Geekerella (Starfield #1)(93)

Finally, the car stops. “Okay, misses,” the driver says, “here we are.”

Sage and Cal look at me expectantly. “So: question,” Sage says. “Does this mean we can’t gripe about his bad acting anymore?”

“Since when did I say his acting was bad?”

Sage raises an eyebrow, and my smile fades.

“Not a word, you hear me?” I poke a finger in her face.

“My lips are sealed.” She grins. “After you, Geekerella.”

I sigh—one BuzzFeed article and you’ve got a nickname for life, apparently—and wrap my free hand around the door handle. Breathe in, breathe out. The world is watching. Even Catherine and Chloe, somewhere, on that giant TV of theirs. Or maybe they’re sitting in their new condo in Mount Pleasant, in an immaculate living room, looking for someone else to make miserable.

You can do this, Elle, I tell myself. You went to a cosplay ball alone. A red carpet’s nothing.

Channeling my inner Princess Amara, I open the door to a raging flash of cameras. I slide out, only slightly stumbling on the curb, and clutch Franco tightly to like he’s a football and the theater door is the goalpost. I just have to get there.

I strain my lips over my teeth in something that I hope is a smile, and move down the red carpet. Thank god I decided to wear my Doc Martens instead of those three-inch heels Sage suggested. I’d have done fallen flat on my face.

“What’s your name, gorgeous?” asks a paparazzo.

“Here with someone?” another asks.

“Oh look, over there! I think that’s the contest winner!” someone else adds, pointing to a tall dark-skinned woman making her way down the red carpet—the girl who won, way back at ExcelsiCon—and they flutter off to her like moths to a flame.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. Holy overload, Batman, how can Darien do this twenty-four-seven?

I hold Franco a little tighter to my side. “Talk about star-crazy, huh, buddy?” I whisper to him. “C’mon, maybe I can get you a hotdog at the concessions stand—if there is one.”

Behind me Cal gasps, grabbing Sage by the arm. “Oh my god, that’s Jessica Stone!” She points down the red carpet to a beautiful dark-haired girl signing a fan’s Starfield poster. “God I love her—not as much as you, though.”

“Oh no, I’d be okay if you loved her more,” Sage replies. “Maybe we can share her. Hey, Elle, is that Darien with her?”

A knot forms in my throat. It is Darien. He came to my high school graduation a few weeks ago—briefly, in sunglasses—but seeing him across the red carpet feels like I haven’t seen him in years. He looks so different in his natural habitat, relaxed and magnetic, an arm around Jessica as he talks warmly to a news camera. Everyone around drinks him in, wanting more. And for a moment, I feel so, so small.

“We should go over,” Sage says, but I catch her before she can. She shoots me a strange look. “Why not?”

“I just—he’s busy. It’s fine. I’ll find him later.”

“But he’s right there now,” she insists, furrowing her eyebrows.

“If she doesn’t want to go, she doesn’t have to,” Cal says. “I mean, he does look busy.”

“Too busy for his own—”

I cut her off. “Ssh. We’re not, like, official. To the press.”

Sage glowers but quickly gets distracted. “Ooh is that Calvin What’s-His-Face?” She loops her arm through Cal’s and pulls her down the red carpet.

I swallow the knot in my throat and look down at Franco. “Well, at the very least, you’ll be my date tonight, right, Frankie?”

“Replacing me already, are you?” asks a velvety voice above the din of the crowd.

I glance up.

Darien, standing a few feet away, puts his hands in his pockets. His suit cuts him at all the right angles, sharp and acute. He’s not quite as bulky as last summer, his hair is a little longer for the new season of Seaside. He raises a single dark eyebrow. It’s infuriating how well he does that.

A blush burns the tips of my ears. “I mean, he is a better actor than some people.”

“Ouch.”

“And he matches me perfectly,” I add, fanning out my dress with my free hand. I told Sage to sew me a dress the exact color of Darien’s Carmindor jacket. Brass buttons line my corset, glitter sweeping up the bottom hem as though I ran through a puddle of gold. Franco has a matching blue vest that almost doesn’t fit around his belly.

The edges of Darien’s lips quirk up. “It’s the wrong color blue, you know.”

I glance up into his eyes. “I dunno, I hear the Carmindor in this new film wears it right enough.”

He smiles. It’s wide, unabashed, no secrets tucked into the edges. “You look beautiful.”

I return his smile. Why am I so nervous talking to him here? Like I’m balancing on a tightrope, afraid I’ll fall. “You look—you know how you look. I don’t have to inflate your bratty ego. You look terrible. That’s how you look. Like you didn’t go to sleep until 2 a.m.”

“Actually four-thirty, and you know your nose twitches when you lie, right?” He touches his own nose, approaching me slowly.

I scrunch my nose and look away. “It was around four-thirty for me too.”