Chapter Four
Four
She tried to feel triumphant about the fact that she’d gotten him over the first hurdle.
But of course it was difficult to, when the second and third and fourth hurdles were looming.
And hoo wow, they were big boys. He was not going to like them, and she knew it.
She didn’t even like them, and she had come up with every one.
But it had to be done.
If you wanted the public to forget what they were feasting on, you needed a better meal for them to eat.
Something juicy, something they were hungry for, something believable.
Something massive, considering he’d committed the mortal sin of insulting romance on national television.
Hell, he’d called romance readers fools for believing in it.
She was honestly surprised they hadn’t surrounded his survivalist compound with pitchforks and torches.
But she had just the thing to match the size of his mistake.
Not only a smoothing over with some well-placed sentiments.
But a true distraction. A gift all his fans had always clamored for.
She just needed to present it in a way that sounded reasonable.
Instead of absolutely bat-fuck nuts.
“So all we need to do now,” she said, as they finalized travel plans and logistics over another meal at the only place he apparently ate at, “is decide who we are going to hire to be your immortal beloved.” Then to add to the cherry on the top of this faux-casual cake, she set about sawing a hunk out of something called a country-style ham steak, and stuffed it into her mouth.
It tasted like bacon wrapped in a pancake.
Delicious, but of course not delicious enough to distract her from his reaction.
She saw his fork pause midway to his mouth out of the corner of her eye. It hovered there, close enough to trembling with tension that she couldn’t call it anything else. And the silence that followed. It was dark, man. It was deadly. The kind of thing you could imagine someone killing you in.
Third act of a horror movie. Caleb Miller with a piece of cutlery.
Though when he finally broke the excruciatingly tense quiet and spoke, he didn’t sound murderous. He sounded like a faint echo of himself. “This has to be a joke. Emmett, tell me that you are joking.”
“Sure I will. After you’ve looked at these headshots of your fake girlfriend.”
She leant to one side and reached into her satchel as she spoke.
Much to his extreme alarm. “You have headshots of people? To be someone that doesn’t exist?” he managed to squeeze out, from what she could only imagine were teeth so gritted you’d need a crowbar to prize them apart again.
She couldn’t placate him however.
She was too busy thinking about that last part.
“So she definitely doesn’t, then,” she said.
And he didn’t even pause.
“Of course not. I’m not that pathetic.”
“There’s nothing pathetic about being in love with someone.”
“Yeah, and who am I in love with? You know there is no one, you can see for yourself there isn’t.
So what does that leave? Some woman who barely likes me, and me watching her like a creep from afar?
Tell me you wouldn’t think I was a loser for something like that.
Maybe not even just a loser. Also an asshole stalker. ”
She’d been shuffling the photos, half to avoid showing them to him.
Half to avoid eye contact. But now she couldn’t resist snapping a look in his direction.
Because honestly. What did he mean? It had never occurred to her that he could think of it that way.
It had never occurred to her to think of it that way.
The last thing Miller could ever be was a stalker.
That would require things like being interested in another person, and a willingness to press himself on them.
When interest in other people and pressing himself on them seemed like the most unpleasant things in the world to him.
She had once seen him move seats in a lecture hall because his ice-breaking-activity skills had seemed to bore the person next to him, and he clearly hadn’t wanted to continue.
At the time, she had thought he just hated doing it.
But his discomfort, with not just other people sharing with him, but him sharing with them, had gotten plainer over time.
Sometimes it even resonated in her—that unpleasant sense of pushing yourself on someone who wasn’t interested.
No, no, he could never. If he had loved someone from afar somehow, there was no way that person even knew.
Or thought they still meant something to him.
But it would mean something about him if it had been true.
And she had to try to make that clear without somehow praising him.
“No, I wouldn’t. It would show you’re capable of human feelings,” she said.
But of course he just gave her a withering look.
“Yeah, but I’m not capable of them, am I. So talk some sense.”
