“At this rate, I’ll take a Sunday off in three years,” Charlie says. She stops in the doorway too and looks me up and down, her no-bullshit meter also clearly pinging high today. “You’re not answering your phone.”
“You want one of my mom’s cinnamon rolls? They go great with bad news. Did I miss Vaughn?”
“No, and it’s not all bad news.”
That means it’s mostly bad news with a side of sunshine. “New plan. Cancel all my appearances for the next month, and I’ll go into hiding in Shipwreck while we tell people I’m in rehab.”
“Everyone who invited you to appearances for the next four months canceled them already. We’re at a point of having to make up an event for you to have an appearance at if you’re ever going to be seen in public again.”
“So…we just need to spread the rehab rumors?”
“It’s astonishing to me that you run a billion-dollar fashion empire with this kind of attitude,” Ellie says.
I grunt. It won’t be a billion-dollar fashion empire for long at this rate.
“He’s a lot smarter when we’re in Milan or Paris,” Charlie tells her. “Being home turns him into a teenager who just wants to play video games again.”
I’d argue that that’s not fair, except it’s true. “Home’s for kicking back and relaxing. I work four hundred eighty-seven days of the year, so when I get my twenty-six to relax, I relax. Work hard, play hard.”
“Until you fuck up hard,” Charlie points out.
“Video didn’t work?”
“Worked too well.”
Ellie glares harder.
Charlie gives me the you’re so screwed smile.
And I realize that whatever’s going on, cinnamon rolls won’t solve it.
Nine
Sarah
Mackenzie shows up shortly after noon with peace offerings in the form of caramel corn and takeout burgers. And because I would’ve posted the video by now myself anyway—maybe edited, maybe not—and I still haven’t told her the truth about where I grew up, I let her in and hug her tight.
“Why are there two black cars with scary looking men parked across the street?” she asks me.
“Security. In case I get doxed. Charlie set it up.”
“Doxed?”
“Doxed. When the crazies on the internet find someone’s address and post it so weird stalker people can come by to see if Beck Ryder’s really my boyfriend.” I roll my eyes like it’s no big deal, but the internet is a scary place with scary people sometimes.
Can’t deny that I was grateful to get Charlie’s message this morning that they’d put extra security in the neighborhood as a precaution.
Especially after I logged onto Twitter to see how bad it was when I got home a couple hours ago.
Currently fifty-fifty, with half the world wondering if Beck Ryder’s apology was sincere enough to result in me crushing on him, and the other half of the world in total chaos arguing still over whether Beck or I are the uglier, stupider, assholier, or more desperate of the pair of us.
No one speculating about where I came from or who my parents are.
I just might’ve pulled this off.
“You two were really cute on the video,” my best friend tells me, leaving no doubt where she falls on the scale. “I can totally see tons of people making the same mistake as everyone at the nature center this morning. Not that an underwear model could ever be another Trent Fornicus—I mean, they stuff the briefs before they shoot the pictures, right?—but it’s your fifteen minutes of fame and you’re using it to save the giraffes.”
That’s it.
That’s my opening.
I suck in a deep breath to tell her, but she impulsively hugs me. “Seriously, I’m so proud of you. Where’s your jersey? The game’s on in ten minutes.”
And the moment is gone.
I change, pop popcorn, use some of my mom’s old meditation techniques to forget Mackenzie brought up Trent and to clear my mind enough to focus on how I’m going to tell her I’ve basically been lying to her for almost a decade, and we’ve just turned the TV on when she leaps to her feet and dashes to the kitchen.
“Wha—” I start, but then I hear voices at the back door.
Now familiar voices.
“Hey. Am I late?”
“No! Come in! Come in! Wait. What’s that? We don’t eat cotton candy during baseball games. It’s bad luck. Throw it away. But is that Fletchers caramel corn? Oooh, we haven’t tried that yet.”
Meda’s once again sitting on the top of the recliner. She gives me the seriously, the underwear model again? stare, and her blue eye looks a little more irritated than her amber eye, which makes me wonder if she, too, is having conflicting thoughts about him.
I shrug and ignore the little blip in my pulse.
He’s not here for me.
He’s here because it looks good.
Except…why come in the back door if that’s the case? Isn’t the point to get caught coming to see me?
Mackenzie shoves him into the living room. “Sarah! Look who wants to watch the game with us.”
He smiles a self-deprecating smile that exudes sexual masculinity and the suggestion that he knows what to do with his equipment, which I also know is most likely a Hollywood lie, or if not, I can at least take comfort in that old rumor so I don’t feel like I might be missing out on something.
“Gotta go with what works to keep the team winning,” he tells me.
“That’s your line?” I ask.
“You remember that year they went to the World Series?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Sarah grew up in Oregon,” Mackenzie says, and I wince, which she doesn’t notice at all. “I converted her.”
“Oregon, huh?”’
Oregon, Los Angeles, it’s all the same. Except not really, but for my purposes, it counts.
Until today.
I really, really need to tell her. But not with Beck here. “Mm-hmm.”
He grins, because that’s apparently all he ever does. “Portland’s awesome.”
“Mm,” I agree again. “Game’s starting.”
Mackenzie shoos me over so Beck can sit in the same seat he was in last night, which puts his long frame right up next to my padded hips.
He smells like bergamot and fresh cut grass today, and he’s sporting thicker scruff than he had last night. If he slept as poorly as I did, you can’t tell by looking at him.
He pops the lid on the popcorn tin and angles it toward me. “For luck?”
Of course he got the kind with caramel and cheese corn mixed together. That’s my favorite.
“Where’s Charlie?” I ask while I help myself, because it’s not weird to be sitting here with an underwear model who insulted me on Twitter two nights ago, let me taser him yesterday morning and then came back for an apology video last night, and randomly showed up for good luck for our favorite baseball team today.
And by it’s not weird, I definitely mean a wormhole opened in my living room.
I wonder if he’s irritated by loud chewers, because I don’t think I can chew popcorn quietly, and it’s going to be crunching in his ear, and that has to be the least attractive sound in the universe.