It was him pretending he didn’t know the reason.
“Or, you know, people had to spend the night putting outyourfires.”
“It isnotmy fault that you climbed my fence under false pretenses.”
“Oh, come on. You tricked me, and you tricked Beck, and you know it. I know you know it.”
“He heard what he wanted to.”
He waved a dismissive hand at her.
But she knew why. She caught how the magic trick was done, around the distraction. “That is suchbullshit, Miller. And you think so too, or you wouldn’t be doingthat guilty-conscience eye thing,” she said, and jabbed a finger at the offending eye for good measure. Always the right one, just a brief squint on one corner.
And usually reserved for people he thought more of than her.
People like Beck. People sweet and sensible.
“It doesn’t mean anything. You just want me to be nicer than I am,” he said.
“Feeling ashamed of treating someone that decent poorly doesn’t make you nice. It means you cross the bar for being human. Barely, considering the hell you made university for m—for everybody else.”
“Were you about to sayme?”
“Of course not.”
“It sounded that way.”
“Yeah, well, you always did think too much of yourself. I never thought enough of you to be disappointed or hurt by your ludicrous opinions. Unlike your readers, who just started the official Caleb Miller Is a Fraud boycott of all of your books. I mean really, did you think you were going to get away with that god-awful miserable epilogue? And then the moaning about happy endings and love onThe View, Jesus,” she said, and was pleased with herself when she managed it.
Even though it took everything she had to make her eye roll convincing, her laugh something other than hollow.Yes, she wanted to scream.Yes, I meant myself. Yes, you did. Yes, you hurt me.But if she went ahead with that, she knew what would happen.
She’d win the fight and lose the war.
Make herself forever weak in front of him.
Instead of keeping the focus and pressure on what mattered.
“I told Beck it’ll blow over. They’ll get over it,” he said, but she could hear a hint of doubt in his voice. She just had to push a little harder—maybe by getting out her phone and tapping to the right thing. Then showing him what was on the screen.
“This video of someone burning an effigy of you has a million likes.”
“Joke’s on them, I looknothinglike that. My mustache is much thicker.”
“Oh my god, who cares about mustache thickness? They set you onfire.”
“Right, but look how poorly they did it,” he said as he shook his head. “That accelerant only got aBgrade inBarbecue Monthly. The whole thing is going to peter out before my face has even finished melting.”
He gestured at it, as if that were self-evident.
Instead of completely deranged.
And he seemed to realize it when he saw her flabbergasted expression, because before she could tell him so, he cut in. “Look. All I did was write something honest for once, and then said the self-evident truth that romance isn’t real,” he told her, as if that made any more sense.
Though somehow, she couldn’t quite bring herself to argue the way she once would have done. Not on that. Not after everything. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the truth, Miller. It matters that you built your career on something you just told everyone you don’t actually believe. That every day you were filling books with horseshit, and then laughing when people swallowed it down.”
“Now wait a goddamn minute, I donotlaugh.”
“Yes, I know you think amusement is for toddlers. That’s not the point.”