“This is sense. You bring her out at the theater we’ve booked for the talk with Juno Winford, you hold hands, you kiss a cheek, you talk about being inspired by your great love, she smiles demurely, makes a pithy comment, problem solved.”
“Stop trying to make incredibly weird, impossible things sound normal.”
“They don’t have to be normal. They just have to work. And they will,” she said, firmer about it than she thought she could be. Though of course this was her wheelhouse now. He was just in it.
And clearly didn’t like that he was.
“You’re just that good at this, huh,” he tried to sneer.
But failed, on one big level. “You said I was, yesterday.”
“Oh, so now you’re using my words against me.”
“I’d use a death ray against you if it existed and I thought I could get away with it.
Now, here are the pictures. Pick whichever one looks most like you could convince an audience is attractive to you,” she said, as businesslike as he was petulant about things.
He practically pouted, sullenly, as she laid down the three headshots of the actresses she’d enlisted.
But when she purposefully glanced away, she caught him peering at them out of the corner of her eye.
She saw the fervently concealed intrigue in him—just like that time when he had dismissed a book she had praised to a girl in their workshop group.
Then later she’d seen him lurking around where the book was, in the library.
Like he wanted to see for himself, despite telling himself otherwise.
And it felt even more like that when he sat back and waved a hand at them.
“None of them. They’re all too—” he started to say, then cut himself off.
She suspected what he was going for, however.
“Too what? If you say too old, so help me.”
“Of course not too old.”
“Why of course?”
“They look like they could be my kids, for fuck’s sake,” he said, and when he did she tried to keep thinking he had wanted to be mean. But the problem was, he just sounded too baffled. Like this fact was self-evident, and why was she confused?
She had to believe him. Even though he was being ridiculous. “Sure, if you gave birth to them at age five. They are all in their thirties, dingbat,” she said. Then got an exasperated expression for her troubles.
“You just suggested that I can give birth and I am the dingbat?”
“It was just a way of putting it. I didn’t mean it literally.”
“Yeah, well, it was wrong anyway, because they may be technically a reasonable age for me but none of them look it. My face is five miles of rough road, and I know it. I could be mistaken for fifty-eight, easy. And they’re all like you—somehow eternally mid-twenties.”
What the fuck, she thought.
And so fiercely she couldn’t stop her reaction. She sat back in her chair, speechless for a moment. Searching for the words, but unable to fathom what they might be. She even found herself studying his face for evidence of what he was saying. Despite the fact that there was none there.
He was a little grizzled, sure.
But he wasn’t a rough road.
Dye the gray out and ditch the forever disapproving expression and he’d pass for her age, easy. In fact, she’d always thought he kind of knew that. That he cultivated this ornery grandpa look on purpose. She had never thought it bothered him—but she could see it clearly did, somehow.
He shifted in his seat once he had said it.
Folded his arms. Unfolded them. Went to take a bite from his plate of boiled broccoli and equally boiled chicken.
Then seemed to find the idea of taking a bite tiresome.
He pushed his plate away and looked at her, frustrated now.
Like he was waiting for her to just get confirmation of this over with.
She couldn’t give it, however. No matter how much she hated him, she couldn’t.
It was too preposterous. She just had to couch her denial in something other than kind terms.
“I do not look mid-twenties. I look my age, thirty-five. And you look yours, forty-two. So what was it you were really objecting to? The amount of smiling going on? All of them too cheery for you?”
“It’s nothing to do with cheeriness.”
“Well, it must be something bugging you.”
“Yes, it is, they’re all extremely thin,” he said.
And this time, her brain didn’t just say what the fuck.
It seemed to short-circuit altogether. She couldn’t say anything for the longest time—and in a way he obviously took as condemnation.
He sighed, heavily. Leant forward, spread his hands, dropped his voice just a little.
“Look, it’s not that I have anything against a woman being skinny.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.
I’m sure they’re all incredibly healthy and to many men very attractive.
But it just isn’t what I am into, all right? ”
It didn’t make anything make more sense, however.
More amusing, but not more full of sense.
