “Cute, is he?”
“No!” That was a shameless lie, and Lauren suddenly wondered why she’d felt compelled to tell it. “Okay, yes,” she admitted. “And my next instinct is to insist I’m not attracted to him, but that would be another lie, and it would undermine the entire reason I wanted to talk.”
“Which is?”
He probably knew, but she answered him anyway. “I’m attracted to him, and the more I get to know him, the more I think I like him, but I can never ask him out or anything because he works for my mom. And we’re having to pretend to be dating because if we don’t it’s going to affect my life — having a bodyguard — which is only making matters worse.” She paused, knowing how stupid what she was about to say probably sounded. “We were rehearsing tonight, and I swear he got as worked up as I did, but then he backed off and insisted we stay professional.”
Jesse was quiet for a moment, thinking most likely. Lauren chose not to interrupt him. “That’s a sticky situation,” he said. “But it’s not the end of the world, right? I mean, is needing a bodyguard going to last for the rest of your life? Surely it’s just until these rumors settle down.”
Lauren considered his point. “Yeah, that’s true. Mom didn’t say how long this was supposed to last.”
“Right,” Jesse said. “So all you have to do is stay cool until the job is over, and then snatch him up the second you can.”
“If he’s even into me.”
“You said he seemed to be.”
“Yeah, but?—”
“Don’t sell yourself short, kid.” Jesse calling her kid when he was all of one year older was rich, but she appreciated the pep talk all the same. “And don’t worry about it until you have to. Just keep it professional while you have to. Keep the flirting to a minimum, but you know… don’t nix it all together. Because it’s fun, and you’ve gotta keep yourself in some suspense.”
“Such wisdom.” She laughed. He always knew how to make her feel better. “Thanks, Jesse. I knew I could count on you.”
“Call me anytime. You know I get bored without a little drama in my life.”
She smiled to herself. It was good to talk to someone other than her mom. She really should try to make more friends whenever she found the time. For now, though… “Thanks for being there, man. I’ll keep you updated.”