Poppy stretched forward and closed her computer, hiding her search history from Rosaline’s prying eyes. She still hadn’t answered Poppy’s question. “You mean youhaven’tlooked at what people are saying online?”
“Who do you think I am? Of course I have.” She set the pizza box down on the coffee table beside Poppy’s laptop. “But eventually you’ve got to know when to call it a day and get some rest. Even I know that.”
“Wow.” Rosaline Sinclair lecturingheron having a work-life balance? “And here I thought you never slept.”
“I suppose that’s better than the rumor that I sleep in a coffin. You know, with being out for blood. Poaching Lyric and vilifying her exes.” She snorted. “Like they don’t do a perfectly good job of that themselves.”
“I just thought that if you slept, you probably did it with one eye open,” she teased.
Rosaline leveled her with a flat glare. “Funny.”
Poppy saw straight through her faux consternation and smiled. “I try.”
“If you want to know the truth,” Rosaline said, tucking her right leg under her, resting her arm along the back of the couch, and facing Poppy, “I came over because I wanted to see how you were doing. I know today was... not easy.”
“Oh.” She blew out her breath. Not easy. That was one way to put it. “Yeah. It was... a day.” She set her slice of pizza back in the box, no longer hungry. “Aside from being mortified that I treated a public bathroom stall like my own personal confessional?” She shrugged. “I’m okay.”
“You shouldn’t be. Mortified, I mean. What you told me? Won’t ever leave that bathroom stall if that’s what you’re worried about,” she promised.
The thought hadn’t even crossed her mind. “I’m not. But I appreciate that.”
Rosaline pressed her lips together, pausing for several seconds as if weighing her next words. “You know that you don’t have anything to be ashamed of, right? Not for what you said and certainly not for saying it.”
She lowered her gaze to her lap. “Not everyone would agree with you on that.”
Most people looked at any kind of dependency as a weakness, a personal failing. Her parents did.
“Yes, well, not everyone’s as brilliant as I am.” Rosaline tossed her hair over her shoulder with a sort of casual confidence Poppy couldn’t help but find attractive. “We all have our crosses to bear.”
The weight on her shoulders lifted, leaving her lighter than she’d felt all day. “Thanks. Not just for saying that, but I didn’t get a chance to thank you for everything you said earlier. For, you know, talking me off the proverbial ledge.”
Rosaline’s lips quirked at the corners. “Don’t mention it. This is a stressful job and, after a while, that stress can take its toll. I’ve watched a lot of people in this industry burn out, seen a lot of people come and go because they didn’t have—”
“Whoa,I haven’t always had the healthiest of coping methods, sure, but if you’re suggesting I can’t handle this or that my freak-out earlier was because of work—”
Rosaline pressed a finger to Poppy’s lips, silencing her. “If you’d have let me finish,” she said, glowering softly, “you’d know I wasn’t suggesting that at all. I mean, God, did you not hear a word I said in that bathroom?”
She lowered her hand, giving Poppy permission to speak.
It took a moment to make her mouth work, her lips tingling where Rosaline had touched her. One touch and she was right back in that stadium, dazed and confused courtesy of the woman currently studying her like she was the puzzle and not the other way around. “No, I did. I heard you. I just—sorry, whatwereyou suggesting?”
“Honestly?” Her plump bottom lip disappeared between her teeth, a look on her face like she was gearing up to say something. “I was about to propose a mutually beneficial way we could bothblow off some steam, but now I’m wondering if I’ve read this entirely wrong.”
Her mouth dried up instantly. “What?”
She waited for the penny to drop, for Rosaline to burst out laughing and take the words back, say it had all been a joke. Only, for the second time today, Rosaline looked utterly discomposed, as lost as Poppy felt, a deep furrow forming between her brows as she stared uncertainly at Poppy. “Am I? Reading this wrong?”
The wordsmutually beneficialandblow off some steamechoed through her brain on an endless, maddening loop. “To be clear, when you say readingthiswrong, you mean...”
“Oh my God.” Rosaline scrubbed a hand over her face and sighed. “You know what? I’m going to go.”
She latched on to Rosaline’s wrist. “Wait. You just—you took me by surprise, okay? I wasn’t even sure if you—earlier, that thing you said about jocks not being your type...”
“Not unless they play powder puff.” Rosaline smirked.
“Huh. Okay.” Those times she’d wondered whether Rosaline was flirting hadn’t been the product of her overactive imagination after all. “To be honest, until today, I kind of thought—I didn’t think you thought of me like—well, I didn’t think you thought of me much at all.”
Rosaline looked at her like she was crazy.
