Bookish and the Beast (Once Upon a Con #3)(54)

“Well, that’s all of them.”

He gives me a sideways glance, and I smile and pull out my notebook from my school bag. “Fine—how about court intrigue? Assassins? Starship battles? The Star Brigade is a good one to start with.” I scrawl the name out onto the top of a spare piece of paper, tear it off, and hand it to him.

“Thank you kindly,” he replies, and tucks it into the fold in his beanie.

I shove my notebook into my backpack. “You know,” I say, and hesitate for a moment, before I continue, “I like this.”

“This?”

“We aren’t sniping at each other for once.”

“I know, it’s ghastly,” he replies with a laugh. A moment later, the light turns green, and we drive on. “We should at least be arguing.”

“I know, you’re a terrible villain.”

“I like to think of myself as an anti-hero.”

“Byronic? Take a left here,” I add as we come to the next stoplight, and he turns onto my street. I tap on the window, indicating my apartment building on the right.

“I am not nearly that broody, thank you,” he says as he slows down in front of the entrance to the building. It’s nothing like his castle-house. It’s a three-story walkup apartment complex with a smaller-than-normal kitchen and a leaky toilet, but it’s home.

“Not broody? Now I know you’re lying.”

He mocks a gasp. “And I thought we were friends!”

Friends. I like the sound of that, strange enough, even after I turned him down for a date. But a friendship—one between him and me, Vance Reigns and Rosie Thorne—doesn’t sound too terrible. I lean across the middle console toward him and when he looks back at me my breath catches in my throat, because his eyes are so blue and he smells so warm, and for a brief moment—I can see him.

The boy I fell for on the balcony of ExcelsiCon.

“There you are,” I whisper. The words slip out of my mouth before I can reel myself in. His eyebrows furrow, and I quickly pull myself back and push open the car door. “Good night, Vance.”

“See you tomorrow?” he calls.

“Tomorrow,” I promise.

He waits until I’m inside my apartment before he drives away, out of the gates, and onto the main street again, but my heart never stops racing.





I CAN’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I woke up before noon, but I didn’t actually sleep very well. My stupid brain kept replaying last night over and over—like the theater previews before a film. I saw her every time I closed my eyes, illuminated by the soft light of the dashboard, fiddling with the radio even though she never picked a channel, just so I wouldn’t notice the blush across her cheeks.

But I definitely did.

It could have nothing to do with you, I think as I fish for a shirt in my dresser drawer, my hair damp against my neck from a shower.

But still.

I wish I’d said something—something remotely flirty, I guess—but instead I made up cat puns. And the way she laughed, and smiled, and leaned over the console in the middle—

There you are, she had said, as if she’d been looking for me underneath Vance Reigns this whole time.

I scrub my head, abandoning any hope of finding a clean shirt, and pace my bedroom. Oh, I’m in so much trouble. I have half a mind to ask Imogen what to do, until I remember that we haven’t talked since our fight, and I haven’t seen her online since.

I really did bungle that up, didn’t I?

Elias knocks on the door before he pokes his head in. “Hey, sleepyhead—oh, you’re awake.”

Sansa squeezes through the crack in the door and jumps at me, tail wagging. “Oof! Easy, girl.”

I scrub Sansa behind the ears, and she thwaps down on the carpet and rolls over for me to pet her belly.

“So, did anything…happen last night?”

“What? No, we didn’t fight or anything, if that’s what you mean.” I grab a button-down shirt from the clean-laundry basket and put it on. It’s wrinkled, but it isn’t like I am going to impress anyone today.

Rosie doesn’t care about wrinkled shirts.

…Does she?

“That is not what I mean,” Elias replies as he comes into my room and sits down on the edge of the bed. “Now, tell me all about it. I can see it on your face. You’ve got something on your mind.”

I give a one-shouldered shrug. Sansa nudges my hand when I stop petting her, and I resume with the scratches. “I just…I don’t know, honestly. I like her, but do I deserve to?”

Words aren’t usually this hard, are they? I like you. I want to date you. Okay, let’s bone. That’s the extent of my relationship vocabulary, which now, come to think of it, is wholly lacking in…literally everything.

“I want so badly to be part of something again,” I say slowly, trying to figure out exactly how I feel. “To care about something. And we both know that I don’t. Back in LA, I rarely cared about anything. I didn’t need to, or maybe I was just afraid to, I don’t know. And once I return to the real world, to being me, there’s no way that someone like her and someone like me…”

I frown.

Because that’s the root of it, isn’t it? She deserves so much better than anyone I could ever be.