Chapter Ten #3
“It’s just a thing people say. I didn’t really mean it,” she said.
Yet weirdly he didn’t let up. He lowered his voice, but he kept on.
“I don’t care. I don’t like it,” he whispered, in a way that made her feel even funnier.
As if he were bothered about something like that happening.
As if he worried about her dying. Even though it was most likely just concern that he’d be left with this mess.
And sure enough, a moment later: “We can deal with this, all right. Even if you’re somehow correct it won’t be that bad.
You come out at a couple of stops, hold my …
hold my hand and wave like some politician’s wife, and that’s it.
Job done. Mission accomplished. Everything goes back to normal. ”
There, she thought. Practical again.
But that was okay. She could be practical, too.
“Yeah, except that is not going to cut it.”
“Well, it was cutting it before. Why not now?”
“Because, dipshit, unlike the original plan with an actress who swans in and out of the picture, we are going to be together all the time. In the same car, at the same hotels, at the same restaurants. On a fucking road trip from hell. Me there, forever behind the scenes, amongst dozens and sometimes thousands of people who think we are a couple. Who we have to convincingly be a couple for,” she said, and knew it had hit home the moment she did.
He went very still, gaze turned inward as he went over everything she had just detailed.
All the things it meant doing, all the ways they would have to be.
She wasn’t surprised that his voice sounded faint when he replied.
“People probably won’t even notice us that much.”
“There are currently seven different sets of people watching us right now.”
“Well, what are they going to do? Demand to see our certificates of true love authenticity? Check our IDs that say we’re really a couple?
Even if people do gawp at us wherever we go, they can’t prove shit,” he said, less faint now.
In fact he sounded so firm and sure it would have been easy to believe him.
But she couldn’t. For one big reason.
“They don’t need to. You’ll prove it for them.”
“I don’t see how. Nobody ever knows what I’m thinking.”
She laughed mirthlessly. “Because usually you’re great at masking.
But not when it comes to me. With me, you have never been able to keep that poker face.
You find me unbearable, and it shows in almost every single thing you do,” she said, sure that she wasn’t saying anything he didn’t already know.
Yet strangely, his expression seemed to shift as she spoke.
It sort of opened up, in a way that almost looked vulnerable.
Or maybe wounded somehow. Even though she’d never known him to be vulnerable or wounded by anything in his life.
The closest he’d ever come was that time she’d called him a phony, but that had just been a blip.
He’s just trying to work out a way around things, she told herself.
And sure enough, a moment later he came up with the goods.
“Unbearable is an exaggeration. And even if it wasn’t, I can do better,” he said.
Then he seemed to pause for a moment. Like he was hesitating before saying something difficult.
Before he finally seemed to nod to himself, and continue.
“I can pretend I like you. I can pretend you never bother me. I can pretend it pains me to suddenly learn I’ve hurt you, that things I do can actually hurt you, and that I want to make it up to you, even if I’m no good at it.
Or don’t know what to do. Hell, you can show me what to do, if I do it wrong. ”
Then he nodded again on the end, like that was settled.
And god, she wanted it to be. Something about all of that sounded so … She didn’t even know. Real, in some indefinable way. Like he was speaking from the heart, even though he was just outlining a kind of game.
Though of course it didn’t matter anyway.
His plan had a flaw, and she knew it.
“All right, then, I tell you what. I’m going to order the biggest, messiest, most seasoned seafood boil you’ve ever seen in your life.
Just a truly disgusting mass of shellfish limbs and guts and eyeballs.
And then I’m going to sit here, and eat every bit of it with all the sloppy gusto I have in my heart.
And you’re going to watch me do it without once looking away, in a way that seems like you do not mind it at all,” she said. Then watched him go very, very still.
He had to cover it fast with a fold of his arms, and a “Fine by me.”
But all that did was give her permission to go as hard as she knew she would have to, if she wanted to convince him that fixing things this way was a mistake.
In fact, in a weird way it was sort of freeing.
She didn’t have to worry. She didn’t have to care.
There was no need to crush herself into a polite cube, the way she usually did with just about everyone she’d ever known.
She could just dive right in.
And she did. She ordered everything but the kitchen sink, and when the waitress set down a tray of frankly incredible-looking seafood covered in butter the color of a stop sign, she started stripping shells and claws and legs right away. No sense of decorum about it—just snap, crackle, and pop.
Without even so much as a whisper from him.
He sat completely silent, as she feasted.
In fact, she was almost starting to think this might work.
That maybe he would be fine enough with her behavior to pull it off.
And then she took her first bite of something—a thick and incredibly juicy shrimp that she had just unshelled—and that was it, inexplicably.
