The Decoy Girlfriend(80)
His answering grin is so proud and so rare that she decides then and there that she is going to compliment him every chance she gets. Appreciate him. Love him. Show him what it feels like when someone’s his.
He fluffs the couscous with his fork, as though it isn’t already perfect. “I thought we agreed that we’re way past googling each other.”
“I wasn’t—” she starts to say before catching him nodding meaningfully at the screen. “Okay, I was. But only to see what people were— Wait. ‘Each other’? Have you been googling me?”
“Yes, weeks ago,” he admits easily. She blinks at his frankness. “It’s been hell making sure I don’t reveal anything I know about you that I got from Internet stalking, sweetheart.”
She wonders if what he discovered lined up with what he expected. “I wouldn’t care. It’s not like I haven’t stalked you, too. Former fan, remember?”
“This just got very You,” he says with a faint smile. Then something seems to occur to him, and he dimples mischievously. “I recall you telling me recently that you were still a fan.”
She swats his arm as best she can without jostling her dinner plate. “New rule. Stop using what I say against me. If I wrote it in a book and you quote it back to me, sexy. Otherwise, nope.”
“I thought we weren’t making up our own rules anymore?” he counters.
She spears a carrot and shoots him a victorious grin. “Since I’m clearly the exception to your once-ironclad rules, I figure I have the right to make at least one of my own.”
He stares at her for a long moment. Under the intensity of his gaze, Freya swallows, but it feels like sucking half-set concrete through a straw.
“Think you’re pretty special, don’t you?” Taft teases. He tucks a tendril that tumbled free of her loose braid behind her ear. “Well, you’d be right.”
Freya can tell from the pleased smile sneaking over his face that her cheeks must be a telltale pink.
“You’re blushing,” he says, quite unnecessarily, half in surprise, half in wonder.
Any other guy and she’d bristle, peeved that he didn’t have the decency to ignore it. But she doesn’t mind that Taft sees, that Taft knows he’s the one who put it there.
“I am known for showing and not telling,” she informs him as prissily as she can muster.
He laughs, just like she’d hoped for. But then he frowns and cups her chin in his hand, dinner forgotten as his eyes search hers. “As much as I enjoy you singing your own praises for once, has no one ever told you that you’re special?”
Freya bites her lip. Is he being serious? People don’t go around saying things like that.
“Literally no one has said that to me in the history of ever,” she tells him, averting her eyes.
Even her mom—who was her biggest supporter—would have found it corny. And it would have embarrassed Freya too much if her mom had vocalized it, but Freya never doubted that she thought so.
There were so many hollows left in her when her mom died, and one of them is something she’s only now starting to get back. He’s giving her back. Until Taft, she didn’t recognize how much of her own confidence came from that kind of support.
Maybe he reads a scrap of her thoughts in her expression, because his frown turns into something else. Sad and thoughtful, and then fierce.
“You’re special, too,” Freya says, because she thinks she has an idea where this is coming from.
Both his brows shoot up, giving Taft an air of comical surprise.
Before he can go all modest and unpretentious about how amazing he is, she continues. “And it fucking kills me that people in your life don’t make sure you know it. I see it, even if those idiot Once Bitten showrunners and the network didn’t. You carried that show.”
He makes a sound of protest. “I’m not—”
“Yes, you are,” Freya says tenderly, placing her hand over his. “You’re hurt, and you don’t want to be, but that doesn’t mean you’re not. You should let yourself feel whatever you need to in order to”—move on—“make peace.”
His laugh is low and disbelieving. “With Connor? Maybe in the next century.”
“Not with him, not if you don’t want to. But you and your mental health deserve it.” She drifts her hand to his temple. “You live in LA. You should know all about precious real estate.”
Taft almost cracks a smile, but his next words break Freya’s heart. “I loved my time on Once Bitten so much. This was everyone’s big break. We were like . . . Hell, we were a family. If making peace means pretending the show and its people don’t mean anything to me anymore, I don’t know if I can do it.”
She’s reminded of their breakfast together the morning after their first appearance. She knows it troubled him that she deleted words that weren’t working for her, enough so that he loaned her an actual typewriter to put a stop to it. No wonder he isn’t okay with deleting people.
He sighs and leans into her touch, eyes closing. “I know I shouldn’t give any of them space in my head”—for a split second, his mouth had formed the word “heart” before he course corrected—“but I can’t just forget, Freya. When I care, and I know sometimes I care too much, I can’t let go. The memories . . . they haunt me. I hate the idea of living my life in distant parallel to people I used to share it with.”