“So what you’re into is big booties.”
“Don’t say booties to me.”
“That’s a yes if ever I heard one.”
“Can we just get on with this? I pick her, okay?”
He jabbed a finger at one of the pictures—Louisa Yates, she thought it looked like. The one who mainly did bit parts in soaps and advertised things you’d never heard of. Though the name and the résumé weren’t what struck her.
“So you like brunettes, then. With big dark eyes,” she said, before she could really think things through. Or imagine what that sounded like. You made it seem as if he picked a woman that resembles you, her mind calmly informed her. But when she tried to shrug it off, she realized.
He was staring at her.
And she was staring back at him.
And it was going on for a very, very long time.
Too long, really. So long, in fact, that she saw the second he stopped simply holding her gaze, and started searching it.
Subtly, she thought, but it was definitely there.
A shift in the sheen over them, a slight flicker of those too-dark eyes.
A deep brown in some lights, ink black in others, now blacker even than that and ransacking her for something embarrassing.
A confession from her soul: I want you to want me.
Even though the idea had never once crossed her mind. The idea was so inexplicable to her, so buried beneath years of his seething hatred—it just wasn’t possible. He had to know it wasn’t. Tell him it’s not, she told herself, but of course couldn’t.
It would only make things worse.
And they were already really bad.
Suddenly everything seemed ten degrees warmer.
As if their waitress had cranked the heat, just over their table specifically.
She could feel it starting to suffocate her inside her sweater, to make her want to pull at the collar like a cartoon character.
And any second it was going to cause a flush over her cheeks.
A guilty one, she thought.
Despite how silly that was.
After all, it was happening to him, too.
He touched his collar, and her eyes flicked to the abrupt move, and she caught what he was trying to cover.
The tiniest hint of pink at the base of his throat.
Like he was starting to actually blush somehow.
Caleb Miller, doing what people who had feelings did.
Must be the heating, she thought. Must be the sun coming through the windows all the way over there. Must be the too-hot coffee he just drank, must be, must be.
Then he suddenly spoke, and apparently it was.
“I just went with the one who is smiling the least,” he said, and the moment he did all that imaginary heat and tension and weird imaginings went away.
She couldn’t even see the pink above his collar anymore.
Her sweater felt normal again. Everything was fine, it was fine, and normal, and businesslike.
“Great. Now we can move on to hotels and flights,” she said, with such commitment to being breezy she couldn’t even hear the shake that wanted to be in her voice. And apparently he couldn’t either, because he went right back to his MO.
“Right. Right. And by flights you mean something that just sounds like me being trapped in a steel tube, with hundreds of people I don’t know, and then launched tens of thousands of feet into the air.”
“You’re not seriously afraid of flying.”
“Nobody said afraid. Did you hear me say afraid?”
“I don’t really have to when your voice goes husky over the word people.”
“Yeah, that’s called being a misanthrope.
A fact that you well know when it comes to me.
And even if you didn’t, look around you.
Do you see anybody pleased to see me? Coming near me?
Is the waitress lingering to chitty-chat?
No. Because I’ve lived in this town for five years and they all know the score by now. Stay away.”
“I heard it’s more than that. That they have their pitchforks out for you.”
“Well, why wouldn’t they? I am, after all, a horrifying monster.”
He stood as he said it. As if it to make it seem more throwaway, more like a joke.
But she caught it in his voice—a hint of something else.
Bitterness, she wanted to call it, as jolting to her as that strange eye contact had been.
As him choosing Louisa Yates, with her black hair and her black eyes.
And the fringe, she thought, as he threw money down on the table. Not as blunt as hers, more feathery, but still still still. It weighed on her mind as he said, “I’m doing it in a car and nothing else.” And not just because it was a particularly heavy and utterly alien-to-her thought.
No, there was also the fact that said thought would be there, beside her, as they did this.
As they crossed the country, side by side, in a space far smaller than a plane.
Say you’re afraid of driving, she told herself—but too late, too late.
He had already gone.