Bookish and the Beast (Once Upon a Con #3)(31)

My phone dings, and at first I think it might be Elias, so I don’t answer, but when it dings again, I think better of it.

    IMOGEN (6:31 PM)

—Ethan wants to know who you chose to date in that new fast-food dating sim.

—[LINK TO GAME]

—(Also hi there nerd)



I snort, and send a quick reply:

    VANCE (6:32 PM)

—I don’t play EVERY dating sim.

—…But Colonel Sanders was the easiest to romance.

IMOGEN (6:32 PM)

—I KNEW IT.

—It’s because he looks like Ron Swanson, isn’t it.



I say that I like Ron Swanson’s mustache one time in an interview and suddenly everyone thinks I have a type. Well, I do, but that’s beside the point.

By the right order of the universe, I should not be on friendly terms with Imogen Lovelace. I shouldn’t even know her—she isn’t a model, she isn’t an actress, she isn’t the son or daughter of Hollywood royalty. Through a series of unfortunate events, I went out on a date with Imogen thinking she was my costar, Jessica Stone. To be fair, they were impersonating each other at the time.

It wasn’t until I was on the set of Starfield: Resonance that I actually met Imogen—I mean, really met her as herself, and not masquerading as a famous actress. She was visiting the set in Atlanta, Georgia, to bring lunch to Ethan—her boyfriend—and Jessica Stone.

“Are you always impossibly glum or is your face just stuck that way?” were the first words she said to me.

I glanced up from a dating sim (they’re the weirdest sort of guilty pleasure, but this one was…odd. It was a Japanese sim about dating a horse guy? I much preferred the one with the pigeons—or Dream Daddy), and there she was sitting in Jess’s chair beside me.

I had to do a double take at first. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Alas, it is.” Then she glanced down at my phone, and her eyebrows shot up. “Is that…the horse dating sim?”

“Don’t judge.”

“Oh, I’m super judging,” she replied with a laugh. “Have you played Hatoful Boyfriend? That one is crazy.”

After that, we just kept talking. She would come on-set to visit Ethan, and then she’d swing by my trailer and we’d talk a bit about the games we were playing, and the new dating sims and otome games that were released that week. She’s the only one who knows about my deep, dark secret love of these games.

“The I’m-a-Loner Vance Reigns is a romantic at heart,” she teased once, and I’d just scoffed.

I’m not a romantic at heart. I just like the stories.

As I wait for my food, I pull out my phone and log into the current game I’m dating through. It’s the one with the assistant who gets hired at an agency and falls for the CEO’s daughter, but she can also have an illicit romance with the mailroom guy who looks a little like a twentysomething Ron Swanson.

What can I say? I do have a type.

You find yourself torn between going to lunch with Ridley, the CEO’s daughter, and taking Oliver up on his offer to have lunch with him in the mailroom…

→ I would love to go!

→ Ugh…I’m sorry, I have previous plans.



The waitress brings me a cup of hot tea, and I take the string on the end of the bag and absently begin dunking it into the hot water. Of course I’ll choose the previous plans—young Ron Swanson is waiting for me, and I never go back on a promise.

Even in a video game.

Though every time I try to get into the world of the game, these blokes in the booth beside me keep distracting me. They’re rude, crowding into too small a booth, their plates half-empty, half-strewn across the floor.

When the waitress brings me my plate of cheesy chips—fries, whatever—she gives them a disapproving glare before she refills my glass of water and leaves for the other side of the diner again.

I don’t much blame her.

“And her friends actually think they can beat me,” one of the guys says, lounging back in the booth. He picks up a chip and tosses it back down on his plate. “They’re not even worth my time.”

“Quinn’s buttons are pretty cute, though,” one of his friends, a stout brown-skinned bloke, says as he licks his fingers. He had previously demolished a bacon cheeseburger with excellent technique. Darien would have been proud.

“Yeah, like anyone’ll vote for someone because of buttons.” He scoffs and rolls his eyes. “I’ve got a whole YouTube audience dying to see me dance with Rosie and you know what, I’m going to. Because who better deserves it?”

Rosie? I can’t imagine that there are many people named Rosie in this small town, and not many who are around our age. Well, isn’t this interesting. I never imagined her going to some backwater high-school dance with a bloke like this—

“To be fair,” another one of his friends, a girl with short blond hair, points out, “you never actually asked her.”

…I stand corrected.

He scoffs. “Who else does she have to go with? I’m doing her a favor.”

“She’s ungrateful,” the first friend agrees. They all seem to do nothing but agree. Do any of them have minds of their own, or are they all just robots?