“Your face is the colour of an heirloom tomato,” Wren says, and the heat in my cheeks only intensifies. “Who are you texting?”
I set my wine down on the table between us and shrug as a response.
“It was Jett wasn’t it,” Wren deadpans. “You’re blushing, Poppy. Jett just made youblush,”she says, as if blushing is a felony.
If only she knew what Jett made me do last night. The way he made me cry out, the only word I was capable of saying was his name.
“Are you…fallingfor him?”
I shake my head, though not in denial of my feelings, butincredulous at the fact that I’ve been having real feelings for my fake husband.
“I’m not…” I start to deny it, but I know immediately that whatever I was about to say, it would be a lie. The hot, prickly sensation on my neck gives it away. I’m honest to a fault, and the feeling this brings up is the same one I had when I was trying to convince Wren that our relationship, our engagement, was real. “But being married to him… it’s kind of fun.”
“Define ‘fun’.” Wren’s near-black gaze bores through me as if I’m under interrogation.
“I don’t want to,” I answer, typing back a quick response to his message.
“Did you hook up with him?”
I stare blankly at her, my mind fixed firmly on the text thread beckoning me from my phone.
“I plead the fifth.”
“Poppy!” Wren shrieks, and I think she might just spill her wine the way she throws her hands up in the air as if I’m a lost cause. “You’re shitting me. Yousleptwith Jett?”
“No,” I start.But I want to,I think. “We haven’t gone all the way yet. He’s just… teaching me a few things. I’ve never done this kind of thing before. I want a bit of experience. Then once this marriage thing is over, I’ll be able to get out into the dating scene with a few more... tools in my toolkit, so to speak.”
Wren squints at me as she takes a long, drawn out pull of her wine.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I warn, nudging her leg with my foot under the table.
“I’m not looking at you like anything.” Her voice goes upan octave. “I just worry about you, okay? This plan seemed innocuous enough at the start, but it is rapidly spiralling out of control.”
“What about ‘Jett is team Poppy?’” I argue. “You didn’t seem so against our relationship after the engagement party.”
“I didn’t think you’d start hooking up with him!”
“What’s wrong with it? We’re just having fun, Wren.” I try to force my features into a neutral, indifferent expression. Becausefunisn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe how I’ve been feeling about Jett lately.
Wren quirks her eyebrow as if she’s not buying it.
“You’re just new to all this, is all,” she sighs.
I have to refrain from rolling my eyes, but I know Wren can see the disdain on my face.
“That’s not a bad thing, Poppy. But let me tell you, speaking from experience, guys like Jett are…”
“They’re what, Wren?” I ask, a defensive wall sliding up my back.
Whatever she’s about to say about Jett, I’m sure it’s going to be misguided. Everyone wants to think they understand him, but they only know what he shows to the media. Not the soft, sweet, caring version of him I’ve gotten to know.
Not the guy who rushed down the ski hill after I fell, frantically checking to make sure I was okay. Not the guy who brought me home and ran me a bath, who speaks to Cordelia as softly as he speaks to me, who wanted to learn to knit.
“He’s a guy who knows how to make girls blush, okay?” She says, with all the conviction of someone who believes everything they see online. Her words land on me like a hundred tiny daggers. “He’sJett. He’s fun at parties, he’s agreat time, and he has a lot of redeeming qualities, but he doesn’t want a relationship.”
Now I hide my face behind my wine glass, all but guzzling it down, even though it’s not doing anything to make this conversation more tolerable.
That little voice in the back of my mind is back, telling me that Jett could never feel the same way about me that I do about him. That if it hadn’t been convenient, and I didn’t need this marriage as badly as he did, I would have never even landed on his radar.
