Bookish and the Beast (Once Upon a Con #3)(42)

At least not yet.

“Your man-nips said you were cold,” I say, probably the least romantic thing I can think of, and leave him with the blanket.

He pulls it behind his head. He looks like he wants to say something else, but thank God he drops the romantic act. “Where did you find this?”

“In a box labeled ‘Dead Grandma’—kidding. Over there.”

“It looks dirty.”

“It probably is.”

He frowns, but it’s too cold not to take it. He wraps it around his shoulders even though he clearly doesn’t want to.

I shiver, but there was only one blanket in the box and I gave it up for the cause.

“You’re cold,” he says.

“Nah,” I reply. There’s a refrigerator into the corner, and though it’s not plugged in, it’s stocked, and I take out one of the sodas. A Coke. I don’t know if sodas expire but why not. I drag up a barstool next to him and look out the window at the pouring rain. He eyes the Coke. “Where did you find that?”

“The fridge. Wanna try it?”

“Definitely not.”

I shrug and pop open the tab. There is a little less fizz than usual. I sniff it. It doesn’t smell rotten. I take a tentative sip, and it tastes like absolute ass, but I try to rein in my disgust and offer it to him again.

“C’mon, it’s pretty good.”

“If you poison me…” he warns me, and takes a swig of the Coke. “Bloody hell,” he sputters, and quickly gives the soda back. “That tastes like motor oil!”

“It’s terrible,” I agree. “I’m pretty sure it expired like ten years ago.”

“And you made me try it.”

“You chose to,” I point out.

“I was peer pressured,” he replies indignantly, and we fall quiet.

We sit there in front of the window, watching sheets of rain cascade over the backyard, graying almost everything—the way a really heavy rain tends to do. Sansa is jumping across the yard, trying to eat the rain, as if she’s never seen water fall from the sky before. The thunder doesn’t even faze her.

I close my eyes and listen as another rumble rattles the small pool house. “My mom loved thunderstorms,” I say. I don’t know why I say it. I don’t know why it matters.

After a moment, he replies, “So did my dad.”

A flash of light—and then another rolling, long rumble of thunder.

“You, too?” I ask, but really I say, You have a hole in your heart as well?

He nods. “My biological father. I didn’t know him very well, though. He died when I was pretty small, before I became the patron saint of disappointment.”

I tilt my head, looking at him—really looking, for the first time since I met him. It’s strange because I’ve memorized what he looks like from all of the promo posters and the movie trailers, but it doesn’t hit me until just then how…human he looks. It’s easy to forget that he isn’t even eighteen yet. He’s been in the spotlight since he was a kid. I watched him grow up in the newspapers and on television shows. His father—stepfather, I guess—is the CEO of some big Hollywood studio, and his mother is one of those gorgeous philanthropists you see heading charities in Las Vegas and LA. He didn’t make it big, though, until his role on The Swords of Veten Rule, and by then he was already being treated like the adult actors who work beside him, so I hardly thought of him as someone my age. Someone who needed to make some mistakes to figure out how to make fewer of them.

And that reminded me of a conversation I had with him that night at ExcelsiCon. “Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped,” he had said, picking around the onions in our hash browns. “I have these expectations on my shoulders, and I just keep screwing up and disappointing everyone.”

“Well, you haven’t disappointed me yet,” I had replied, propping my head on my hand as I leaned on the table.

He gave a sad sort of smile behind his mask. “It’ll just be a matter of time.”

Is that why you didn’t tell me? I want to ask. Because you thought that I would be disappointed? I know he didn’t mean to run off the road with Elle Wittimer, and I know he didn’t mean to break up her and Darien, and I begin to wonder, when are you able to learn and grow from a mistake—and when does it haunt you for the rest of your life?

As if he can sense what I’m thinking, he says quietly, almost too quiet to hear over the rain, “I didn’t want this. Any of this. I make so many mistakes, and I ruin so many things. I guess that’s why…back at ExcelsiCon, I didn’t want us to take off our masks. I didn’t want to ruin things because I think I—” But then he stops himself, and shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

And, for a moment, the mask of Vance Reigns drops, and there’s just a boy sitting here beside me, orange hair and too-blue eyes, looking more tired than he should.

I want to reach out and comfort him, but I curl my fingers into fists in my lap and keep them there. He was about to admit to me that I was perfect, but I can’t say I feel the same about him. So what right do I have to reach out?

“You know…” I find myself saying. The rain is beginning to let up a little, a shaft of sunshine streaking through the sky beyond. “I like you when you aren’t being a spoiled, selfish jerk.”