Chapter 19 #2
Dash’s chest was heaving with one deep breath after another as I took too long to answer him. I gazed back at him. The knots inside me hurt, and the only way I knew to stop things from hurting was to either ignore them or run away from them.
Or cut them out.
I could tell that Dash saw the urge in my face, because his soft, beautiful, articulate mouth flattened into a tight line. His eyebrows knitted together.
“Dash, I—”
That’s when my phone started to buzz. And then it did it again and again and again. I won’t insult your intelligence by lying and saying that I wasn’t happy for an excuse to put the conversation on hold.
“What is it?” he asked, sounding resigned. “Are we going viral or something?”
“Yes,” I said, caught between trying to keep any suspicious shininess from my eyes and trying not to hyperventilate as I handed him my phone. “Because Lady Cerulean just posted about you on Instagram.”
So far, most of our success had come from within the Fling app.
Sure, I’d noticed that a few of our videos had been reposted to other platforms and that part of our traffic came from the teasers we posted on TikTok and Instagram, but for the most part, our audience was comprised of Fling users. Until now.
The Duke of Harding had breached containment. And not just that, we’d landed on the main feed of the world’s biggest… look, to call Lady C a musician would be to massively understate it. She was a phenomenon. A force of nature.
And one who knew we existed.
I scrolled through the first few comments, growing more and more overwhelmed by the response.
Before I could get too far, my phone buzzed again with a text from Chase.
I opened it to find a string of exclamation points and a long list of links to different publications that, if the first couple were any indication, were breathlessly reporting on Lady Cerulean’s post. And I mean, it must have been a slow news day or the Duke of Harding thing must have been unusual enough that the story was getting picked up by all kinds of outlets.
Another text came in, this one from Tía Nena—a screenshot from the culture section in the fucking Diario Libre website.
Wordlessly, I turned my phone so that Dash could see the screen.
Though he probably couldn’t read the text, which was in Spanish, the picture that went along with it was unmistakable.
He let out a breath and ran his hands through his hair. “That’s…”
“Yeah,” I replied.
When I tapped back into Fling, so many notifications were popping up that I felt like the phone should be growing warm in my hands.
Carefully, almost gingerly, I set it down on the coffee table.
Then I shrieked and jumped into Dash’s arms, knocking him backward into the couch.
I felt my ruffled top riding up as I straddled him, my hands finding his shoulders so that I could shake him as I screeched.
Dash folded his arms behind his head, his eyes shining. “You do realize… this is going to change everything.”
“Yeah,” I said, quieting down. “Are you ready?”
“I better be.” Dash let out a breath. “I just… I’m glad I’m doing this with you, you know?”
“Yeah.” I looked down at him. “I know.”
And look. I was fully aware that we had this whole conversation hanging over our heads. That I didn’t, actually, have the grace and maturity to deal with anything real. That I was going to flail and fuck everything up.
Just for a moment, though, I let myself relish how good it felt. How good all of this felt—Dash under me, Lady Cerulean posting about us, our phones about to spontaneously combust.
I could have stayed there forever, my thighs cradling Dash’s hard ones and my palm pressed so tightly against his chest that I could feel his heartbeat against my skin. But another sudden barrage of texts had us scrambling to get on Instagram, where Lady C was hosting a livestream.
“Whoa, y’all are really into this guy, huh? Can’t blame you. Did y’all check out his OnlyFans yet?” She laughed, and her lash extensions fluttered as she scanned the comments. “Of course you did. You’re quick. I don’t know, maybe I’ll have to reach out, see if he wants to do a collab.”
I wasn’t hyperventilating—but that was mostly because I seemed to be utterly breathless.
Lady Cerulean smirked. “You like that?” she asked, and for a second I thought she was talking directly to me. Then I saw all the flame emojis in the comments.
“Shouldn’t we say something?” Dash asked. His own phone was probably somewhere in the depths of the couch cushions, because for some ungodly reason he didn’t feel the need to check our notifications every three point four minutes.
“Yeah. Hold on.” I thought for a second, then typed, I await your invitation with bated breath, my lady. “That okay?”
Dash nodded, and I hit post.
The comments went so wild that our message was quickly obscured.
Lady Cerulean blinked at the screen. “Wait, what just happened?” Her lips, slicked with her signature red lipstick, parted as she read through the comments that were scrolling by at increasingly faster speeds.
“The Duke is here? What do you guys say—should I ask him to join the live?”
Another flood of comments and emojis. And then—a notification popped up. A request.
Screeching, I tossed the phone at Dash, who caught it neatly and leapt off the couch to stand in front of the curtains.
“Take off your shirt,” I hissed.
His head snapped up. “What?”
“You’re not in costume! You’ll ruin the illusion! Take off your shirt!”
He hesitated for half a second before ripping off his T-shirt and tossing it toward the couch. And then his chest was bare, bathed in light from the window and framed against the blue backdrop of his curtains.
I didn’t pause to stare longingly. I was already scrambling to my feet and racing over to his dining table, where his laptop sat open. Quickly plugging in his bougie noise-canceling headphones, I logged into my personal Instagram account and hopped over to Lady Cerulean’s live.
The screen was split, with Lady Cerulean on the bottom, looking gorgeous in a very 1970s caftan.
She was curled up on a chaise, surrounded by tropical plants with large, glossy leaves that reflected the purple light from the lamp next to her.
The top half of the screen was fully occupied by Dash’s face.
