Chapter Ten #2
“Dude, they asked that because their favorite of your heroes gives the heroine one just like this. With the off-the-shoulder part, and the stripes. He makes it for her, and leaves it in their childhood treehouse.”
“So you really have read my books.”
She threw up her hands. “That’s what you’re going to grasp here?”
“I don’t know what else you could want. Everything went great—and without any need for any elaborate nonsense. No actress had to pretend to be my special someone for any of this to perfectly work.”
“Miller, they think the special someone is me.”
She didn’t mean to hiss it like that. She had intended to ease him into it, maybe lead him over to figuring it out for himself. But now she had done it, and there was no going back. Even if he immediately tried to sort of laugh and shake his head.
“What the hell are you talking about? No fucking way do they think that,” he said, but she noticed something when he did. His voice cracked on the last word. And he was leaning forward now. He was in the shelter of the menu with her.
All she had to do was nudge.
“Oh, they very much fucking do. Open your eyes. Look around you,” she said.
And he did. He lifted his head a little and peered over the barrier between them and everyone else.
Clearly saw the three girls sat two empty tables away, giggling and pointing.
Then his eyes slid back to her, while his face stayed turned toward them.
Like most of him had frozen as this new knowledge sunk in.
“But the interviewer said you were just my assistant.”
“And you think the general public listens to things like facts, do you.”
“Well, even if they don’t they have eyes. They could see you were seething at me. You had hold of my lapels and were on your tiptoes, what else could that mean but intense and incredible loathing?”
“Don’t make me spell it out for you.”
That got him. He jerked back, as if seeing what she was suggesting.
What they had imagined. Though as soon as he did, incredulity took over.
He leant back in, half rolling his eyes.
“There is no spelling it out. You would never,” he said—so now it was time to go hard.
Harder than she really wanted to, honestly.
“Of course I would never, but they don’t know that. They see someone about to heave a man into something and they don’t think off the stage like a sack of fucking garbage. They think into getting his face fucked by her mouth,” she said, cheeks heating even with the caveat she’d set at the start.
But thankfully he didn’t seem to notice that.
He was too busy blushing, too.
And his voice when he answered was hoarse. “Good god, don’t say things like that to me. That cannot be true,” he said, but she could see he was starting to believe it. All she had to do was underline what he already knew—and she had a good idea how to do it.
In fact she was already getting out her phone.
Searching a few keywords, flicking to a few images.
Though even she didn’t realize just how bad they were until she was in the middle of showing him.
She got to a picture taken by millerverse369, almost gasped, and tried to take it back.
But it was too late for that now. It was there in 4K, enormous looking even though it was only on her tiny iPhone screen, and somehow so well lit it looked like a still from a movie.
Romancing the Loathed, she found herself thinking—though if that was the title the shot had to have been from the end.
It looked like they were trying to merge with each other.
She could hardly see where his jeans ended and hers began.
One of her legs was somehow behind his, so obscured that it genuinely seemed as if she’d hooked it around his hip.
If they’d been naked, nobody would have been in any doubt that he was right up in her guts.
Hell, it kind of looked as if he was anyway.
His cock had transcended the laws of four layers of fabric somehow.
But that wasn’t even the most harrowing thing about the image.
No, there were about three other more pressing matters.
Like the fact that the knuckles on her hands were white.
And her back was really, really super arched.
And her face was tilted right up to his, eyes inexplicably half closed, lips bizarrely parted.
You must have been in the middle of narrowing them and spitting insults, she told herself.
Yet it couldn’t change how a split-second capture of that looked.
It was humiliating in the extreme.
Or at least it would have been.
If he hadn’t looked significantly worse.
One of his hands seemed to be on the nape of her neck, even though she didn’t remember that happening.
And it felt like she should remember, because it wasn’t a slight or unpleasant sort of thing at all.
His thumb was in her hair; he almost appeared to be gently cupping her there.
Urging her face up, so he could do the thing.
