The Decoy Girlfriend(94)

She has the wild, fleeting desire to reach out and grab his hand, make sure he’s real. That all of this hasn’t been an illusion all along. If she concentrates, she can remember the weight of his palm against her hip.

The splintered silence that lingers in the wake of her response is anything but empty—so much hangs in the balance.

“If doing these movies instead of the indie film is what sets your soul on fire right now, I support you,” says Freya. “I don’t know that it’ll give you what you’re looking for, but I want for you whatever you want for you. I always will. But what I can’t do—what I won’t do—is compromise on who I am. Not anymore. I can’t be fake.”

She’s never been more sure of it than she is in this moment.

“When I said I was done being Mandi Roy, I meant that. I’m ready to be me again. Not the girl I used to be, but the person I’ve become now. The person I found with you.”

Taft looks tortured, but she knows he’s listening.

“I just found that person,” she says quietly. Her words are unscripted, but she knows exactly what she needs to say. “I don’t want to hide her to be with you.”

“But I don’t want to lose you, either,” says Taft. “Don’t make this an ultimatum, please.”

“It isn’t one. I’m telling you what’s important to me. When the photos of us at Tiers of Joy and Books and Brambles came out, it felt like we’d lost everything because of a couple of mistakes. So maybe hiding us seems like the answer to you, but I’m telling you that it’s not. We’re too important to compromise.”

His face flickers with an emotion Freya can’t place, but as her heart sinks into her stomach, she’s afraid that he’s been compromising for so long that he’s too scared to find another way.

“I care about you,” Taft says, and when has that ever prefaced anything but a but? He pauses. “But sometimes we have to compromise to get what we want.”

She nods. She had expected it, but it still hurts as though she hadn’t. “Then you are a cheater,” she says without any animosity. “You’re cheating yourself out of what you really want.”

He stares into his coffee, likely gone cold. It’s hard to tell what he’s thinking when he won’t even meet her eyes. She waits, hoping he’ll say something, say anything, but she gets it. She’s picked her writing over relationships too many times not to understand.

He sees the choice before him as no true choice at all, and even though her pride still smarts, she can’t even blame him for wanting his cake and eating it, too.

“I’m going to call Stori to pick me up,” says Freya.

She waits for him to tell her not to, but he simply nods.

That one small, resigned gesture breaks her heart. She was going to leave today, anyway, but going like this makes her want to scream, cry, throw things against the wall.

When Stori arrives, Freya hesitates at the front door, taking everything in one last time. The green couch they never had a chance to christen, the billowing curtains with the shadows of his windowsill herb garden, Sir Henry’s empty doggy bed. She never thought she’d say this, but she’ll miss Hen, too.

“I’m proud of you, Taft,” she says. Her voice doesn’t crack. I’m a better actress than I ever gave myself credit for, she thinks somewhat abstractly. “And you should be proud of you. When that’s enough, I hope you come after me.”

And then she’s gone.



* * *



—

Stori, unsurprisingly, makes tea. It’s the most Stori thing to do, and Freya can’t help but love her for it.

She drinks the tea. She loathes it, remembering Darjeeling and cupcakes and I’ll be free to pursue what I want. She crawls into bed and hopes she doesn’t dream.

When Freya wakes up, she can hear Stori’s boyfriend, Marcus, in the bedroom next door. His Cuban accent is soft and coaxing while Stori’s is hurried and agitated. Without using names, she’s explaining that Freya’s having boyfriend trouble and is back home to regroup.

It’s only midafternoon, so Freya slips downstairs to Books & Brambles to distract herself, takes over the register from Cliff, and thumps Hunka Junk down on the counter. Everything is going back to normal, before cute actors blazed into the bookshop and turned her entire world upside down.

Except . . . From here, she has a vantage point to the stacks where they almost kissed. She glares in that general direction before budging everything ten inches to the left.

She’s never felt so out of place.

When her phone rings, her literary agent’s name on the screen, Freya latches on to it like a lifeline.

“How are you?” asks Alma. “Because I’m doing terrific. My incredible client just wrote a killer book, I can’t stop thinking about that last plot twist, and her publisher is going to be very, very happy. I just have a few tiny notes for you that I’ll send over tonight and once you address those things, we can send it on to your editor. Sound good?”

It takes Freya a solid ten seconds to realize that it’s her, she’s the client. “You liked it? Really?”

“If you call reading it in one sitting and having to close my laptop about eight million times because I just needed a minute to calm my heart rate down before I perished? I woke my girlfriend up when I squealed on three separate occasions and finally she just stayed up so I could read out all my favorite parts to her, so yeah, safe to say I more than liked it.”