The Decoy Girlfriend(53)
She watches with amusement that he pretends not to notice.
Right as he’s about to slice the pizza in half, Freya yelps, “Wait! We should take a picture.”
He hadn’t even noticed she’d brought her phone with her. “Sure.”
It’s a bittersweet reminder of the roles they’re both playing. When she’s done, she runs the caption by him and posts it to Mandi’s Instagram. Immediately, the likes start to climb. Within seconds, they’re at two hundred.
Once the pizza is halved, Taft tries to remember every reason he had to keep his distance.
He can’t.
Instead of what he really wants to say, he asks, “Do you want some spicy chili oil?” He offers her the bottle.
“On pizza?” She side-eyes him, clearly doubtful.
He sprinkles some on his half, grinning. “Olio di peperoncino is lip-tinglingly good. Trust me, you haven’t lived until you have spicy olive oil on a Margherita pizza.”
“Why mess with perfection?” Freya cuts a neat square with her knife and fork.
Taft takes a deep breath. “Because . . .” WAFFLE HOUSE WAFFLE HOUSE WAFFLE HOUSE. “Sometimes you think something is pretty good the way it is, because you’ve always stuck with what you know. But it could be better, and deep down you know it. If you add something new, something you could have never seen coming, your life could change.”
He isn’t talking about the food anymore, and he hopes she knows it.
Freya’s lips close around the fork, pulling the pizza into her mouth. “Hmmm, yeah, that’s true. But you could also ruin something good. And this is actually really, really delicious. Hard to see how it could be improved, and I don’t know if I want to risk it.”
“That’s . . .” Not what he wanted to hear. “Fair enough.”
He should have known better than to want someone he can’t have.
* * *
—
The new and unwanted distance between them should have given her more time to focus on her book, but instead, Freya’s motivation to write starts to wane around the thirty-thousand mark. By thirty-five-thousand she seriously considers scrubbing the whole thing. Three days of hating almost every word she types. Three days of wanting to fling herself into the sun. Three days of Hen draped over her legs, moving a little closer each time, somewhere between a woolly blanket and a paperweight.
And her writer’s snarl is all his fault.
Now, as they sit in the dressing room on the set of their promotional Banshee-themed photo shoot, makeup artists fussing over them, Freya aches to tell Taft so.
This is the most high-profile item on their to-do list, one that will really sell their chemistry as a couple, and to her dismay, he only looks at her when he thinks she isn’t looking back. She tries to keep her gaze steadfastly on Taft, hoping to catch him in the act, but her makeup artist keeps tilting her face back to him so he can touch up her lipstick.
The strokes tickle as his brush traces the sensitive outline of her lips, and Freya involuntarily squirms. Benji, a handsome Black man with waist-length locs, tuts as he fixes her smudged Cupid’s bow for the second time.
“Stop nibbling your lips,” he gently admonishes before stepping back to study his work.
For Freya, the photo shoot involves tight-laced corsets, laughably large hats with fake birds perched on the brim, and a dipping neckline that emphasizes her décolletage and the floral black cameo necklace hanging above the swell of her breasts. She toys with the dainty chain and delicate gold filigree around the pendant, letting her fingers dance across her collarbone, but annoyingly, even that action doesn’t draw Taft’s attention. She sighs. At least wardrobe nixed the voluminous hoop skirt after seeing her balk.
Taft, on the other hand, isn’t buried under layers of fabric and looks sinfully good in his formal and elegant pin-striped pants and suspenders, wine-red silk shirt, and matching velvet Gothic tailcoat.
To Freya’s supreme annoyance, whenever she catches him looking at her, he’s the first to glance away.
Benji must have seen her eyeing Taft and mistaken lethal intent for lust, because after an embarrassing moment where he whispered into his colleague’s ear, they both made excuses to leave the room. He stopped on his way out the door to toss her a bold wink over his shoulder, as if to say, You’re welcome.
This room is way too small for the pressure cooker of awkward and wounded and confused that Freya is feeling. She takes a deep breath, inhaling the scent of all the hair spray it took to keep her pinned updo from tumbling apart the way she would in a second, if she wasn’t careful.
“You’re messing this up for us,” says Freya, fighting to keep her voice even.
Taft looks up from his phone, a question in his otherwise carefully guarded eyes.
“The silent treatment is getting noticed,” she says. “You’re blowing my cover.”
But it’s more than that—he’s making her miss memories that they never even got a chance to make.
He’s quick to parry. “Unlike you looking at me like I’m on the menu, which is so subtle, by the way.”
She didn’t expect his quick comeback, the yearning in his voice that brings an ache to her throat, or for him to return his attention to his phone. Frankly, she’s more than a little surprised he even noticed that she was noticing him.