Chapter Ten
Ten
She kind of thought they had gotten away with it at first. She exited the stage in a businesslike fashion, after straightening his jacket in a way that seemed like something an assistant would do.
And then Joan mentioned that she was that very thing, and she knew everybody there would probably look this up.
They’d find out who she was.
Discover what she did for a living.
It was all very neat and tidy and explainable.
Yet somehow she still had this sinking feeling in her stomach.
It was the reason she almost forced Louisa to go out onto the stage, even though Miller saw and surreptitiously shook his head in the fiercest way she could imagine.
Like he had already had enough of these shenanigans, and would not stand for any more of them.
And even though she knew how much they needed the shenanigans, she hadn’t insisted.
She couldn’t insist on anything right at that moment.
Because sure, Lesley with a Y did air quotes around girlfriend as she said goodbye to Louisa, and yes, Louisa laughed when Daisy told her she’d be needed again, and true, a lot of people were looking at them in this very amused way now.
But Miller was already probably fuming over everything she had hurled at him.
And she had already made herself very vulnerable by hurling it—after all, she had accidentally revealed how much he could hurt her, if he wanted to.
So it didn’t seem like a good idea to push her luck.
To back him into a corner. To force him to think about what had probably just happened, and what it might mean.
And doubly so once they were walking back to the car together, side by side.
Because the thing was, she expected him to absolutely roast her.
But it was worse than that: he didn’t say so much as a word.
Not a single snide comment about what a hash she had made of everything.
Not one cruel aside about how soppy she was over things he had once said.
He didn’t even ask her a slightly derisive question about it, like You really worry so much about something I think?
He just walked beside her in silence, like after the singing and the meal at Plain and Hearty, only worse.
More intense somehow, in a way she couldn’t quite identify.
All she knew for sure was that it seemed to get bigger and bigger and hotter and hotter until she simply had to steal a surreptitious glance at him.
Only to find him doing the same fucking thing.
He was looking at her. He tried to dart his gaze back away before she could see it, but she saw it all the same.
In fact it was still lodged in her brain, after they went back to staring ahead at the doors out of the place.
The way he had almost been peering at her, like someone trying to look through foggy glass for a person they had lost in a crowd.
Eyes almost wide.
Eyebrows a little higher than usual.
He is watching you warily, just in case you want to spring another emotion on him when he least expects it, her mind suggested. And that seemed to fit so well it made her cringe. It made her panic, and want to take it all back, or say sorry, or something, just anything that would make it stop.
So how was she supposed to raise all the rest of it with him? Oh hey, so I know I just dealt you maximum emotional damage, but also I think we may have to pretend I’m the love of your life? That just sounded completely deranged.
Even though it was increasingly looking like this was the case.
Her phone was now constantly vibrating against her butt.
It was like having a really depressing sex toy in her back pocket.
And of course she knew the reasons for it.
She could almost see Beck’s texts without even looking: Are you super certain that you posing as his paramour is the best idea, I thought the super secret plan was to hire someone?
Or Alfie’s: Blink twice if this animal has blackmailed you into this.
Or Hazel’s: Look when I said a fake relationship is a fun way to solve problems I meant for people who aren’t mortal enemies.
Or Kelsey’s: Jesus Christ boss I know you wanted the company to grow but this is going to be ridiculous.
And it only got worse when she did steal a look at what was going on, and found her inbox overflowing with something else entirely.
One of the emails was from CNN. Another three news stations had somehow found her phone number and texted her.
Because I’m their contact anyway for anything to do with Caleb Miller, she internally groaned.
But there was nothing she could do about it now.
She just had to find a way out of it. Leak something to some garbage outlet that suggested she wasn’t his beloved at all, maybe.
Or manipulate the details so they seemed like something else entirely.
Like when she’d been working for an A-list rock star, and had somehow managed to turn him pooping himself in a McDonald’s into him having a vendetta against the place for burning his nan with an overheated apple pie.
He’d gone from brown pants to national hero overnight.
And that wasn’t even her most impressive achievement. No—her most impressive was definitely making sure that everyone who tried to crush Mabel Willicker had fallen flat on their faces. All those little misogynists and fatphobes—oh, she’d worked hard to make sure they got shut down.
She could work hard to shut this down, too.
Quietly, so maybe Miller didn’t even ever have to know about it.
After all, he was still acting very strangely.
They got to the truck, and he didn’t just help her in.
He opened the door for her first. Awkwardly, like he knew he was doing something weird, but couldn’t seem to stop himself.
And he didn’t put on the shipping news when he got in.
He reached for the on button on the radio, then stopped short.
Then reached for it, then stopped short.
But the weirdest thing was definitely the restaurant.
The one he pulled up outside without saying anything to her or negotiating a single thing. Even though it wasn’t his kind of place at all. It was the seafood joint she’d bookmarked after their rules conversation. BIG POPPA’S, the neon sign above the broad windows screamed.
And the rest of it was just as garish.
It had a giant plastic lobster above the door.
He should have been arguing with her about setting so much as a toe in a place like this, and yet he had chosen it.
As if he were in the middle of some sort of mental break.
First he was furious, and now he was whatever this was, and neither of those two states seemed conducive to a discussion about the shit they were in.
It seemed better to just work on it alone, nice and quiet, so he never had to know.
And then they got inside the restaurant, and oh god.
People made actual sounds. And true, a lot of them seemed to be attendees of his interview.
One of a group of girls seemed to be actually cosplaying as one of his characters.
But many of them weren’t, and they were still staring.
Then sort of pointing. Oh, and there was definitely a man in the corner of the restaurant surreptitiously filming them with his phone.
Things needed to be said.
Broken to him, before he noticed on his own.
Because he would, eventually. The phone guy had stood now, so he could see into the corner she had forced the waitress to take them to. She had to put up a menu as a kind of shield around them, before she spoke.
“Okay, we need to talk about everything that is going on right now,” she whispered, from behind brightly colored images of dancing crabs and talking fries. But he didn’t join her. He just carried on arranging his napkin on his lap and putting on his glasses to peruse his own menu.
Then he said this:
“Nothing is going on right now. I’m being perfectly normal.”
As if the issue were his manner. Which it kind of was—he still seemed way too calm and silent for her liking. But they had bigger fish to fry. “You are acting the least normal I can ever imagine you being, but that’s not the point.”
“Then what is, exactly?”
“What happened on that stage.”
“We had an argument about how cruel I can be.”
I never said cruel, she thought. But he didn’t seem bothered by the label he was leveling at himself. His face was as neutral as she’d ever seen it. She couldn’t even really see his eyes behind those little weird glasses to discern if there was light in them. So she plowed on.
“Right. And after that. After that what happened.”
“I did what I was supposed to do, what you asked me to do. I said a lot of things I don’t really believe, about how simple love is, how it’s just there waiting for everyone, that everyone deserves it, that everyone knows how to show and give it, that it’s easy and forever,” he said, voice getting fainter and fainter as he did.
Like the words were poison to him, even as an echo of the originals.
But then he seemed to straighten. He cleared his throat.
He took off those glasses, and set them upside down on the table as he finished his thought. “And they ate it up. Job done.”
It made her sit forward. Talk like a teacher spelling things out.
“Yeah, but why did they eat it up. Why did they. What love did they think you were talking about. Let’s connect some dots here. Let’s put on our thinking caps and switch on our memories and recall who they kept mentioning.”
“The only person they mentioned was you.”
“Yep, and what did they say about me?”
He looked genuinely puzzled. Shrugged one shoulder. “Nothing. They wanted to know where you got your sweater,” he said. Then he wagged a finger at it, as if it had done something wrong. Much to her exasperation.