Bookish and the Beast (Once Upon a Con #3)(18)

Darien and Elle are broken up?

I was supposed to take her back to Darien’s place on the west side of LA. It was during the wrap party for Starfield: Resonance. We had filmed our last scene that day, and so we were celebrating at Natalia Ford’s—our director’s—house in the Hills. Which would have been grand, but I had a previous engagement at a club with a few of my other blokes, so I decided to leave the party early.

I was heading back to my car when I intercepted Darien, dark hair messy and shirt crumpled, and Elle in an oversized sweatshirt and jeans. She wanted to leave, he didn’t. Classic case, really.

“I’ll just call a car,” she was telling him.

But he was shaking his head. “No, just hold on—I’ll drive you home.”

“You want to stay, Dare, and I have an exam tomorrow morning. It’ll be fine. Stay and enjoy the evening, okay?” she told him soothingly, and pressed a kiss onto his cheek.

“Get a room,” I called as I passed them, spinning the key ring around on my finger, earning a middle finger from Darien. I should’ve just kept quiet.

“Thanks for the—wait, are you leaving?” Elle called after me, much against Darien’s insistence not to.

I shouldn’t have stopped, but hindsight is always clearer. I looked back at him. “Does it look like I’m staying, Geekerella?” She hates it when I call her that, most likely because she gets it every time she shows up in the tabloids.

Her face flickered with annoyance, but then she said, “You’re heading over toward that club, aren’t you? On the far side of the strip?”

“Am I that predictable?”

“Yes,” both of them said in unison.

I rolled my eyes. “What do you want?”

Darien began to shake his head, but Elle pushed on and said, “Would you mind dropping me off at Dare’s place? It’s on the way.”

Again, I should have said no. I should have told her to get her boyfriend to take her home, because I shouldn’t have dealt with the trouble of her. But I said yes. Not because I wanted to be nice.

I said yes because I knew it would piss Darien off, and I wanted to piss him off as often as I could. He’s just so insufferably perfect, like his character in Starfield. He does everything right, and he says all the right things in interviews, and he has a beautiful girlfriend, and everyone loves him.

But I think I hated him the most because he loves himself. He loves his life.

It annoyed the hell out of me.

So I agreed to take Elle home just so I could see the look on Darien’s face when I led his girl to my car and helped her inside. But once the door was closed and I pulled out of the auto spot, she said, “You really like getting under his skin, don’t you?”

“It helps that I have a pretty girl I can use,” I replied slyly.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not helping, and you’re not using me. You’re taking me home. I have an exam in the morning that I cannot fail.”

I knew where Darien’s apartment was, so I took the quickest route to it. I sighed, “Ah, the life of a college student. A wee bit different from perfect Darien’s life, isn’t it?”

She gave me a look. “Yes, it’s different—but neither is perfect. He has a lot of night shoots. I have exams and studying.”

“And professors who already know your name because of who you’re dating, and classmates who want to be your friend because secretly they all think they should be dating Darien Freeman instead of you.”

“Do you always think the world revolves around you?”

“When has it not?”

“Don’t you ever get tired of being the spoiled brat?”

“No,” I said, but what I honestly meant was—

If I can’t be this, what can I be?

But we didn’t have time to delve into a therapy session, because a moment later, at a red light, she put a hand on my arm. At first I thought she was getting sweet with me, but when I followed her gaze, she was looking at a black SUV next to us. The window was rolled down. And a bulbous camera lens stared unblinking at us.

This was why I took the shortest possible route. This is why I should have told her no, to call a cab, to let her perfect boyfriend take her home.

The news outlets would report that we had tried to get away from paparazzi, and that was when my car took a nose dive into a pond—which was more like a muddy reservoir, but I quickly stopped trying to argue that point, especially when everyone began to narrow in on the part where Elle and I were together in the car.

Elle and Darien set the record straight almost instantly, of course, but by then it didn’t matter.

What do you think was more newsworthy, the unfounded rumor that I was trying to get Darien’s girl, or that I was—mostly selflessly—taking her home from a wrap party?

It’s not bloody rocket science.

My manager thought it would be best if I laid low for a while. If I let everything blow over. My stepfather, at the end of his rope, thought that if I went somewhere without Hollywood influence, I would come out a better man.

But it seems like even without me there, things just got worse. I made everything worse.

I always make everything worse.





THE DISMISSAL BELL SHRILLS and I slam closed my notebook and shove it into my bag. Miss Rayna bookmarks our spot in Twilight by Stephenie Meyer and shouts at us to finish the novel. A few students grumble about having to read about sparkly vampires, but the teacher quickly tells them, “As if a ring of invisibility is any more believable—there’ll be a quiz tomorrow on the differing mythos between Dracula and Twilight!”