LOL: Laugh Out Loud (After Oscar, #2)(22)

He glanced my way. “You okay?”

I smiled at him. I was better than okay, I was content. “Yeah,” I told him. “Thanks for that. I needed a good laugh.”

He went back to his sauce, dumping in a couple of cans of tomatoes and then fishing around the spice cabinet. “Then you really need to meet Oscar. He’s got a million stories just like that. The man collects bad dates like baseball caps. I’m beginning to think he’s cursed.”

“He definitely sounds like a character,” I said.

“Totally.” He opened a few tins of spices and added pinches of several to the sauce. “So now it’s your turn.”

“My turn to what?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

He grinned at me. “To share. You know, crazy dates? Psycho exes?”

I reached for the wine bottle and topped off both of our glasses. We really didn’t need to talk about me. There honestly wasn’t anything there to share. “But you never finished telling me about the date with Oscar. What happened next? Was that the end of it? One date and it’s over?”

“You’d think,” he chuckled. “But no. He was a pretty good sport about the whole thing, and once I got home and figured out what to do with those fucking frogs—”

I nearly choked on my wine. “You mean you actually took the welcome frogs?”

He looked at me sheepishly. “What else was I supposed to do? They were a gift.”

I couldn’t believe it. I had to set my glass down I was afraid that I would spill it from laughing so hard. “They were practically livestock!”

“Their names are Beep, Peep, and Mayweather. They live happily on a horse farm in Nebraska with my nieces. Anyway,” he said pointedly, “as I was saying, Oscar and I actually dated for a bit after that. I was worried he might be freaked-out when he found out who I really was, but he didn’t even bat an eyelash.”

He continued adding spices to his sauce, but from the angle of where I was sitting, I could see that the tops of his ears had turned pink. Was he actually blushing? And what kind of guy travels from New Jersey to Nebraska with a jar full of random frogs to give them to his nieces? A good guy.

I cleared my throat. “Then what happened? Why did you break up?”

Roman adjusted the temperature on his sauce and then grabbed his wineglass and leaned his hip against the counter. “It just didn’t work out. Oscar’s a great guy, but he’s not the right one for me.”

Who is the right guy for you?

The question hung in the air. I wanted to ask it so badly, but instead I chugged another gulp of wine. Unless he was going to say “a narrow-hipped carriage driver from the city with a wicked sense of humor and a horse named Nugget,” I didn’t want to hear it.

“What about after Oscar?” I asked instead. “Did you date a lot after you two broke up?”

He shrugged. “Not really. It’s not really that easy to date me.”

I wouldn’t have minded accepting that challenge. I cocked an eyebrow. “You high-maintenance? Do you turn into an asshole if you get fed after midnight?”

A small smile crossed his lips at the Gremlins joke. But it was temporary. “I just come with baggage. My life isn’t private. Which means anyone who dates me doesn’t get a lot of privacy either. That’s a lot to ask someone to take on in order to go out with me.” He lifted a shoulder. “Some people can’t handle it. And I can’t really blame them for that.”

I thought back to when I’d been in the library looking up articles about Roman. All the headlines that had screamed back at me. So many of them laughably ridiculous but repeated over and over again. Articles about what he’d eaten, what he’d worn, what an ex-lover had said about his performance in bed. He was right. There was nothing about his life that was private. I’d even been one of the shmucks who’d gobbled those stories up like a starving fan without realizing that I’d been feeding the paparazzi’s need.

His eyes met mine. The carefully crafted movie-star exterior was long gone. This was the real Roman, the guy who’d let a practical stranger bring a horse into his home and then cooked him breakfast. The man who’d accepted a jar of frogs because it was the polite thing to do, but then instead of tossing them aside, he named those frogs and gave them a home. The man who’d talked to Nugget earlier that evening because he’d had no one else to talk to.

And it was clear from his expression that this Roman—the real Roman—was lonely.

I wanted to launch myself off the counter and throw myself into his arms. I wanted to thread my fingers into his hair and wrap my legs around his waist and do whatever it took to erase the pain and loneliness from his expression.

But then he let out a laugh. “Poor me, right?” He shoved a hand through his hair. “Sorry, no one likes to hear a celebrity complain. I’m one of the luckiest human beings in the world.” He turned back to his sauce, giving it a stir.

“That’s way more than enough about me,” he said. “Now it really is your turn. Any good stories from the dating trenches?”

I shrugged and toyed with a ragged fingernail. “I don’t date, really. I mean… I hook up, I guess.”

“You guess?”

I looked up at him and saw his furrowed brows.