The Decoy Girlfriend(10)
“It costs extra.”
Taft doesn’t ask how much, like a normal person, just waves a hand for her to get on with it. Freya unrolls more of the corgi wrapping paper, about to cut into it, when he clears his throat.
“Could I see all the choices you have?” he asks.
Do not glare at customers.
“Since you asked so nicely,” she says sweetly, smiling with her teeth.
The corner of his top lip gives the tiniest twitch upward. “And could you do one of those twirly ribbon things with the scissors?”
She glares, but he doesn’t scare easy. If anything, he’s getting better at standing his ground.
With a few swift swipes, the ribbon races along the scissor’s slant.
It’s the smallest of things, something she’s done a hundred times in the last couple of months she’s lived and worked here without even thinking about it. But Taft leans down to stare at the perfect coils of sparkly silver and gold like they’re something exquisite, as if she’s created something magic.
The awed look on his face stirs a pathetic sense of enchantment in Freya’s chest. A whole day spent on her book—a day of deleting detritus that’s put her writing progress in the red, of disappointing Stori, of being bad at tea—and this is what gives her warm, fuzzy satisfaction?
Something that anyone can do. With their eyes closed, though she wouldn’t recommend it where scissors are concerned.
The exalted feeling rushing through her is the way she used to feel when she smashed her daily word-count goal, no sticker motivation required. The fireworks in her stomach as her email dinged with an invite to a book festival and they flew her out first class and comped the hotel. The cramp in her hand as she signed thousands of preorders, enough that her literary agent was convinced Freya was a shoo-in for bestseller status months before either of them actually saw it in the Times.
It’s the energy she once felt when sprinting with her friends on Zoom for half an hour and managing a thousand words by the time the timer went off. Red-eying her deadline, reworking the third act with only drive, desperation, and a deadly amount of coffee, triumphantly-slash-hastily emailing the manuscript to her editor a minute before the midnight deadline without a salutation or a subject line.
How the mighty have fallen. Freya slips the wrapped book into one of Books & Brambles’s recyclable brown paper bags. If only she could do the same thing with her thoughts. Let them walk out the door with a customer, heading far away from here.
Stori was wrong—the change of scenery moving from New York to Los Angeles wasn’t a fix, it was just more failure. And Freya is so sick of the taste. She’s had a mouthful of it the last three years, as much as she can stand. But she can’t backspace on the wrong turns of life, no matter how much she wishes she could. She has to keep moving ahead, like she’s on a deadline and every word counts.
Shit. She is on a deadline.
Freya gets a grip on herself. “Will that be all?”
Taft takes the bag, letting the twine handles dangle off his thumb. There’s a pause as they both watch it sway before he says, “Yeah. Thank you.”
“Don’t forget about tonight!” Stori calls out from deep within the stacks.
Freya cringes, praying to whichever deity might be listening in for this embarrassing interaction to be finally over and for him to go away.
“Yeah, maybe!” he calls back. Then, to Freya, at regular volume, “I’ll see you?”
Technically, with his eyeballs, for Steph’s signing tonight? Yes. But it’s hard to translate his subtext. It sounds like he’s trying to gauge . . . something else. Something that, if she didn’t know any better, she suspects could pass for flirtatious.
His tone fills her with uncertainty, but still feeling a little contrary, she shrugs. “Will Mandi be joining you?”
Taft’s face slackens with surprise, and his fingers squeeze into a fist around the handles.
It takes Freya a minute to get it—until that moment, he didn’t realize that she knew who he was all along. And for some reason she can’t place, he’s disappointed.
CHAPTER FOUR
Taft knows he shouldn’t have flirted with her. He’d known from the moment their eyes had met over the blue-haired woman’s shoulder that this girl was absolutely his type, and therefore very, very off-limits.
Which made it hideously inconvenient that Freya—barbed-tongue, chemistry-goggle-glasses-wearing Freya with the lightning fingers—was the only thing he could think about as he got on with the rest of his day: wrapping the commercial; going to the post office to mail the book he’d just purchased to his mom; taking a cold shower that had more to do with her than the heat; cuffing his classic black blazer to mid-forearm as he got ready to go out, still uncertain if he was attending the signing at Books & Brambles or not.
In a way, Taft was kind of glad that he probably pissed Freya off for good with the way the inelegant words fell out of his mouth—I’m here for a book—because there was no way anything could come of it as long as his manager, publicist, and contract explicitly prevented it.
Fuck, it wasn’t just inelegant. It was rude. And then he’d just kept right on digging his own grave, needling her just to watch that flush of red crawl up her pale, svelte neck. He’d done sex scenes that didn’t do it for him as much as that cross look on her face did.