He reacted.
Just a little, it seemed like.
But a little amounted to a lot, when it happened all over his body, all at once.
His shoulders went back a touch; the smug tilt to his lips dropped by about a millimeter; the light in his gaze shifted near imperceptibly.
And somehow he seemed to get taller in his seat—as if he’d been slouching before, relaxed before.
But now he wasn’t.
Now he was an animal, bristling at a suddenly sensed threat.
Even though she had no idea what the threat could be. All she had done was bite into something. That wasn’t nearly as bad as splattering crab guts everywhere, objectively speaking. And nor was licking butter from between two fingers, almost absentmindedly.
But if anything, that seemed worse to him.
She actually saw the word don’t form between his lips the moment she went to do it.
His tongue touched his teeth; he sat forward just a touch.
And even after he’d reined himself in, something seemed off about him.
Fully rattled now. Ready to call this off.
All she had to do was push a little harder, it looked like.
Even if he didn’t seem to think so. “See, I’m totally cool with it. No problems here at all,” he said. As if he truly thought he was being as subtle as a sphinx. Though to be fair to him, it was possible it looked that way to everyone else.
Only she could see when a man so stoic was screaming.
And he was screaming, now. She tried curling her tongue around another finger, nice and slow and long, and the resulting sound was unmistakable. She didn’t even need to check. She knew what it was. “Your leg is jiggling so hard it’s almost rattling the cutlery,” she said.
And he had the nerve to try a dismissive shrug.
A really shaky, weird, tense dismissive shrug.
“Maybe I just have a cramp. A really bad cramp.”
“That would be more convincing without the maybe at the start.”
“Fine, then, I take the maybe back. I do have one. A hugely bad one.”
“You’re really going to have to do better than this, and I think you know it.”
He looked away then. Mainly, she thought, so he could curse under his breath without anyone else seeing. But when he turned back, he didn’t seem any calmer or more reasonable. He seemed pissed. “I do know it, all right, but just give me a chance. Let me get used to this,” he said.
As if she could really do that.
“We don’t have time to ease you in, Miller. Someone most likely just took a picture of you accidentally crushing that empty Diet Coke can into a small cube, in reaction to me sucking butter off my middle finger,” she said.
Because she knew without even looking that this was exactly what had just happened.
She’d heard the snap and crackle of aluminum as she slid the tip between her lips, and fully understood.
Though, god, it was wild getting the confirmation.
To have him hold her gaze like this, and talk like nothing was going on, and react that violently. In fact, he was still reacting now.
He couldn’t seem to relax his grip.
Both his fists were clenched so hard she was surprised she couldn’t see blood easing out from between his fingers. And they only clenched harder when she sucked her bottom lip into her mouth. In fact, his whole body seemed to.
Yet he had the nerve to deny it.
“That wasn’t why I did it.”
“Then why did you?”
“Seafood allergy makes my hands seize up.”
“Then I guess it must also effect that clenched jaw.”
“No, that’s just the effort it takes not to beg you to—” he started to say, then for some reason cut himself off before what had to be the last word. Stop, she filled in for him. Stop stop stop stop stop.
Even though it didn’t quite feel like it.
It felt too brutal for it. Too much like he should have just said it, if it was.
Yet she couldn’t think what he might have put there instead. Maybe something mean, she told herself. Maybe he wanted to tell you to fuck off, or leave him alone. But if he did, the look in his eyes when he finally slid them back to her was a strange one. It was almost soft. Reaching for something.
“I think I’ve done enough to show you I can be what you need,” he said, so close to sounding real about it that she didn’t have the heart to tell him no.
I’ll show him the pictures and videos resulting from this when we get to the hotel, and convince him this is ridiculous that way, she told herself.
Then talk real strategies, no matter how botched and cobbled together they’re going to have to be.
But then they got outside, and he went ahead, and she stopped.
Just to check. Just to have a little look, line up some juicy ones, maybe.
And her heart almost halted in her chest. She couldn’t carry on walking, it was that disturbing to see.
He actually called back to her—“Hey, what’s the holdup?
” But she couldn’t answer. She was too busy scrolling through shaky video after blurry screencap of everything they had just done, frantically searching for the gruesome thing she had imagined.
But instead getting something she could never show him in a million years.
The stage thing had been bad enough. This was something else.
She had to look away. But not before she saw someone had put into words the first thing she thought on seeing his broken, open gaze locked to the slow slide of her soft, sweet mouth down one slick finger.
On watching him lean forward without meaning to, on watching her own eyes look up at him from beneath far-too-heavy lids.
I swear to god, it couldn’t have looked filthier if they had actually fucked.