And his neck and bare shoulders. Even though he wasn’t in costume, he had slipped fully into Duke mode, adding a little bit of a smolder to his expression.
And judging by the wicked curl to her red lips, Lady Cerulean was eating it up. Because clearly not even someone with a shelf full of Grammys could resist Dash’s rizz.
“Lady Cerulean,” Dash was saying in his crisp Duke of Harding accent, “or should I call you Lady Scandal?”
“A hottie like you can call me anything he wants,” she replied.
“Then you’d have no objection if I were to refer to you as darling?”
Lady Cerulean fanned herself. “Whew! Did anyone else’s panties just flee the state?”
“I’d be more than pleased to offer my assistance in locating them,” Dash shot back.
He didn’t look the slightest bit nervous. Couldn’t be me. I was close to peeing my pants and I was just a spectator.
My hands, pressed to the table on either side of the laptop, felt like they were vibrating.
I kept glancing from my screen to Dash’s face, and touching my sternum to try to control the fluttering there.
Like Lady C with her panties, I had lost my shit so deeply and completely, I wasn’t sure I’d ever find it again.
The smoky tinge to Lady Cerulean’s voice made something sultry out of her low laugh.
“I don’t know how’d useful that would be, seeing as you’re the one who caused them to vanish in the first place.
” Her long lashes grazed her cheekbones as she lowered her gaze, looking like she was catching up on comments.
Something she saw made her laugh again. “My fans will never forgive me if I don’t ask—are you single? ”
My heart started pounding.
Dash’s gaze remained on the screen. He let his lips soften into a smile that managed to look both bashful and like he had a sinful secret he didn’t intend to reveal.
“Now, you know that’s not fair. A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell—he just takes his breeches off in public.
” He tossed off the line with a slight shrug of his shoulder and a flirty little wink that turned up the intensity in the comments.
Nobody’s panties were a match for Dash at his most charming, and mine weren’t exempt. My palm flat against my chest, I made my gaze skip from his and Lady Cerulean’s faces to read what everyone was saying.
“And we love you for it,” Lady C was saying as she settled back into the pillows of her chaise, somehow managing to keep her phone at a flattering angle. “We stan a man who gives us a little something to work with, if y’all catch my drift.”
“I’m honored to help,” Dash replied with a hair flip that had her fanning herself again.
Lady Cerulean laughed. “I better go before I self-combust. Your Grace, it was a pleasure making your acquaintance.”
“Likewise, Lady Scandal. Dare I hope we meet again soon?”
“I think we just might.” Lady Cerulean blew a kiss toward the screen. “I’ll catch y’all soon, babies. Behave yourselves—and give the Duke here a follow.”
She ended the live, and the laptop screen went dark. Behind it, Dash was lowering my phone, looking a little dazed.
“Holy shit,” I breathed, taking off the headphones and setting them on the table next to his laptop. “I can’t believe that just happened.”
Dash rubbed a hand over his face, but he couldn’t hide the grin that was beginning to spread over his lips. “It did,” he confirmed. “That just happened. I just chatted with Lady Cerulean.”
“And you called her Lady Scandal! That was brilliant!”
“Brilliant? It was terrifying.”
“In a good way?”
He collapsed onto the couch and gazed at me from across the room. “It felt pretty good, yeah. I think. I feel like I blacked out for most of it.”
“Well, even unconscious, you were really damn good. Everyone was going wild in the comments. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a few thousand followers out of that.”
I think it hit us at the same time—Dash was no longer just internet famous. He was the real thing.
For one long moment, we just looked at each other. And it felt like we were suspended in a moment again, insects caught in amber for centuries. Inside that moment, everything might have been fine. We might have been able to brush our argument aside and keep going on our merry way.
Then the moment passed. And the exhilaration moving between us like a live current was replaced with awkwardness—if there’d been an epic film score rising over the past half hour, it would’ve ended with a sudden and discordant twang.
Whether Dash knew it or not, this thing between us had always had an expiration date.
We were only ever here for a fun time, not a long time.
All the hurt feelings just made it clear that it was time to end it.
I closed his laptop and stood up. “So, about earlier.”
The elation leeched out of Dash’s face, leaving behind a wary line between his eyebrows. He grabbed his discarded T-shirt and started pulling it back on, so that his voice was muffled when he said, “Yeah?”
“Look, I think you need something out of this—” The word relationship got stuck in my throat. “Um, this. That I can’t give you. I can’t be who you want me to be.”
“I don’t want you to be anyone but yourself.”
“And that’s someone who can’t do serious or real.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
I let the silence speak for me. Dash sucked in a breath, jerking his head into a nod.
“We’ll still work on Duke of Harding,” I said, like that was any kind of consolation. “Take advantage of all the visibility and stuff.”
“Sure.” Dash looked away from me, though there was nothing on the wall to capture and hold his attention so intensely. Then he seemed to remember something, and glanced back at me. “What about the ball? For the Georgie Hart premiere? That’s next month.”
“You should probably count me out,” I said. “I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding a date, though.”
I’d meant it as a joke, I guess. But there was no humor in Dash’s eyes—and no twinkles, either—as he looked at me. “I never did.”
“Right,” I said. “I guess I should be going. I’ll, uh, email you the next script as soon as I finish it.”
I made it all the way down to the sidewalk before I let the impact of what I’d just done shudder over me.
This was no temporary third act breakup. This was the end of Dash and me.