The one she didn’t want to think about, but had to. Because he’d also almost tilted his head down to her in that singular moment. The way someone would, if they wanted to go ahead. If they were past considering it, and into something else. If they were on the cusp of it.
Though it was his eyes that really hit her hard.
The way they lay on her, heavy and soft as winter eiderdown.
Transfixed, it almost looked like, as if nothing else in the world mattered.
Only she felt important, only doing whatever this was felt important.
Only kissing her did, because she had to admit that kissing was the right word for it.
And so much so that it made her heart start beating hard and slow in her chest.
Even though he didn’t seem to see it.
“They must have photoshopped your face,” he said. Which was good, in one way, because it meant that he didn’t believe her expression was anything but what it absolutely had been. But in another it was bad, because now she had to keep pushing. She had to convince him of what the crowd had seen.
Even though it made her face heat to do it.
“And my body, too, I’m guessing.”
“It isn’t your fault your chest is doing that.
You just have … you have a lot of that sort of thing.
So you know, when you stand that way it makes it seem like things are happening.
Like a lot of things are happening. Even though obviously they’re not.
I mean, clearly you would never purposefully arch into me like that,” he said, voice wavering all over the place as he did so.
Twice he had to stop and swallow, too hard.
And she could see that color creeping up over his collar.
Just out of the corner of her eye, because she couldn’t stand to look at him directly right at that moment. But it was definitely there. And it deepened, when she replied, “I can’t believe you just called my tits that sort of thing.”
“Well, I’m not going to be gross about your body on top of all of this.”
“Nothing you say will ever make me think that. It just makes you seem in deep denial about what has happened. They saw what they saw, and came to their conclusions, and now we’re in big, big, huge trouble.”
“Okay, but even if we are they’ll figure it out.”
“Figure what out?” she asked, and now she did glance at him.
But he just looked baffled by her bafflement. “The university stuff.”
“You mean confirmation that we knew each other years ago.”
“But we didn’t just know each other. We hated each other.
Everyone will back that up, every person from college they ask will say we argued constantly, that we couldn’t get along, that I badly hurt your fee— That I made some mis—” he said, that weird swallowing thing he was doing now so bad it was cutting whole words in two.
She couldn’t even tell what he was trying to say, really.
Not that it mattered. They had bigger problems.
“Miller, hey. Focus. Listen to me. That will not matter.”
“How on earth won’t it? How on earth couldn’t it?”
“Because they’ll just think of it as enemies-to-lovers.”
There, she thought. That makes sense.
But he just rumpled his face up in disgust.
“That sounds terrible.”
“It isn’t though. It’s the opposite.”
“Even though by definition enemies cannot be lovers. I mean, what are they doing, clambering into bed with knives at each other’s throats? Accidentally falling onto each other’s genitals while attempting to aim their death rays?”
He made a sound that was almost a chuckle, and shook his head. Like oh, ho ho ho, these silly fools. While she did her best not to lose her mind. She had to take a second, carefully put down her phone, breathe slowly. Otherwise she was likely to explode and let everyone hear the lie.
Instead of keeping her expression neutral.
Then saying it in a low, tight hiss that only he could hear. “Yes, for fuck’s sake. Yes, that is exactly what they do and exactly what people eat up. Oh my god, how did you ever become so successful in this industry. I mean, what did you think when Never Not You sold a million copies?”
“What I usually do when that happens. Everybody has gone mad.”
“Oh my god. Oh my god. I am going to walk into the ocean.”
She tried to put her face into her hands then.
Surreptitiously, behind the menu, so only he could see how despairing she was.
But just as she went to, he spoke. “Hey, don’t say that.
No, don’t look at me that way, I mean it,” he said, loud and brutal enough that it startled her into stopping dead.
And the rapped fist on the table—lord almighty.
It felt as if he’d done it somewhere inside her rib cage.
Because someone will have heard, she told herself.
But somehow she wasn’t checking. She was staring at him. Taking in that suddenly molten look in his eyes, the refusal to back down once she’d seen. It was so powerful for a second that she almost said sorry. Then at the last moment, forced herself to just explain.